Government Employees Gone Wild: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast
Our latest podcast is called “Government Employees Gone Wild.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript below; it includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)
It’s about a book that I’ve come to love — a most unusual book. What makes it unusual?
This unusual book is called The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure, and you can get it here (2013 additions here). What is it? It’s an ethics guide for government employees, full of true stories about epic screw-ups. In the podcast, you’ll hear from the Encyclopedia‘s founding editor (Steve Epstein) and its current editor (Jeff Green). Epstein explains how the project came about:
- It is made available online, as a Word document, but is not actually published.
- It is free (or, more accurately, it’s already been paid for — by U.S. taxpayers).
- It is published by the U.S. Department of Defense.
EPSTEIN: There was a requirement that we train our senior officials and many other officials in the government every year. And the problem of course is keeping that training fresh, keeping it relevant. And to do that we discovered that the first thing you have to do is you have to entertain folks enough so they will pay attention.How do you do that — entertain folks while teaching them? By telling stories, of course. In this case, all the stories are true, divided into chapters that include “Fraud,” “Gambling,” “Conflicts of interest,” and “Abuse of Position.” Here’s one, for instance, that gives “governmental red tape” a new meaning...MORE
