An interesting article by Guriev/Tsyvinsky, "Ratings Don’t Lie." It’s about measuring corruption. The authors argue that all of this can be measured just fine, and that citizens’ subjective impressions match the objective data. Basically, if citizens think, "f...ing hell, b...h, they’ve stolen absolutely everything," then some smart bespectacled analyst, after working for six months and crunching a mountain of data, will write a fat report whose main conclusion is: "f...ing hell, b...h, they’ve stolen absolutely everything." I’m sure that’s true. But this post isn’t about that. What caught my attention was this part of the article: the most interesting of these studies is a paper by Benjamin Olken of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What makes the study unique is that Olken was able to directly measure the level of corruption in road construction in Indonesia. Indonesia, incidentally, is less corrupt than Russia — according to World Bank estimates, in 2008 Indonesia ranked ahead of 31% of countries. For each road segment, Olken’s colleagues took a sample of the road surface, determined the quantity and price of the materials used, and calculated labor costs. This allowed Olken to determine how much the cost of the work had been inflated. He then surveyed local residents about their subjective assessments of the level of corruption. Their estimates turned out to be surprisingly accurate, especially considering that poorly educated rural residents were able to assess theft in the construction of a fairly complex engineering project. *What’s amusing is that the road workers in Kirov, when they were explaining to me why it’s supposedly impossible to steal anything in road construction there (and what else could they have said?), described exactly this method. Some contraption gets driven into different sections of the road. Sort of a narrow, long tube. Then they pull the thing back out, and it pulls out the road with it. So you can examine it like a layer cake. The thickness of the asphalt, the thickness of the sand, the crushed stone, and so on. Each material is checked for grade. And when I told professional builders about this method, and about how the road workers themselves claim it’s corruption-preventing (sic), the builders first looked at me skeptically. Then they burst out laughing, slapped their thighs, wiped away tears, and said, "Oh, Alexei, that was a good one, you little rascal."