You’re right that there can be a tremendous return to corruption. A couple of examples are the Clinton Foundation’s direction of funds in Haiti, or the way Obama put a big political bundler who had $70 million invested in Solyndra ahead of the US government in liquidation recovery. I’m sure we could come up with dozens more. Oh, here’s one: Biden’t son has profited immensely by selling Slow Joe’s influence.
So, I was thinking about the idea of the expected return on a governmental bribe. It varies a lot, but it can be very large, as you noted. For example, the DNC gave Perkins Coie $9 million (or some say $12 mm), of which $1 million wound up with Fusion GPS, who paid Steele only $168,000. I mentioned this to one of my sons, and he said, “Dad, do you know about trophic level efficency? On average its only 10%.”
So, I looked up trophic levels, which are the classification of who eats who eats what in ecology. The idea is that only 10 % of the energy consumed winds up being converted to physical substance (meat, flesh). The rest is used up in metabolism involved with walking around, hunting, grazing, etc. So the 10X leverage figure on the bribe seems to fit right in.
Very interesting.