The Cheating Culture

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead is a nonfiction book, authored by David Callahan and published by Harcourt in 2004.

The main thesis of the book is that the current state of American society, characterized by rampant inequality and a winner-take-all philosophy, produces the cheating that has been observed in business, law, academia, journalism, entertainment and medicine.

Cheating, of both illegal and legal forms, is pervasive in an American society where incentive-driven structures (e.g. , production-based pay, fast-track career options) have gone haywire: Instead of promoting productivity and "fair play", they reward deception and chicanery. Callahan provides multiple examples of this phenomenon in recent American history:

Not restricted to professions, cheating now appears in all facets of American life. According to Callahan, cheating breeds upon a dynamic between a "winner class", an upper-class so influential they effectively are exempt from most rules and standards, and an "anxious class", often compelled to cheat during a period of downward social mobility, downsizing, and within a cultural climate that values money and power above personal integrity.

Callahan shows, however, that large-scale cheating is most prevalent among the "Winner" upper class. Despite their high salaries and opulent lifestyles, they live in constant comparison with those who have more than them, and therefore exhibit lives characterized by high spending, severe anxiety, and countless opportunities and temptations to cheat.

The author, however, also notes that blame for the cheating phenomenon does not lie upon a single class of people. Rather, it represents the individualistic ambitions of the amorphously-defined "Me" generation, mixed dangerously with laissez-faire principles espoused by the 1980s neoliberals, and implemented, to America's detriment, during the "get-rich-quick" era of the 1980s and 1990s.

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