Cheating Is the New Normal: How Our Inequitable Society Promotes Dishonesty

Pro-cyclists are among the lowest-paid professional athletes in the world, earning an average annual salary of just over $45,000 a year. And yet, at the height of his racing career, Lance Armstrong is reported to have earned $28 million in a single year thanks to a combination of sponsorship deals, salary, bonuses, and other income. Of course, we now know that Lance’s success was due primarily to his use of performance-enhancing drugs, and, as more and more of his competitors caught onto this fact, it created a culture in which doping was considered necessary to success. Pro-cycling quickly became characterized by reward asymmetry, a condition in which the lion’s share of the rewards are earned by a small minority of people. Seeing this imbalance, pro-cyclists learned they had two options: cheat, win, and reap all of the benefits or play by the rules, lose, and end up with nothing.

Unfortunately, reward asymmetry is all too common in our society. It’s an oft-quoted statistic that the top 1 percent of earners in America control nearly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. While some argue that income inequality creates healthy competition by providing incentives for people to work harder in order to earn more, what we have here is actually a case of reward asymmetry in which the lucky few receive the vast majority of the rewards. And the gap is only widening over time. In the past thirty years, the top 1 percent’s share of the nation’s wealth has grown from just under 30 percent to nearly 49 percent, while the share held by the bottom 90 percent has fallen from 33 to 23 percent. As the playing field has become less equal, our society has become less fair.

What this creates is a society in which people are forced to cheat in order to survive. Humans are hardwired for scarcity, and when they sense that resources are disappearing and that some people are ending up with more than others, they will do what is necessary to be among those few. If they sense the game is not being played fairly, then they will lie, cheat, and steal rather than end up with nothing. Humans are currently creating more resources than they ever have before, and yet, they’re being distributed less and less fairly across the board. History is full of examples of people fudging the rules (at best) or committing heinous crimes (at worst) in order to get ahead financially, but I am certain that, if we don’t take major steps to correct this imbalance, we’re going to end up in a situation in which the stakes are so high that people will be forced to set aside their integrity in order to survive. And the cheating need not be something newsworthy--like a Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme or Enron scandal. It could be something as simple as lying to protect your job or undermining a coworker you see as a threat. Even the most avowed capitalists among us can’t argue that a system like this can last for long without something breaking. So what can we do?

Some believe the government should step in to create laws that level the playing field and to punish those who don’t play fairly. But I would consider this a failure. If we need laws to tell us how to behave, that’s a sign that we lack trust in one another. We need laws, sure, but what we need more is integrity. Doping was never allowed in professional cycling, but that didn’t prevent Lance Armstrong from doing it. It was only after he started outperforming everyone else that cheating became (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor) par for the course.

As in sports, what we face is a culture problem, not a governing problem. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I believe that entrepreneurs and business leaders will ultimately take the lead in creating a fair society. Already we see examples of leaders rejecting the old notion of “profit over people” or the belief that the market is a perfect power that should be left alone. We see it in their humane approach to leadership, in their instituting more human-centric policies, and in their embrace of diverse opinions and ideas. Since we instituted a $70,000 minimum wage at Gravity Payments, other business leaders have told me they have done something similar at their own companies simply because they wanted to level the playing field. They are not motivated solely, or even largely, by profit or creating the biggest payday for themselves. They don’t want more for the sake of having more, and they’d rather share the resources they have at their disposal with those who helped them earn them in the first place.

Playing by the rules when others are not is incredibly difficult, but it is also much more sustainable than continuing a culture of cheating. If you don’t want to live in a world where cheating is rewarded, then create a world where it isn't. Don’t be like Lance Armstrong; be a leader whose legacy will last.