What economic approach would actually work?

[Montmorency]

Finance appears to have a situation where not only is the money they have enough to bribe people in all sorts of ways, but also the complexity of what they do is extreme. Oh, and the processes are done to the standard of Criminal Law which as for funsies it also crosses borders makes getting anyone guilty of anything next to impossible.

I believe that if all industries had the same method of oversight as Pharma does in the UK, there would be a lot less corruption since the risk : reward would look very different.

There exists the suggestion that corporations "as persons" be held accountable to criminal law, possibly including the death penalty. One problem is that the individuals involved still have the opportunity to scatter and continue their bad behavior elsewhere.

If corporations were democratically built and controlled by the whole body of their workers, each individual would have a clearer liability and a corporate criminal penalty would impinge on the whole body responsible. If the offense was a small conspiracy concealed from oversight, then normal criminal statutes can also still apply (whereas the contemporary centralized structure gives executives the dodge that someone below them must have been at fault).

And I wonder just how British pharmaceuticals compare to others in "corruption". If they're big enough, then can't limited fines be accounted for as but one more operating cost, as long as the profits of rule-breaking exceed the costs? That seems to be the case across industries and countries. Cost-benefit analysis is supposed to estimate the costs and the benefits separately for each affected party, not just the corporation; forcing the inclusion of negative externalities on environment and society seems like a worthy approach.

Finding a perfect system is impossible, because it doesn't exist. Human error and human nature will always be a factor, in any system.

I don't know how to achieve strong government oversight, but then again, I'm pretty sure our ancestors a several centuries ago couldn't have imagined separation of church and state.

One of the problem in the west is that media can be used to redirect people's anger, and that media is ultimately only responsible to its owners. It should be their job to point out toxic influence of corporations in most western countries, but as media is owned by corporations , that's not going to work.

Lobbying should be made illegal. Politicians should come under more scrutiny about the source of their money, not just whether they payed taxes or not. Funding political campaigns should be illegal. The state should provide all possible candidates with a fixed amount of funds that they are able to spend on campaigns. Trying to influence a politician should be akin to trying to bribe officials and should come with heavy fines and possible jail time.

Maybe not perfect, but what if it has a 'baked-in' tendency?

Lobbying: you need a system to allow people to voice their concerns and desires. Right now this is channeled through lobbying and advocacy groups, many of which aren't all that rich. And they're specialized, while it's difficult for any one person to have a clear position on all the possible issues. That could be separated into two difficulties then, but they're equally important. How would, for example, the government hear about the importance of various environmental issues beyond at best a popular mandate not to Saruman everything?

Influence: there would be absolutely no recourse or contact with politicians once they have been elected? I'm not sure eliminating communication between the elected and the electorate is a good idea. Rather than trying to seal off the leadership from the public, maybe putting more of the public in leadership and oversight roles...

Since this is a site about war games, I'll post the obvious. An economic model that keeps your homeland out of the dustbin of history is what works. I suppose that would be "Darwinian Economics". A nation with an economic model that is less than optimal would adapt less well to its environmental threats, i.e. competing nations' economies, and become extinct.

It's actually correct, I think, to say that economic and political forms as a rule are determined not by individuals but by physical factors like geography and technology (and you may add culture, though calling it physical is tendentious). In short, the economic system of any one time and place tends towards the one that is most effective or productive given other constraints. So agrarian feudalism works with one set of the variables, venture commercial oligarchy in another, and so on - an unstable equilibrium, since the variables are always shifting. Achieving socialism (which doesn't have to mean Leninist central planning) would somehow require breaking with history, if socialism doesn't turn out to simply be the natural outcome of other political, economic, social and technological trends into the future.