Taboo Trades
Taboo Trades
Getting Away with Taboo Trades with Gabriel Rossman, Pt. 1
Want to buy sex, bribe a politician, or get your dumb kid into an Ivy League school? I discuss how to get away with taboo trades with Gabriel Rossman, an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and my co-host, UVA Law 3L Autumn Adams-Jack.
Rossman studies cultural industries (such as radio and film) and economic sociology (including diffusion and disreputable exchange). He is interested in how people structure immoral exchanges like bribery to make them more subtle and therefore less obviously immoral.
I’ve been an admirer of Rossman’s work for a number of years and was so happy to have this opportunity to talk to him about his research that I kept him longer than normal and have divided his podcast into two parts. In this part, we talk about sugar babies, college admissions, Bill Cosby, and Islamic finance. We also discuss a forthcoming book manuscript on the obfuscation of disreputable exchange that Gabriel generously shared, currently titled “How to Get Away With Paying Bribes, Buying Sex, and Selling Corpses.
Suggested Readings
· “It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional.” 2018. (with Oliver Schilke) American Sociological Review.
· “Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange.” 2014. Sociological Theory.
· “The Diffusion of the Legitimate and the Diffusion of Legitimacy.” 2014. Sociological Science.
· Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. Princeton University Press. 2012.
There was this weird period where everybody kind of knew that Bill Cosby had sexually assaulted a lot of women, but nobody really cared. And then Hannibal Buress, who was offended by Cosby's respectability politics, made it a regular part of his acts saying, this guy's a rapist. And at every one of his shows, he'd say, this guy's a rapist. And then people just noticed. And it's not that you had new facts. There was this period where it was in the newspaper. And it's not like, oh, everybody knew who knew people. And you guys aren't from LA, but trust me, I was at the Ivy League. No, this is something that was in the newspaper. You could Google it at the time.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Trades podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell, but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravick. My guest today is Gabriel Rossman, an associate professor of sociology at UCLA. Rossman studies cultural industries such as radio and film and economic sociology, including diffusion and disreputable exchange. He is interested in how people structure immoral exchanges like bribery to make them more subtle and therefore less obviously immoral. Thank you so much. Bill Cosby, and Islamic Finance. We also discuss a forthcoming book manuscript on the obfuscation of disreputable exchange that Gabriel generously shared. It's currently titled How to Get Away with Paying Bribes, Buying Sex, and Selling Corpses.
UNKNOWN:Music
SPEAKER_00:Hey, good morning. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. Well, it's great to finally, you know, quote unquote, meet you in person. I've attempted to meet you a couple of times in person and vice versa, I know. Well, I'm
SPEAKER_04:glad to finally meet you on Zoom.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you too. So hi, Gabriel. Nice to meet you. My name is Autumn. I'm a 3L at UVA Law. So I can just start off with the first question. So in the book manuscript, you say that we differ not only in what we find illegitimate to exchange, but why we feel that way, or at least how we articulate our moral reasoning. As you say, you're going to discuss later, the broadly rights-based conception of Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic culture exaggerates the sense in which exchange morality is about exploitation. This is true for nobody so much as moral philosophers of exchange, who when they find occasion to condescend affirming the institutions, intuition, sorry, of ordinary people, insist on doing so from utilibot reasoning that nobody actually believes. So we've kind of read some moral philosophy in this class, but not a lot. And I was wondering if you can elaborate on what the standard take is as you view it from moral philosophy and why it's deficient.
SPEAKER_04:Sure. So I am not a moral philosopher. I'm a sociologist. But the proverbial reviewer number two has told me that I, oh, you have to read Deborah Satt's. And so being the dutiful... author with an R&R. I turned it around and read Sats and I was kind of horrified by what I saw because Sats has this argument in her book. I think the book is called Why Something Should Not Be For Sale.
SPEAKER_00:It is.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Thank you. She talks about all these taboos and then she's like, okay, well, people don't like prostitution. Why don't they like prostitution? And the obvious answer is because they think sex is special or they think prostitution is gross or something like that. And she's like, and that's not... That's against the rules. You're not allowed to say that. You're not allowed to have that opinion. Millions and millions of people do have that opinion. you know, in fairness to her, she's not being a psychologist or a sociologist or an anthropologist, she's being a philosopher. And so she's allowed to play by those rules where she's allowed to say, this argument is not cricket. You're allowed to say that this argument, you know, we moral philosophers, at least as we moral philosophers who work within broadly the liberal tradition, you could easily imagine Thomas Aquinas saying something totally different. We moral philosophers who work within liberal tradition have a rule, which is that you're not allowed to say things are just gross. You have to say things are unfair or exploitative or hurt people. And, and then, so she goes and she will say like, well, okay, so why can we say that prostitution is wrong? She's like, Hmm, I got it. The reason prostitution is wrong is because it degrades women as a class. And even women who aren't directly... And let's say that one woman performs the sex act for money. It seems like she consents. It's like that meme, like, I consent, I consent, but they forgot to ask somebody else. Except in this case, the somebody else isn't God. It's women as a broad class, because she's making this argument that prostitution degrades women as a class. But you can see she's really grasping for something. She's like... She's basically saying like, okay, I know that I have to be able to say that this archetypal illegitimate exchange is immoral or otherwise I'm just a libertine who's saying anything goes. And she's working really hard to find out, find an argument that's fair according to her rules. That's not how ordinary people think. And I don't even think that's how Deborah Satz thinks. I think that's how Deborah Satz thinks at work. I think that's why she's good at what she does. But in terms of like, why she actually, assuming for the sake of argument, she opposes prostitution sincerely. I have no idea if she does or not, but let's just take that. I think she probably opposes it for much the same reasons everybody else does, but she knows that she has to build a case based on certain types of arguments where it doesn't count as moral philosophy. And of course, I'm talking to a law school class, right? And what you guys are all doing is very closely analogous to, you know, liberal moral philosophy. In some ways, it's like apply in, you know, engineering is applied physics or engineering is applied chemistry. You guys are kind of like the engineers of moral philosophy, right? You kind of have to take, you know, liberal moral philosophy and use it to build a case. And, you know, depending on who you ask, it could or could not be appropriate to say that's just gross, right? Scalia has some famous dissents where he's like, well, if we say this, then nobody's ever allowed to say anything's gross. And that's a valid reason in the law. And obviously, you know, Scalia thought that that should be an appropriate view in the law, but plenty of other justices didn't. Anyway, so I think the best work on this sort of thing has been done by John Haidt, who I think was at UVA at one point, but is now at NYU. And he has this fantastic article called The Rational Tale. And it's the emotional dog and the rational tail, but tail is spelled tail like a story, not just tail like the appendage at the back of an animal. And his argument in rational tail is that, so he did this experiment where he or his grad student read people a story that was really disgusting but carefully constructed so that nobody was hurt. So one of his stories was an adult brother and sister are on vacation together. And I hope you can, well, actually, I kind of hope you can't see where this is going, but you probably can, right? An adult brother and sister who are, you know, go on vacation together. And while they're there, completely sober and with complete consent, they say, hey, you know what would be a fun experience and something that would be interesting to try? Why don't we have sexual intercourse with each other? They do. She's already on the pill, but they use a condom anyway, just to be safe. And then, and then afterwards they agree not to talk about it, not to scandalize anyone with this story, but they feel like it brought them closer to, and not to do it again, but they feel like it brought them closer together as siblings. That's almost verbatim what Haidt reads to his respondents. And then he says to them, okay, what did you think of that story? And almost everyone says, oh, that's disgusting. This is horrible. And then he asked this really devious question, which is why? And the interesting pattern is that if you go to people outside of the West or even uneducated people in the West, they'll say, did you miss the part where it was a brother and sister having sex? That's gross. That's wrong. It's against the Bible. It's whatever, right? And they'll just say, it's just wrong because it's wrong, right? It violates the laws of nature. And they just basically give you a disgust-based answer, and they're very comfortable with that. People like you or me, right, that is to say educated people in the West will generally say, hmm, I've never thought about why it's wrong. And you say, I got it. Their kids could be deformed. And then the, you know, height or his grad student would say, but did you miss the part of the story where they were on two forms of birth control? So they couldn't possibly have, you know, given birth to an inbred child. And then typically a person like you or me would say, damn, I didn't think of that. And then you say, and then they'll say, okay, so what do you think now? And they'll say, so why do you think it's wrong? And it'll be, I got it. Incest almost always involves coercion. And then the person will say, but remember, this is not a stepdad and a teenager. This is two adults who made a decision completely sober. And the person will go, damn. And then eventually people like you or me might very well say, I guess it's not wrong because nobody was hurt by it. So in effect, moral philosophers are doing that. They're a more extreme version of what people like you and me do. But Haidt's argument is that even people like you and me do have moral intuitions. It's just that we... also have a form of moral reasoning that plays by very particular rules and one of those rules is that we're allowed to give certain reasons such as it's unfair or it's exploitative or it involves coercion and we're not allowed to give other reasons notably it's just gross or it just violates the laws of nature or just offends God.
SPEAKER_00:There is a debate within law, I guess, about sort of what the causal direction here is between sort of things we prohibit and sort of the things we consider to be disgusting or just inherently wrong. So I guess in that story, the more sophisticated legal account would be that we actually want people to, we don't want people to be thinking through the reasons for why things are wrong. We want people to internalize So, you know, legal norms in particular, perhaps we could say the same thing about social norms. I'll leave that to the sociologists, but in any event, right? And so how does that fit into yours or Haight's account? I think that the more sophisticated legal account would be, yes, this is exactly what we want people to respond. This is the point of these sorts of norms is that we don't want people going through and saying, okay, it's wrong. And we, you know, it's wrong in this instance. It's not wrong in this instance. Most Most of the time, there would be harmful effects from this. And therefore, by having people sort of internalize a norm of moral unacceptability or grossness or disgust, that is a much more effective way of policing this particular norm. And in most countries, maybe all countries law.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And and The way it works, too, by the way, is that one reason you might want something like that is that people are very good at using their moral reasoning to justify norm violations. Right. So a simple example of that would be, let's say somebody is considering committing statutory rape and they're like, oh, but, you know, this 16 year old girl is so mature. Right. Right. And so they they could be giving kind of a almost cliched. uh, justification as to why this rule doesn't really apply in their case. But of course, that's why the rule applies is because we know that, uh, people would, um, you know, uh, apply that kind of justification. Yeah. And, and, you know, height would, I think if height was on the phone instead of me, you'd be getting the same argument, right? He, he, he, in fact, often describes moral reasoning as our internal lawyer, right? Like the, the, the function of moral reasoning is to justify the things we already want, uh, you know, for whatever reason we have.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. I'm going to return it back to Autumn. There were, as you might expect, the group was interested in some of your stories about college admissions, which hit close to home. So I'm going to start with Autumn and then Samantha has a question about that as well.
SPEAKER_04:Very close to home in my case.
SPEAKER_00:Was UCLA one of the schools? It was
SPEAKER_04:mostly SC, which is a few miles away, but UCLA did have one. You know, we're the parents bribed the women's soccer coach with Facebook stock.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, go ahead, Autumn.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so just going off the discussion about, you know, families donating major amounts to the school. Yeah. And it's obvious a lot of the times that's why their children are getting accepted to these schools because these families are donating very large amounts. But there's obviously other ways children of wealthy families are getting into these schools from coaches, like similar to what you said, or maybe test prep coaches, maybe having the right extracurriculars, the right feeder schools to get into these colleges. So aren't these also ways of kind of using money similar to the other way to beat the system and against those who just got solely accepted based on merit. Why do you think there's not more discomfort with those inequalities than the people just donating to the schools? And why is it easier to pretend those criteria are more about merit?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. So one of those reasons I'm going to take exception to, which is the Varsity Blues scandal, which I saw in the preview of the questions, a lot of the you were thinking about, as you should, right? It's a high profile thing. The Varsity Blues scandal was not people bribing the university. The Varsity Blues scandal was people bribing individual members of the university, almost always athletics coaches, typically in women's sports.
SPEAKER_00:This is the one that most of the celebrities were caught up in. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_04:Exactly. So the celebrities and the other rich people, the typical pattern is a celebrity bribes a women's athletics coach to give a recruited athlete spot to her daughter to get them into USC. That was the typical pattern. And this went through a consultant named Rick Singer. I don't consider that to be a case of obfuscation with the school because the, that was really much more of a principal agent problem. So if we were to draw an analogy with something like selling citizenship in the there are models where you can actually buy citizenship from countries, typically
SPEAKER_00:poor. Plenty of countries.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, very often poor countries that have reciprocal travel rights with rich countries, right? So for a long time, you could go to some Caribbean country give a million dollars to the treasury of that Caribbean country, and they would give you a British Commonwealth passport that you could use to travel to the UK or the European Union or something like that. And typically if countries do this too aggressively, they get kicked out of those travel areas. Anyway, so that would be an example of simply buying a resource. In the varsity blues case, this is more analogous to you go to the passport office and you bribe the clerk. You're not buying something from the, I'm just going to pick on the Bahamas. You're not buying something from the Bahamas. You're buying something from the guy you bribed at the Bahamanian consulate, which is very different. Now, it might be that you also have an obfuscated exchange with the dude at the Bahamian consulate. And in fact, some people did have obfuscated exchanges with these coaches. But fundamentally, this was a principal agent problem where the coaches were not acting as good agents for the interests of the university as a whole. But we can put that aside. So with all these other cases, I mean, the interesting thing is the modern admission system came in, in a large part, in order to avoid an even more distasteful system. And it is obfuscated, but not obfuscated originally in terms of payment. So Jerry Carrable has a very good book called The Chosen, which is a deliberate pun because in his usage of the title, The Chosen refers both to Jews and to people who are chosen to be admitted to Ivy League schools, where he talks about the origins of the modern admission system in the 1920s. elite education. And this was characteristic of private schools and then it spread to public schools after the Grutter decision. The system, what you basically had in the 20s is with the introduction of the, it used to be that Ivy League schools mostly worked on a basis of A, feeder schools and B, who could afford to pay the tuition. And then with the introduction of the SAT, you saw a lot of working class Jewish kids getting in. You had kind of Gentile flight from Columbia University, where Columbia University got so many Jews that Gentiles stopped going there. And the other Ivy Leagues looked at that in horror and said, how are we going to prevent Gentile flight? And so they instituted quotas on Jews. This was very unpopular and very distasteful and seen as not gentlemanly. And so they figured out, well, what's a more subtle way that we can basically accomplish this? And they said, okay, well, we're going to have regional diversity quotas. So you get points, not just points, but we're going to give preferences to people from Wyoming. And we're going to give preferences to people who do obscure sports that they don't teach at Bronx Science, but they do teach at Exeter. So you're going to have basically the kind of well-roundedness criteria. And so that's the origins
SPEAKER_00:of the modern admission system. and therefore they'll give money back to the school. But that just suggests that we need a proxy for something like being rich. And it seems to me that we don't need a proxy for that. There are other mechanisms that we can use to figure that out. So, I mean, is that part of why? Is this a holdover from that or
SPEAKER_04:no? That's a very good question. And kind of a related question would be not just why did we have it five years ago, but why do we still have it after the Varsity Blues scandal, right? I mean, I kind of expected Varsity Blues to really discredit college sports and in particular to have universities have much more oversight over recruited athletes slots, right? Because the current way is that the coaches basically get a certain allocation where they're basically allowed to say, as long as they meet the NCAA qualifications, I want that one, that one, that one, right? And so it's this weird system where the admissions office controls admissions of most people, but recruited athletes are controlled by the coaches. And Varsity Blues basically showed why that's a bad idea. If you give this valuable resource to people, sometimes they're going to abuse that valuable resource. That largely seems not to have happened. I mean, you had some coaches fired. You had some athletics directors fired. Our athletics director at UCLA got turned over. The message was all very much like, we thank this person for their long service. Maybe that's the true story. Maybe they were fired because they hadn't spotted that the women's soccer coach was taking bribes. I don't know. Well,
SPEAKER_00:we've got some questions about sports later in the podcast. And of course, the NCAA has bigger fish to fry these days, I guess, is perhaps part of the answer.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. But in terms of like, why... So I thought when you started asking questions, I was going to say, why is it? Why do women's sports, which was mostly what was his issue, adversity blues? I would assume women's. I mean, I'm not an expert on this, but I would assume that's something to do with Title IX. That if you're going to give resources.
SPEAKER_00:There's extra money floating around there because of Title IX. I'm
SPEAKER_04:guessing. Yeah. Yeah. That if you're going to give resources to men's sports, you have to give them to women's sports. But in terms of like, why? But why? the non-revenue sports as well as the revenue sports, that's, that's a very good question. I honestly don't know the answer, right? It seems like you could just, I mean, to a first approximation, unless you're at like Princeton where people really do care about crew, who cares if the crew team wins? Right. Right. So why not just admit the person who got a 4.0 and, you know, did the Intel Science Fair and whatever in high school?
SPEAKER_00:Or if you're trying to figure out if you're trying to admit rich people, then just admit the rich. Like, I mean, we have other mechanisms for figuring out which of our applicants are rich. So,
SPEAKER_04:yeah. But but to go back to Autumn's original question, you know. why do we allow these deviate? Why are we more comfortable with some deviations from merit than others? I mean, you could take the other answer. The other way to think of it is like, why do we care about merit in the first place? I mean, there was a time when school admission was not based on merit and that, that itself was around a hundred years ago. We saw, you know, the birth of the SAT and we saw this historic, uh, know and also not just the birth of the sat but also schools dropping their uh greek requirement um because you know in the 19th century you basically had to know greek and latin to get into a really good school and most public schools at the time taught latin but not greek and so in effect that was only preppies were preppies were the only people who learned both Latin and Greek. And so if you made Greek a requirement, that was effectively saying we only want people from prep schools. So there were a variety of changes, you know, relaxing this Greek requirement, adding the SAT that made things more meritocratic. That was controversial at the time, you know? So I don't think we can necessarily, if we're going to take like a big picture social constructionist view of it, we have to take, we have to problematize the idea of merit in of itself. Now, I mean, I, as much as any other 21st century American person, uh, you know, basically do take merit as the ideal and see other things as deviations from that of like, you know, why should this matter? Why should, you know, the gift matter, uh, you know, but the large giving that's probably the clearest case because it's, it's a case of, um, you know, the institution, um, you know, being able to thrive. Um, I, I recently heard a podcast with, uh, Russ Roberts, uh, and he was saying that, um, And I believe his guest was saying it was either him or his guest. One of them was saying the job of a dean is to ensure the continuity of the institution's values. The job of the college president is to ensure the continued existence of the institution. And, you know, this kind of shift from pure merit to saying like, well, you know, this Kushner kid has a lot of money. Yeah. You know, that's I mean, it's hard to say. Except in some kind of like abstract deontological ideal of merit, it's hard to say that Harvard made a bad call that way. They did get a lot of money from the Kushner family and they were able to direct that to other resources. And for that matter, Kushner himself ended up being a very powerful person. And it's a big part of the job of an Ivy League university to make sure that the next generation of elites are people who are their alumni. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So, Samantha, to the extent that your question hasn't been addressed in the prior discussion, do you want to follow on from here?
SPEAKER_01:My name is Samantha Spindler and I'm a 2L at UVA. And something that I was curious about is ostracism. And that seems to be a bigger concern than legal punishment when it comes to taboo activities. And does this mean in order for an activity to leave the taboo sphere, reform should be focused on public opinion? And legality will follow after public opinion. Because, for example, the parents in the Varsity Blue scandal were ostracized for securing their children fake spots on sports teams. They lost jobs and other opportunities. And I was also wondering if this ostracism makes the parents brokers because they were the ones that seemed to be blamed, even though their children were their children were the ones receiving admission to the schools.
SPEAKER_04:Well, at least in some cases, the children do seem to have been innocent. of the knowledge that they... And some of the parents actually went to fairly great lengths to make sure that their kids didn't know how the scam was working. Others of them, it's like, hey, I set up this canoe in the driveway in front of a green screen, go sit in it for a minute. I mean, it's pretty obvious what's going on there, right? But the... But in terms of like, it's interesting to think of this as like a reform effort. But if you're not thinking of it as like, okay, let's say that we have the, let's say that the taboo question is the coalition to legalize paid or to legitimize paid college admissions, right? So let's say that you have some NGO, it's a 501c3 or 501c4 or something, and you have this moral crusade to increase that. So one thing would be like, you'd want to pass a law saying that it's okay for universities to accept to openly and not as gift exchange, which is the main way that it works. And by the way, I highly recommend Golden's Price of Admission. He was a Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote a book on this and one of the very strong themes that you see in golden price of ambition is that development always works as gift exchange. Um, and no matter how close to the line they get, they always stay on that side of the line of never promising like, okay, here's the price. They always say like, yo, this is the usual donation, you know, and people listening to the MP3 can't see, but I just did like this very stage wink, uh, like a British pantomime or something. Um, and, So, but, but, you know, as you're suggesting that wouldn't be enough, right? Because we can think of things that are legal, um, but are still distasteful. So let's say hypothetically that, um, you know, I, I were to regale you with a personal story about how, uh, last summer I went to the, well, last summer would be a bad example, right? But it doesn't matter because the story didn't actually happen, right? So the story takes place in alternate universe with no COVID. So, uh, last summer I went to the Greek islands and I didn't want to go alone. So I put an ad on seeking arrangements and, uh, and I got, you know, saying like, you know, I like, uh, you know, uh, you know, attractive woman between the age of 25 and 35 to, you know, come you know who would be interested in accompanying me to the greek islands and then i got several responses and i said okay uh you i'd like to invite you to come with me we meet at the airport we go to the greek islands and it's understood that when we get to the greek islands we'll have sex so let's say i told you the story uh i mean and let's assume that it's not like out of context like it would make sense why i i'm not you know telling you the story I have to imagine that no matter what you think of sex work or what you think of transactional sex, you'd probably say like, that guy's kind of a creep. You know, like I feel like you'd have to, you know, like that would be the very strong moral intuition you have. I mean, you might very well say, I don't think he should be in prison. I don't think he, and you might even say, and you probably would say, I don't think he should lose his job, but you also might say, I'm not gonna invite him over for Thanksgiving dinner. you know, like this is, you know, I'm not going to introduce him to my, uh, to, to my single cousin. Right. I mean, you're going to say, this is not somebody who I think has good values and this is somebody who's kind of sketch, you know? So, um, and I'm not sure what you do about that. Right. Like what is the process of making it? I do think as both you and Kim were suggesting earlier, um, you know, part of it is that there is a signaling function of law. You know, I know that you guys have a special term for that, right? Basically the idea that law signals the morality of the society. And so just legalizing something in of itself could make it less morally taboo. But then there's just going to be a long process of habituation where if people get used to seeing it and it becomes more normalized and it's just like, So maybe the first time you hear this story about transactional sex involving travel, you think like, what a creep. But after the 10th time you hear it, you're just like, this is just something people do. It's a good way for middle-aged affluent men to get companionship and attractive young women to see the world. And that's cool. It's just amazing.
SPEAKER_00:You know, Gabriel, returning back to your initial discussion we were having about donations and colleges and how it's always, you know, and for charities more generally, right, always sort of in the gift realm, regardless of how close it comes to the line. I mean, I think in partial, at least, evidence for your statement here is I think that there have been a variety of legal changes that treat donations much more like a typical any bargain for exchange in terms of enforceability in contract law. And it has not done anything, I think, to move us away from still having this as a cultural and social category of being separate from a standard marketplace transaction, even as the law is beginning to treat it more and more like a standard marketplace transaction. So, of course, perhaps most people aren't as finely tuned to the law of charitable donations as some of us are.
SPEAKER_04:Well, I mean, and a lot of the legal changes or things that are effectively legal changes, even if they come through some type of accrediting body or professional society, take the form of reporting requirements. So pharma detailing was completely devastated by reporting requirements where you're still allowed to give a doctor an invitation to a Hawaiian golf resort where to present findings at a conference, but the conference only meets for an hour a day and it's well after the best tea times. But you just have to report it now and it goes in a database and then everybody knows that doctor's basically being bribed.
SPEAKER_00:The reason I find the contract cases kind of interesting myself is because Prior to some of the changes are statutory and some of them are just common law changes. But prior to that, the way to fit them, the way to make them enforceable was in fact to argue that it was basically a quid pro quo, that it was completely transactional, just like any other market. Sure, I gave money to the school, but I did it with the expectation. kind of interesting.
SPEAKER_04:So on this, Zelizer's Purchase of Intimacy is really good. And there was a version of this that was published. If you only have patients for 10 pages, read the version that was published in Law and Social Inquiry. And if you have patients for 300, 400 pages, read the book. But Zelizer is a sociologist, but her main method is going through old court cases.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. I love her treatment of those cases, by the way. Some of the students have read that, not in this class, but in the class I taught last semester. Oh, excellent. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I assigned them the chapter on coupling, and it's great.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Anyway, I was just going to say relevant to your point that, you know, she generally finds that, you know, so first of all, the law changed and that when, you know, seduction by promise of marriage ceased to be a crime, you know, you saw the rise of the engagement ring. And then you also saw the rise of the norm that depending on who breaks off an engagement, the, you know, the ring has to be returned or the ring can be kept, which was effectively a way to kind of turn this into, you know, in effect that the ring becomes almost a deposit on a woman's virginity. And, and she talks about how courts would actually enforce that. And I think a main theme in her book is how to frame and under that courts could be very kind of legal realists in how to understand and interpret exchange, based on who they wanted to win, right? So there's these weird stories about like, you know, some creepy old rich guy who had, you know, two sisters as mistresses and he kept them on an allowance. And then a lot of her cases actually involved with who has to pay the tax.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, a lot of them were tax cases. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And it's funny because I know for a fact, actually, that she went into it thinking that a lot of the cases would be about the Mann Act, but she ended up finding all these tax cases. Yeah. And, you know, even the courts would basically just decide based on who they thought was more sympathetic, whether this was a gift or whether it was an income payment. And, you know, even though something looks a lot like a job in some of the cases, the courts might say it's a gift because they didn't want the mistress to have to pay the tax they wanted. They said it was a gift because they wanted the old guy to have to pay the tax.
UNKNOWN:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. We have a couple of questions about the mechanics of obfuscation. And I'm going to start with Alex.
SPEAKER_03:Hi, Gabriel. I'm Alex. And I was wondering how obfuscation really works. You mentioned this The obfuscation is, you know, you take these two functionally similar transactions and you make them reputably different through some sort of structuring. But it seems like there are some intrinsic limitations on that. Like when we were talking about the physicians accepting gifts from pharmaceutical companies, you said in the paper that that's relatively tolerable compared to open kickbacks. Yeah. Is it always the case that there are those limitations? Absolutely. When we're talking about obfuscation, are we talking about hiding the transaction so that people don't realize it's going on? Or are we actually transforming it into something that's a little more palatable?
SPEAKER_04:So I think to take the second one, I think it's not just an issue of hiding it, that sometimes in the process of hiding it, you have to transform it. So let's take an example of a taboo transaction of prostitution. And those of you who have studied sex work know that there's all different forms of sex work. And that generally speaking, the more ephemeral and the more focused on sex it is, the cheaper it is. And the more enduring and the more focused on emotions it and other types of more cultural, you know, basically stuff that happens outside the bedroom, the more expensive it is. And so we see this, and if you read like the, I'm forgetting the scholar's first name, but if you read Dank, Dank has this fantastic work on sex work, D-A-N-K. Anyway, but you see that there's this huge price range where in a lot of cities, street prostitution will very often have a median price of$50, whereas escorts may charge, you know,$4,000. So you see this huge price range. And of course, escorts are, you know, that's not a 20 minute interaction. That's a four or five hour interaction, you know, and also there's more emotion and cultural performance involved with it.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Anyway, so, but then you say like, okay, well, then we have this social institution of sugar daddyism where we can obfuscate the performance of prostitution. But one of the interesting things is that it's impossible to have sugar daddyism that replicates street prostitution. You can't have, there's no such thing as sugar daddyism where as a gift exchange, you get in my car, we drive to a dark place, we have sex, so then I drop you off 20 minutes later. You just can't do that as sugar daddy-ism. Sugar daddy-ism can only replicate what in sex work would be called a girlfriend experience. So it transforms it by nature. And it forces it by nature to take on this more embedded form, this different form. There's certain aspects of it you can't do. Huang's research on... Kimberly Huang at University of Chicago, her research on real estate bribery in Vietnam, she shows that there's all sorts of ways that basically different real estate investors use different strategies because they're based on their cultural familiarity where, you know, Vietnamese investors will use gift exchange because they, they understand they're culturally close enough to the Vietnamese public officials that they understand how to tactfully bribe somebody with a gift. And also they have the patience to develop a relationship over many years.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:American investors in Vietnam totally lack the cultural tact to be able to bribe someone effectively with a gift. And they also lack the patience. And they're also terrified of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And so American investors in Vietnam will typically hire a local fixer and then not ask too many questions about what the local fixer is doing, which, of course, is brokerage. So you see kind of the obfuscation can change the nature. of the exchange, not just hide it. Now, in terms of how does the obfuscation have its effect, this is something that Shilke and I did in our vignette study, which I know you guys didn't read. I'm not saying you should have, right?
SPEAKER_00:Everyone should.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So in our 2018 American Sociological Review, Shilke and I presented several vignettes where we had a story about commercial bribery, a story about political bribery, and a story about baby selling. And then we randomly assigned people to hear one of five versions of the story. So we had the four obfuscation structures. Oh, there were six versions. There was the four obfuscation structures. There was an overt quid pro quo. And then there was somebody just asked nicely for the taboo good or the non-market good, but they don't offer anything in return. And so we call that version the appropriate version. And what we found is that in our vignettes, it was almost always the case that the people preferred the appropriate version. They prefer that somebody just ask without offering something in exchange for the non-market good. May I please adopt your baby? And they dislike the quid pro quo version. I will give you$10,000 if you let me adopt your baby. And then the obfuscated versions were in the middle, although a little bit closer to the quid pro quo. So I will forgive this$10,000 debt if you let me adopt your baby. And then in this part, I really have to credit to Oliver Schilke, my co-author, because he's much better at this sort of thing than I am. But we, or specifically Oliver, did a mediation analysis where we asked people, what aspect do you think about this? What aspect do you think about this? What aspect do you think about this? Okay, now what do you think about these people overall? Because the main dependent variable is basically, we asked four different ways. Do you think these people are a bunch of creeps? Right. And and then but we also ask this question of like, do you think everybody does this? Do you think this is common? Do you think that there's a transaction involved here? Right. So we have these three what a social psychologist would call mediators. And we showed that the the relationship between the effect of obfuscation works through these mediators. Right. the attributional opacity, basically making it seem like it's less of this happens because of this, the sense that everybody does it. All these things that we measured as mediators do explain a big part of how obfuscation works. Now, that said, I think the study was somewhat conservative in measuring the effect of obfuscation because the one thing we couldn't measure is that you just never put the pieces together. We're giving people roughly four paragraphs of text, less than a page of text. So the facts are all there. And in real life, obfuscation, if done well, the facts are not all there. You shouldn't know that this celebrity paid a soccer coach. If I tell you a story, this celebrity paid a soccer coach, or this celebrity paid Rick Singer's Bullshit Foundation, and then Rick Singer's Foundation paid this soccer coach, and then the soccer coach paid let in the celebrity's daughter. And I'm going to say, you know, do you think that's sketchy? You say, yeah, you know, but the thing is, is that you didn't think that until the FBI investigated it and, and got a snitch with a wire to get that all on tape and, and then put it in the U S attorney for, you know, Los Angeles, you know, and then put in the newspaper, right. Once it's in the newspaper story and you read the New York times of this celebrity did this on this date and you're like, Oh yeah, that's totally sketchy. But the day before that, you didn't know that, right? And maybe you could even go through some type of public records disclosure. You could find the 990 filings for Rick Singer's foundation and you could see, okay, you know, Rick Singer got this major donation from this person. Rick Singer made this huge outlay to this other person. And then you could also check the, you know, the USC student freshman roster and see that the celebrity, or even look on Instagram and see that the student is now matriculating at USC, but you're not going to put those pieces together. These are just going to seem like two disconnected facts in the huge realm of facts. And so I think part of what, um, obfuscation does, it's almost impossible to measure an experiment is it just takes the facts and it scatters them all over the universe, you know? And so it just makes it very hard to put these facts together. Um, and that
SPEAKER_00:by the way, do you think brokerage is different potentially from your other I know that you had different findings for brokerage and pawning. And I'm wondering if part of it is why brokerage seems more oriented towards making it difficult for people to put the pieces together rather rather than to sort of say to ourselves, even perhaps this is something different.
SPEAKER_04:In the mediation study, brokerage and bundling were less effective than gift and pawning. So the two things that involve a delayed reciprocity, which is gift and pawning, those were more effective in the study. And yeah, I agree with your interpretation that the way that brokerage and bundling work is they hide the facts. They make it difficult to see, right? You know that the congressman bought the defense contractor's house And you know that the congressman wrote a letter to the army on behalf of the defense contractor. I might be mixing up a couple of different cases there. But you don't necessarily know that these two things are related because lots of people buy houses and lots of congressmen do constituent service. And now if you see them all on the same page, you're like, hmm. But if they're just like, if you just look at all the real estate records from San Diego County, you look at all the letters sent out by uh members offices in the house you're never going to put these two facts together right so right um and that that by the way is an example of bundling um but once it's all put together it's it's totally obvious that this you know defense contractor overpays by seven hundred thousand dollars for the congressman's house and then immediately puts it back on the market and this congressman writes a letter on behalf of the defense contractor that's that's obvious what's going on but Only once you have the facts put together. And by the way, one of the things I think is really interesting about this is the process of accusation that, you know, there's a whole developing sociology of scandal. And one of the points in the sociology of scandal is that scandals aren't about moral transgressions. They're about moral accusations and that, and this, this transcends, I think this absolutely applies to obfuscated crime. disreputable exchange and disreputable exchange period, but it applies to all sorts of things. So a very simple example would be, there was this weird period where everybody kind of knew that Bill Cosby had sexually assaulted a lot of women, but nobody really cared. And then Hannibal Buress, who was offended by Cosby's respectability politics, made it a regular part of his acts saying, this guy's a rapist. And like at every one of his shows, he'd say, this guy's a rapist. And then people just noticed. And it's not that you had new facts. There was this period where it was in the newspaper. And it's not like, oh, everybody knew who knew people. And you guys aren't from LA, but trust me, I was at the Ivy League. No, this is something that was in the newspaper. You could Google it at the time. But it was this weird period where people kind of were aware of this fact, but they just didn't care. But focusing attention on it drew it. The classic example in the sociology literature is Oscar Wilde, where, I mean, you'd have to be blind. in Victorian England not to know that Oscar Wilde was gay. But there was this weird period where nobody cared until he seduced the son of the Marquis de Queenbury. And then Queenbury made it his mission to get revenge on Wilde for seducing his son. And he just constantly accused Wilde of being gay. And then that created the scandal, right? So it wasn't the fact or the revelation of the facts even, it was the focused process of accusation And, you know, you can see this in a lot of these obfuscation cases where, you know, kind of a data problem is that I'm only aware of these things once it becomes scandalous. Like, basically, I'm not aware of the obfuscations that worked. I'm only aware of the obfuscations that failed.
SPEAKER_00:Reading your vignette piece and putting it together, because we had been talking about Viviana's work on this. I wanted to ask you about the relationship between money, what I'm gonna call sort of transactionalism, like the explicitness of the quid pro quo and certainty of the exchange. And maybe those last two are the same. There's been a lot of focus in the literature on money and the corrupting effect of money And not as much, except from you and Viviana, I think, on this transactional aspect and the certainty aspect. Have we focused too much on money and not on the certainty aspect? I'm not sure if my question is making
SPEAKER_04:sense. It's funny you ask about certainty because Shilke and I are writing another paper and we're right in the middle of data collection and the new paper is on trust. And so we basically, as part of the, we tell people a story of like, hey, here's this guy, you really need something from him. And do you want to bribe him or not? And then we have, then we also introduce the thing that's random. So that's constant across all the studies.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And then the thing that, but we make it a form of bribe where in theory, the guy could just take the money and walk away, right? It's not an enforceable bribe. It's a gift exchange bribe. And then we also do a version with brokerage and that works too. But the thing we do is we say, this guy is really trustworthy or this guy's not trustworthy, right? We say this guy has a reputation for always doing right by his partners, or this guy has a reputation for screwing people over. And we find that there's a very strong effect that people are much more likely to bribe the guy who has a good reputation for being loyal and much less likely to bribe the guy who has a reputation for being disloyal. And so that would fit pretty directly in with the certainty thing that like a bribe to somebody who's known for being loyal, that's, that's money in the bank. Whereas a bribe to somebody who's disloyal, it's like, well, he's just going to keep the money and then not give me what I want.
SPEAKER_00:Certainty of the return seemed to be relevant in the college admissions cases. One of the things that sort of came out in our discussion was in all of the cases, not everybody who donates gets their kid in. It increases the probability and it presumably increases in a manner that the more you donate, the higher the probability is, but it's not certain. And one of the things that our discussion reminded me of is that that was an issue, that was the analysis in a lot of the cases that Viviana discusses in her chapter. Now, perhaps the courts are just striving to find a mechanism for distinguishing the cases and finding the, quote, right person liable, as you say. But the way in which they did it was to make a big distinction between the certainty of sex in exchange for payment and just sort of an expectation or hope of it. And I sort of wondered whether that gets lost sometimes in our focus on the way in which money corrupts. And so I don't know whether, especially after you have looked at this aspect of it so much by varying it through the vignettes, that I didn't know whether you thought that we were losing sight of something important by focusing just on the
SPEAKER_04:money. No, that's a fantastic point, right? And in fact, you see it well beyond the kind of transactional sex thing, which is, you know, in some ways the easiest case to discuss. You also see this in Islamic finance. Islamic scholars are pretty uniform in saying that something isn't Reba. If the, the, the person who in normal terms would be the creditor takes on some risk that there has to end, this gets very finely grained. Sometimes it can be kind of quantum risk, but you know, so like if, if we have it, let's say that you and I are both very pious Muslims and we, You want to borrow some money from me. And so we work out this, I think this is called Bayal Ina. It might be one of the others. Maybe it's Tara work. I confused the different institutions, but let's say we work out this scam or basic scams, wrong way to put it. But like we work out this institution, which is traditionally approved by Islamic scholars, but has been increasingly rejected since the rise of fundamentalism in the 1950s. But let's say we do this traditional approach where we say, okay, what we're going to do is I'm going to buy, a million dollars worth of copper, and then I'm going to sell the copper, and then you're going to buy the copper from me, and then we're going to sell it back to each other, but your payment's going to be delayed by a year. And I'm going to buy the copper and sell it to you, and then you're going to sell it back to me a tenth of a second later. And then this really looks like we're just finding an incredibly convoluted way to have a fixed points on the principal interest loan. which most Islamic scholars would say would be Reba, except most Islamic scholars would say, this is not Reba because if the market for copper crashes in that 10th of a second, you know, I, I'm liable for that risk. And so as long as I have some risk that, that would still count. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, and then also another thing, especially appropriate for UVA audience is, uh, the Tulloch lottery can be a good model for understanding, you know, kind of the expectation or the hope or the risk, but no, not the enforceable promise of reciprocity. So Gordon Tulloch, who was, I think it was at UVA in the sixties, he had this model of bribery where he said, you know, bribery is not enforceable. And he, the way bribery typically works is that you give effectively as a gift exchange process. But the way that you model that is that you're effectively buying tickets in a lottery. And, you know, typically it would be the way of, let's say that I'm the steel lobby. And so I want a high price for steel and Kimberly's the automobile and washing machine lobby. And so she wants a low price for steel. And so I'm lobbying for a higher tariff on steel and she's lobbying for a lower tariff. tariff on steel. Both of us make a bunch of campaign contributions, you know, find out what the Congressman's favorite charity is, you know, find excuses to throw a lot of business at the Congressman's wife's consulting business, et cetera. And, um, and then push comes to shove. There's eventually a vote on, should there be a high tariff on steel? And Tulloch would argue that the probability of the steel tariff passing is proportional to to the volume of bribes that I paid and the volume of bribes that Kimberly paid. And so, you know, you can, the simpler form of this is the all pay auction, but where it's strictly deterministic that like whoever paid more bribes ends up getting the law. But the more probabilistic version, which I think is more accurate is the Tulloch lottery. And so that's a very good model for understanding how these things can work probabilistically.
UNKNOWN:Okay.
