Corruption

Many of you readers out there may have heard this term before. Heck, many may have already experienced corruption in their daily lives. Corruption is something that has appeared thousands of years ago, back to the time where people would bride officers or landlords either to gain some sort of benefits or to escape a certain crime. Nowadays, corruption has became more powerful than ever. From petty things like bribing a police officer to avoid getting a ticket to grand schemes between corporations and government officials, corruption is something that can and may have already infested many aspects of our lives. So today I'm going to talk about what is corruption, what are the causes, and possible future solutions.

Let's start with the definition. Although corruption has many different meanings, today we're only going to talk about corruption as "an illegal, bad, or dishonest behavior, especially by people in positions of power." (Cambridge Dictionary) In real life corruption works kind of like a trade (an illegal trade, that is). For example, an individual or group who wanted to gain a certain benefit that is hard or even impossible to get without breaking the law. What they would do is they would find the person in charge or has the authority to grant them what they want. Then they would try to "negotiate" with that person to see if there's any way this person can help them achieve their goals. You would think that this person would refuse to accept such an absurd favor. But sometimes the two sides might come to an agreement where this person would grant them what they want (even if it's illegal to do so) in exchange for something in return (usually a large amount of money). That't what corruption is.

So to sum up, corruption is the illegal act of exchanging of money (or other things) for some sort of benefits between an individual or a group and the people with power. It's important to know that corruption only happens when there's people with power involve. Giving 5 bucks to your brother so he wouldn't disturb you when you're playing League of Legends is not corruption. But giving 5000 dollars to tax collector so you can pay lower tax is. Remember that corruption acts are illegal, so if it's legal to pay money for a certain benefits then it's not corruption.

Now let's talk about the different kinds of corruption. There are three kinds of corruption: petty corruption, grand corruption, and systematic corruption. Petty corruption occurs at a small scale, usually between people or people and public servants, and does not seriously affect any systems. Grand corruption occurs at the highest levels of government and can significantly damage the economical, political, and legal system of a country. Systematic corruption occurs inside a system of a weaken corporation or company. Although petty corruption occurs most frequent, it's grand corruptions that seriously alter our way of life.The good new is, these don't occur most often. The bad new is, people who are involve in grand corruption usually have enough power to escape charges once they are exposed.

There are many different methods of corruption like bribery, embezzlement, theft, fraud, extortion, blackmail...Although each one is different from another, many of them was caused by the same reason: "systems that don't work well and create bad incentives" (The World Bank). Although corruption can be cause by bad ethics in people, there are other causes like: an opportunity to earn some cash, little chance of actually getting caught, bad incentives, and the diregard of the law by people because of their attitudes or circumstances that they're in. Therefore, corruption is not about ethics but also how systems are govern as well.

So what are the solutions to corruption? Well, since corruption is illegal, there are government officials and organizations who are working hard in order to erase corruption from governments around the world. What need to be done is that governments and systems need to improve in order to prevent corruption from happen. An important thing to know is that corruption is a group kind of thing. No single individual dare to commit acts of corruption because he or she is too scare to get caught. But if several people were to commit it together, it makes them feel more safe and more willingly to continue their acts. Therefore, if governments and systems can be improve so that no one wants corruption to happen, corruption would be erase.

So what can you do? Well for small readers out there, you can help by spreading the news about corruption to people so they can be aware of the problem. For adults, if you experienced corruption in your daily life and you wanted it to change, report it to the government so that they can help stop corruption from continue. If you have any other ideas of how corruption can be stop, feel free to share in the comments so that everyone will know how corruption can be stop. Just remember that corruption is something people do to gain unfair advantage. And if you help stop it from happening, the world can become a better place.
Ps: Sorry for the cheesy ending.

Corruption:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#Methods
http://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/content/what-corruption
https://www.unodc.org/southeasterneurope/en/Corruption.html
Cause of Corruption: http://info.worldbank.org/etools/docs/library/35971/mod04.pdf