> I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians.

I will just say this: "Christians" is not a wholly uniform population.

I attended Caltech in the 70s when it had an honor system. An anecdote on how it worked:

A fellow student of mine, "Bob", was taking Ama95, a required class that was one of the hardest classes. All exams were take home, open book, open note, but with a time limit of 2 hours. There was no proctoring, and nobody would know if one took extra time or not.

Bob took the exam to his dorm room, closed the door, and set the timer at 2 hours. He had been up late studying, and fell asleep. The timer woke him. He figured he'd been asleep for an hour. So he drew a line in his blue book, and continued taking the test for another hour. He then wrote an explanation of the line and what had happened, and turned it in.

He received an F. The professor was very apologetic, but explained that he had no choice.

Bob received the news with equanimity, and signed up to take the class again next year. He related this story in a matter of fact manner to a group of us in the dorm library.

The thing about the honor system is it turned the students and professors into collaborators rather than adversaries. The students liked the honor system very much. If their best friend cheated, they'd turn him in. Hence, any attempt at organized cheating meant ostracism. I never saw any of that in my time there.

Nobody stole anything in the dorm that I was aware of.

For contrast, I attended a class at a local college. One of the other students befriended me, and it turned out he did that to convince me to help him cheat. (I declined.) A friend of mine attended another university, and the day he moved into his freshman dorm room it was looted.

We don't punish politicians who run scams, and the result is predictable.

The thing is that petty crime affects the man and woman on the street and it infects lots of others too who figure out, whelp, I guess this is how it works/ A politician embezzling is bad but you don't experience it directly --but for your tax dollars not doing what they are supposed to be doing.

People can put up with a sleazy politician but they can't live comfortably knowing they can't trust their neighbors or trust the police to fight crime for them when the police know DAs will reduce charges, drop charges, etc. Like why bother putting in hard work where you're putting your wellbeing in the balance just so that criminals go unpunished... eventually you end up with a "Caracas" & wild-west experience.

These two things don't rule out each other.

Quite to the contrary, when we observe rampant cheating from the presidency down to shrinkflating food and freeriding the subway, it is a good argument for having an universal morality problem.

There isn't a dichotomy between the saintly people and the scummy political class. A nontrivial part of the voter base of the scummy politicians is formed by regular scummy voters.

That's because having to pay the large fine does not deter crime, and bumping the price does not have a major affect. Increasing the odds of getting caught is much more effective. [0] shows states this outright in the abstract

[0] https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/202...

Crime rates in NYC move in inverse proportion to enforcement.

When the National Guard was deployed in Washington DC, the crime rate plummeted.

Crime rates soared in cities that decriminalized shoplifting.