WaPo:

KABUL — The two men accused of orchestrating Afghanistan’s largest banking scandal were sentenced to five-year prison terms Tuesday, more than two years after stealing more than $800 million from Kabul Bank, about 5 percent of the country’s GDP.

In 2010, the scandal threatened to destabilize Afghanistan’s fragile economy. Its adjudication has since been considered by many as a litmus test for both the feeble Afghan judiciary and the government’s efforts to reduce rampant corruption.

What the report also reveals is that the banking sector has boomed during the long war, and much of this wealth has, of course, ended up in a few hands...

The more than $500 billion invested by the United States in Afghanistan since 2001 has been a boon to Afghanistan’s banking sector... But the vast majority of bank loans, investigators would later discover, went to fewer than two dozen people or companies, many with connections to the government.

I now want you to watch this remarkable video of an experiment conducted on capuchin monkeys...

The question is this: How is it that we humans, like so many other primates, have an inherent and deep sense of fairness, and yet this fairness is rarely reflected in our societies? To answer this question you need Darwin and Marx. You need Darwin to explain, in evolutionary terms, the reason why real, biologically grounded feelings of fairness were positively selected in our species. And Marx to explain why we have failed to express these real feelings in (or why they are distorted by) the structure of our large-scale societies.