Yes, I think 'honesty', 'trust' and 'reputation' used to be very important in the old days but not so much now - The system is extremely generous when it comes to giving people 'second chances'.
In our semi-globalized world, you can take HUGE risks and make a COMPLETE MESS of your reputation and credit rating in your home country, but then you can move to a different country (and often, you can also bring along your dirty money with you) and start fresh as though nothing ever happened. Unless you're a major public figure; no one will know what a crook you are.
A partially-globalized world is a perfect world for crooks. I think we should either give up on globalization completely or go full steam ahead and merge into a 'world government' under which everyone can be held accountable for their past behaviour without any loopholes.
We don't need a global government as much as a global reputation system, and we're slowly moving towards that direction. It's especially true of the United States and Europe--if you screw up big time there, it's easy to find out, and it's not like authoritarian regimes outside the west have any incentive to protect the reputations of western companies via censorship.
In our semi-globalized world, you can take HUGE risks and make a COMPLETE MESS of your reputation and credit rating in your home country, but then you can move to a different country (and often, you can also bring along your dirty money with you) and start fresh as though nothing ever happened. Unless you're a major public figure; no one will know what a crook you are.
A partially-globalized world is a perfect world for crooks. I think we should either give up on globalization completely or go full steam ahead and merge into a 'world government' under which everyone can be held accountable for their past behaviour without any loopholes.