Two types of scandal

I think most people will agree that, tautologically speaking, scandals are unexpected events.

There are two ways to think about encountering unexpected events.  First, it may be that our senses and ability to recognize these events are just fine, but the events themselves are rare. Call these discoveries “Aberrations.”  Or it could be that the events are relatively common but our ability to detect them is lacking.  Let’s call these “Revelations.”  Whenever a new scandal breaks, I like to ask myself whether it is more likely that this is an Aberration (i.e., an example of uniquely troubled people doing uniquely troubling things) or a Revelation (i.e., an exposure that the world, or at least a part that the individuals caught in the scandal represent, is more troubled than we thought).

My classic example of Revelatory scandal is Libor rigging.  No bank is more closely associated with the Libor rigging scandal than Barclays, but that is mostly because Barclays was the bank that got caught in the scandal first and a lot of the early press put “BARCLAYS,” “LIBOR,” and “RIGGING” right next to one another in the headlines.  Eventually a dozen or so major financial institutions also paid fines.

My classic example of Aberrant scandals used to be Jerry Sandusky.  But, ech, then there was Larry Nassar and Richard Strauss and I just don’t know have the confidence that I would like to.

In fact, more or less since the distinction occurred to me, hedging on the side that any given scandal was more Revelatory than Aberrant has been a pretty safe and pretty sad bet.  Cheating on emissions tests? Not just Volkswagen, but Nissan, Opel, Volvo, Renault, Jeep, Hyundai, and Fiat were all accused.  Harvey Weinstein?  More analogs than blogspot can handle.  Even “colluding with foreign powers to rig elections” comes up with more hits than you may care to know about.

It is easy, maybe even instinctive, to assume a fresh scandal is Aberrant rather than Revelatory.  But this can lead to a bigger reputational penalty imposed on the first company or person caught in a scandal than they deserve relative to their peers.  That’s not to say it is okay to rig Libor, just that it may be epistemologically unsound to attach too much of the blame to one bank.  So with that in mind, for the time being I am going to refrain from putting down specific nineteen-year-olds who might have gotten into a good school based partly on fraudulent pretenses, because it might turn out that the college admissions process in general is even further from the clean, meritocratic ideal than we would like to believe.