From tipping to corruption

 Americans of strong democratic fiber have been railing against tipping ever since the late 19th Century, when the practice drifted over from Europe, borne by wealthy Americans who had traveled to the continent after the Civil War and came back eager to share their new civilized manners with the poor relations at home.As the decades have passed, tipping has only become more ingrained in American habits and business models, which makes it precisely the sort of thing that is most difficult to change. But that doesn’t keep the democratic gag reflex from kicking in on occasion. 

"Tipping is an aristocratic conceit — “There you go, my good man, buy your starving family a loaf” — best left to an aristocratic age. The practicing democrat would rather be told what he owes right up front. Offensively rich people may delight in peeling off hundred-dollar bills and tossing them out to groveling servants. But no sane, well-adjusted human being cares to sit around and evaluate the performance of some beleaguered coffee vendor." - Michael Lewis

In any event, this month, a new study describes another dimension of the problem with tipping: according to a paper in Social Psychology and Personality Science, societies in which you see lots of tipping are also societies where you see lots of … corruption and bribery.

The authors, 

Magnus Thor Torfason, 

Francis J. Flynn, 

and Daniella Kupor,

investigated the link between tipping, an altruistic act, and bribery, an immoral act. They "found a positive relationship between these two seemingly unrelated behaviors, using archival cross-national data for 32 countries, and controlling for per capita gross domestic product, income inequality, and other factors. Countries that had higher rates of tipping behavior tended to have higher rates of corruption. We suggest that this surprising association may be accounted for by temporal focus—people may tip and bribe others in order to receive special services in the future. Indeed, in a pair of follow-up survey studies, we find evidence that the link between tipping and bribery can be partly accounted for by prospective orientation."

The data here is new. But the thesis that there is a relationship between gratuities and graft is not as counter-intuitive, or at least as novel, as the researchers let on. William R. Scott's Book: Itching Palm, A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America, written in 1916, made a powerful case against tipping:

-On the economic side, tipping is wrong because it is payment for no service, or double payment for one service; thereby causing the exchange of wealth without a mutual gain.

- Tipping is ethically wrong because one person accepts payment for a service not rendered, or for a service which the employer already has paid to have performed. And because gratuities destroy self-respect.

- Employees defend tipping upon the ground that it compensates them for extra services not covered in their wages. An examination of individual instances shows this contention to be false in a vast majority of the number examined.

- Employers defend the custom on the ground that the public insists upon giving gratuities and they must face competition based upon that condition. But it is shown that employers openly profit by the custom and secretly encourage it.

- Flunkyism is rampant in the American democracy and this aristocratic influence is undermining republican ideals and institutions.The hold which tipping has upon the public is due to unscrupulous appeals to generosity, pride and fear of violating conventional social usage.

- Tipping nowadays is of precisely the same morality as paying tribute to the Barbary Pirates was in Jefferson's day, which the American conscience finally abolished.

Finally,as Scottt says

"If I must build my pride upon another man's humility,
I will not be proud;
If I must build my strength upon another man's weakness,
I will not be strong;
If I must build my success upon another man's failure,
I will not succeed!"