The Ethics Recession: Reflections on the Moral Underpinnings of the Current Economic Crisis

What started as an economic recession has become an ethics recession-a full-blown collapse of integrity and responsibility that is now shaping the way we need to think about and respond to this crisis-argues award-winning journalist and author Rushworth M. Kidder. In this timely new book he makes the case that, with each passing day, the current economic crisis is moving from issues of money to issues of integrity. Kidder reflects on the abandonment of responsibility and the failures of moral courage that underlie the financial numbers. He also identifies the kind of changes required to bring us through this crisis-changes not only in personal ethics but in our collective culture of integrity. Until the fall of 2008, Kidder observes, the recession was typically reported, discussed, and analyzed as though it were simply a question of failures of prosperity and wealth creation. But as examples began piling up of failures of private character and public responsibility-from Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme to Wall Street's excessive bonuses-the public conversation has, he writes, "moved irreversibly from finance to integrity." In the earlier months, the crisis was framed through what Kidder calls "the two default languages of journalism"-the language of economics, which asks, "What's the bottom line?" or the language of politics, which asks, "Where's the power?" Now, Kidder argues, we're increasingly using a third language-the language of ethics-to ask, "What's right?" "In assembling these pieces," Kidder writes in the introduction, "I've been struck by the way that each week's news kept building the case for an ethics recession. Written with Kidder's trademark fluidity, penetrating analysis, and eye for detail, this book is aimed at professionals and non-specialists alike-for all those who are seeking frameworks for understanding the current crisis, seeing its larger meaning, and finding the way through it.