His conclusion — and Ronson is a social observer with a comic temperament, not a gavel-banging moralist — is that we've been swept up into accepting and nurturing a culture of increasingly severe moral punishment, corrosive to the shamed and the shamer alike.
In London alone, there were more than 430 reported acid attacks last year, as young people increasingly arm themselves with highly corrosive but widely available household products as a weapon for use in street crime or gang violence.
Invisible to most, our fragile, indispensable marine life is increasingly facing the challenge of more corrosive waters as more CO2 is taken up by the ocean.
Dr. Maybury-Lewis became close to the people he studied and was increasingly alarmed by what he saw as the corrosive effects on tribal culture and the environment by development.
What has emerged is a series of increasingly heated disagreements about economic disparity and the corrosive power of wealth that at times seem more at home in the Dust Bowl era than the Microsoft era.
But in a world where the wealthy are increasingly central to the political system, there are also corrosive political implications to personal tax avoidance, as details of the Paradise Papers make plain.
