Lessons about corruption from the history of garbage
In September 2024, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was charged with accepting improper gifts in return for favors, including pressuring the Fire Department to approve a skyscraper that would not otherwise pass inspection. (The Justice Department has just ordered the Southern District to dismiss the charges.) It’s not an isolated case. Local government officials across the country have accepted bribes to direct contracts, embezzled millions of dollars and defrauded charitable donors.
Compared to good, clean government, corruption is inefficient and inequitable. It undermines common safety standards, endangering individuals’ lives. It diverts resources to private pockets that could be put to public ends. It erodes public trust.
There are countless examples of corruption harming local residents, but can it also serve a broader public purpose? The short answer is “yes.”
Corruption can be an important part of how governments work.
Bad apples vs. bad barrels
We tend to use the word corruption as though it means one thing: bad behavior. It’s true that corruption is the abuse of power for personal or political gain. But corruption takes many different forms. For starters, it’s organized in different ways. It can be a collection of business people who have an inside track (through bribery, for example) to getting what they want from city government, as is alleged in the case of Mayor Adams. It can be an organization that controls some function(s) of government and some function(s) of industry that benefits by public contracts, such as a political machine or organized crime group that has infiltrated government and receives more funding as a result. Or it can be a set of families that benefit long-term from governing arrangements, such as through nepotism.
Corruption also has different relationships with the formal institutions of government. There’s a difference between corruption that is confined to a single individual or handful of individuals (a “bad apple”) and corruption that is part of the way that a government works (a “bad barrel”). In the simple case of the bad apple, there is a functioning government and addressing corruption means prosecuting corrupt individual(s) under existing laws.
In the complex case of the bad barrel, corruption is a systemic part of how governments around the globe work. When it is embedded in governing, it is not easy or simple to eradicate. Too often, reformers try to eliminate systemic corruption by getting rid of a few bad apples rather than the bad barrel. Alternatively, they do successfully eliminate the bad barrel, but there are unintended long-term consequences because corruption had played a vital role in governing.
Our own research on 19th century American municipal government shows how corruption was a resource for city governments when they took on new tasks, specifically when they addressed the mounting piles of trash in American cities. Before the municipal garbage collections that we’re used to, picking up garbage from streets, lots and alleyways was not seen as a public function. City officials could shirk responsibility for city collection. When they saw opportunities — to get the contract to build a new disposal facility, for example — they began to claim garbage collection as a public good and a public work.
Corruption motivated city officials — who had been perfectly content to let the garbage fester — to take concrete action. It also provided the capacity (ability) to offer garbage services to governments that lacked the ability to do so on their own. When reformers tried to eliminate corruption, they found an uncomfortable trade-off: They could rid a city of corruption and lose the capacity to provide services, or they could keep some corruption and retain capacity to deliver city services.
Lessons from the 19th century
Trash was a huge problem in 19th century American cities. Even though it piled up in the streets, creating noxious odors, impeding commerce and fostering deadly disease, city officials were not particularly eager to do anything about it. If garbage collection was not seen as a public function, then it was not seen as a responsibility of the local government. Local officials were content to do nothing. However, when officials found they could benefit politically (building support from constituencies who would be added to the city payroll for providing this new service) or financially (by selling the rights to provide a new city service), they decided to address the garbage problem.
Even when city officials wanted to address the garbage problem, they often found they lacked the capacity to actually build and maintain such a project. Garbage collection required teams of collectors and drivers, horses and carts. Employees needed to be supervised. Horses needed care and stables at night. The garbage cart needed to be contained so that it did not spew its contents as it traveled down streets, and it needed to be washed out at night. All of these features cost money, as well as administration.
In the 1890s, the American Public Health Association committee on refuse collection and disposal determined that even if they identified the most sanitary methods of collecting and disposing of garbage, “the expense may be so great that the method precludes general adoption.”
Sanitarians — medical experts concerned with public health — were keen to develop disposal facilities that reflected the latest innovation in sanitary engineering, such as reduction or incineration plants. But if cities couldn’t afford them, they could fall back on basic methods, such as dumping in the river or sea, or on a lot outside the city. If sanitarians wanted to achieve the most sanitary collection and disposal systems available, then municipal governments would need to come up with the funding to pursue the latest innovations in engineering.
There was a great variety of methods undertaken by cities, ranging from dumping, to feeding to swine, to erecting modern disposal plants. The selection of methods depended on the climate, geography, concentration of population and — most importantly — resources. Municipal governments could not be expected to have the capacity to provide all of the services, from garbage can to modern disposal plant, but a local business could. A local street paving company would already have established contracts with the city, and would have the horses and carts that it could divert to garbage collection. A local engineering company might be willing to expend the resources to land the contract to build a new reduction plant, a building that could collect garbage then dry it and extract grease for profit. If that company could be assured of the contract, then it would have the incentive to invest and take a chance in profiting from garbage disposal.
Sometimes a member of the political machine would kick this contract to a family member. The relationships fostered between local governments and contractors were often corrupt, but they also delivered. The contractors may not have done the best job picking up garbage, but to maintain appearances, they followed through. To withstand legal challenges, they made an effort. Through such arrangements, 19th century cities picked up trash and sent it away, facilitated by corrupt contracts.
The limits of reform
When Progressive Era reformers struck at these machines and their corrupt contracts and spoils, they also struck at the means by which cities established the capacity to achieve public works. Freeing the city of the corrupt contract meant ridding the city of its capacity.
In New Orleans, they booted the contractor (and the mayoral regime). The contractor’s reduction plant never recovered, and the city dumped residential garbage into the Mississippi River for decades. St. Louis took on its corrupt contract and failed to replace that contractor’s reduction plant. The city first transported garbage for miles by train out to farmland, producing odors for residents on the train route. It later spread city garbage on Chesley Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River. When the garbage accumulated, it sent hogs to the island to consume the garbage. In the 1930s, it reverted to a garbage grinding plant, which tore up garbage and emitted it into the river through the city’s sewer system. None of these methods met the expectations for modern disposal methods by sanitarians, and they failed to achieve the innovations of the engineering profession.
While our research is about the past, municipal corruption is hardly history. New York City Mayor Eric Adams is the latest and most high-profile case. Local officials across the country face similar charges. In the zeal to rid cities of corruption, it’s easy to ignore the role that corruption plays — and to design reforms that have little chance of successfully eliminating corruption and making government work better. If we really want better government, it’s worth thinking about the work that corruption does for governments and designing an alternative and legitimate way of accomplishing that goal.