Tainted Money Research Articles

A Note on Mark Twain and Chinese Missions

In his essays “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics,” published in the North American Review for February and April 1901, respectively, Mark Twain expressly disparaged foreign missions in China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. He was particularly critical of William Scott Ament (1851–1909), who as a longtime agent of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had extorted reparations from Chinese villages where Christians had been killed or their property destroyed. Ament's actions, Twain averred in the first of these two essays, consigned “pauper peasants” and their families “to inevitable starvation and lingering death” and “concrete a blasphemy so hideous and so colossal that, without doubt, its mate is not findable in the history of this or of any other age.”1 In the second essay, rather than retract his allegations, Twain doubled down on them, repeating that Ament was guilty of “theft and extortion” of “tainted money.”2A few months later the foreign correspondent Henry Fischer, whom Twain had known in Berlin and Vienna, sent him a cartoon clipped from the German humor magazine Ulk. In a letter dated 3 January 1902 Twain acknowledged its receipt. “My best thanks, dear Mr. Fischer, for that delicious Ulk cartoon, which could not be improved except by the addition to its reverend bandits of Ament, D.D., Reed, D.D., & the oily Secretary of the American Board.”3 Twain referred to W. S. Ament; Gilbert Reid (1857–1927), founder of Mission among the Higher Classes in China in 1894; and the Reverend Judson Smith, D.D. (1837–1906), who as secretary of the ABCFM had demanded that Twain apologize for libeling Ament.The cartoon Fischer sent Mark Twain was likely the image entitled “Christenthum in China” (Christianity in China) published in Ulk for 18 October 1901 (figure 1).4 It depicts a western millionaire speaking to a roomful of Chinese boys from the podium of a mission school as teamsters haul away a telescope and a globe—teaching tools and the symbols of scientific enlightenment—under the supervision of a guard. The millionaire asks, “Kinder, wie lautet der Spruch Apostel 20, 35? (“Children, what does the apostle teach in Acts 20:35?”) “Die ganze Klasse” (the entire class) replies, “Geben ist seliger denn nehmen.” (“It's more blessed to give than receive.”)

Ethical Dilemmas in Nonprofit Governance: ARNOVA Governance Section Case Studies for Use in the Classroom and Practitioner Training

The Governance Section of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Associations (ARNOVA) is pleased to continue an ongoing collaborative relationship with the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership in 2020 to publish teaching and research-based case studies examining contemporary nonprofit governance challenges. This year’s theme is Ethical Dilemmas in Nonprofit Governance. Unethical behavior remains a persistent problem in the nonprofit sector, and ethical difficulties emerge in many forms: tainted money, compensation, conflicts of interest, appearances of impropriety, lack of transparency, internal controls, fundraising, and so on. Designed to provide case exploration for use in the academic classroom and nonprofit professional development, the authors include scholars, practitioners, and nonprofit professionals. Each case provides an investigation of a contemporary ethical challenge in nonprofit governance, theoretical background and framework, and an implementation guide for instructors.

Dirty Money: The Role of Moral History in Economic Judgments

Although traditional economic models posit that money is fungible, psychological research abounds with examples that deviate from this assumption. Across eight experiments, we provide evidence that people construe physical currency as carrying traces of its moral history. In Experiments 1 and 2, people report being less likely to want money with negative moral history (i.e., stolen money). Experiments 3-5 provide evidence against an alternative account that people's judgments merely reflect beliefs about the consequences of accepting stolen money rather than moral sensitivity. Experiment 6 examines whether an aversion to stolen money may reflect contamination concerns, and Experiment 7 indicates that people report they would donate stolen money, thereby counteracting its negative history with a positive act. Finally, Experiment 8 demonstrates that, even in their recall of actual events, people report a reduced tendency to accept tainted money. Altogether, these findings suggest a robust tendency to evaluate money based on its moral history, even though it is designed to participate in exchanges that effectively erase its origins.

The Corruption of Value

We investigate the possibility that negative moral associations can reduce the desirability and perceived value of money, and that they do so by threatening to contaminate individuals’ perceptions of their morality. In Study 1, participants filled out fewer raffle tickets to obtain a money prize with immoral associations and perceived it to have less purchasing power than a morally neutral prize. In Study 2, we experimentally manipulated participants’ moral self-image, reasoning that ameliorating moral self-image concerns would make participants less averse to accepting morally tainted money. Consistent with this, participants who recounted a past virtuous act completed more tasks to receive monetary payment with immoral associations than participants who recounted a neutral act. These findings provide experimental evidence that immoral associations reduce the desirability of morally tainted money by threatening to contaminate the recipient’s moral self-image.

Feeling Immoral About Money: How Moral Emotions Influence Spending Decisions

In this research, we examine how consumers react to receiving money that makes them feel morally uncomfortable and guilty. Whereas prior research suggests that feelings of guilt can trigger a wide variety of pro-social and self-improving compensatory actions, we find that money tainted with moral guilt triggers a remarkably specific reaction. Across eight studies, we find that feeling guilty about money as a result of a moral failure, increases pro-social spending of that tainted money (such as charitable donations), but does not increase self-improvement consumption, pro-social spending of time, or even pro-social spending of other, untainted money. We propose that the exclusive effect on pro-social spending of the tainted money results from both (1) the moral nature of the guilt and (2) its association with the money. In further support of this conjecture, we find that guilt attached to money does increase self-improvement consumption when it is non-moral in nature (i.e., resulting from a private self-control failure), and that moral guilt does increase pro-social spending of time when it is not attached to money. We conclude that participants who feel guilty about the money act as if they aim to cleanse the morally tainted money rather than redeem themselves.

Mindfields: Don't accept this tainted money

New Scientist doesn't accept ads from organisations that say “God is the answer”. A. C. Grayling doesn't think that goes far enough

Tainted Money? Contribution Limits and the Effectiveness of Campaign Spending

Campaign expenditures are not effective in increasing candidates' vote shares if voters do not respond to the advertisement when they believe that campaign expenditures are financed with tainted money. In this situation, limiting contributions may reduce the number of policy favors that candidates promise to contributors, and thereby increase the effectiveness of campaign spending. Exploiting cross-state variation in campaign finance laws, this paper tests whether campaign expenditures by state House candidates are more productive in increasing vote shares when candidates run in states that limit contributions. The results show that campaign expenditures by incumbents, challengers, and open seat candidates are more productive when candidates run in states with campaign contribution limits, as opposed to in states without limits. Controlling for the endogeneity of incumbent spending, the study shows that in states with contribution limits, incumbent spending and challenger spending are equally productive, and that spending by both candidates is quantitatively important in increasing their vote shares.

Strengthening Laws and Financial Institutions to Combat Emerging Trends in Money Laundering

Money is the lifeblood of all domestic and international organised crime groups regardless of whether the criminal activity giving rise to the proceeds is drug trafficking, arms smuggling, terrorism or white‐collar crime. The flow of criminally tainted money through the international banking and trading system is what sustains these criminal activities. Systemically, however, money laundering harms every legitimate business transaction that it touches. On a macroeconomic level, policy makers have emphasised that it impedes international trade and finance to such an extent as to present a serious threat to the world economy. On a microeconomic level, it can damage an institution's good reputation, the public's confidence, revenues and employee morale. This is why the world has attached heightened significance to the money‐laundering problem.

Having the Last Word: Plot and Counterplot in Bernard Shaw

Shaw's first play was a collaboration of sorts with William Archer, and one of his last was a collaboration of sorts with William Shakespeare. play that eventually became Widowers' Houses began in 1884 with an agreement between Archer and Shaw that the former was to provide the plot and the latter the dialogue. arrangement broke down after a few weeks when Shaw said to his collaborator, Look here, I've written half of the first act of that comedy, and I've used up all your plot. Now I want some more to go on with.2 Archer's plot was of the school that dominated the English theatre in the late nineteenth century, that of the French well-made play-the school of Scribe and Sardou, in which plot and incident are the essence of tightly constructed works. Shaw used Archer's plot, but in a way that made a mockery of the type of play Archer had in mind. In Bernard Dukore's words, The entire play may be regarded as a demonic parody of the well-made play, whose features ... it utilizes.3 Whereas in Archer's plot the young man was virtuously and heroically to reject the father-in-law's tainted money, in Shaw's play Trench is made aware of the fact that he is just as guilty as the slum landlord and in the end he marries the daughter without rising to any heights of virtue or heroism. When Shaw returned to his shorthand manuscript three years after the 1884 attempt, he gave the first two acts to Archer to read, warning him in advance that he had turned his plot into a different type of play. The central notion is quite perfect; but the hallucinations

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Interchurch World Movement of 1919–1920: A Different Angle on the Ecumenical Movement

There is a certain irony in the title of Eldon G. Ernst's Moment of Truth for Protestant America, the standard interpretation of the Interchurch World Movement (IWM) of 1919–1920, because this broad and generally perceptive study of the IWM is based primarily upon an elaborate falsification of the historical record. That falsification was perpetrated in a document entitled “History of the Interchurch World Movement” prepared under the direction of Raymond B. Fosdick. Fosdick, who was the lawyer and long-term adviser of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had the document compiled precisely to conceal the real role Rockefeller played in the organization. Research in Rockefeller's papers reveals the truth about his role and thereby illumines a significant aspect of the ecumenical movement and its relationship to wider historical trends. This overlooked aspect from the background of the liberal side of the fundamentalist controversy is particularly pertinent today as tensions mount between those who identify themselves as “liberals” and those who claim to lead a “moral majority” of resurgent conservatism. Perhaps Washington Gladden, the old social gospel advocate, was not entirely wrong when he referred to a Rockefeller contribution as “tainted money,” however idealistic Rockefeller's motives may have been.

Analogues of Wordsworth's The Borderers

The Borderers does not, and cannot, rank high among Wordsworth's poems. It is curiously lacking in the glamor, the color, the atmosphere of a remote and picturesque past by which the romantic poets are wont to impart a persuasive verisimilitude to their pictures of the Middle Ages. The characters of the play have slight individuality, and in spite of the calamities that befall them, they evoke no sympathy. Although the poem exhibits intellectual power in the handling of a philosophical problem and a finely whittled precision in the statement of ideas, yet these robust merits are unhappily wedded to the mawkish ineptitude of contemporary literature. The hero, Marmaduke, is the humanitarian freebooter of Schiller's Robbers; however, to do him justice, he does not, like Karl Moor, support young men at college with his tainted money. Herbert and Idonea present a lachrymose picture of virtue in distress; the blind old man is a sentimentalized Oedipus, and his daughter is a Greuze maiden, a girl with a broken pitcher, who has stepped out of her frame to go a-wandering; her angelic perfection only exasperates. Even the “little dog, tied by a woollen cord,” that guides the wandering Herbert, has a sentimental pedigree; he is the faithful animal of current novels—the descendant, for example, of virtuous, old Trusty, the “shag house-dog” of The Man of Feeling.