I’ve been listening to this BBC podcast, Lives Less Ordinary, that tells people’s stories. It’s interesting, also surprisingly lowbrow given that it’s BBC. For example, here are three typical shows: “Stolen as a baby, I called my abductor ‘Mom’,” “The bullet that ended our friendship,” and “He counted 3, 2, 1 – then stabbed me in the heart.” Also, they did a completely credulous show on Diana Nyad (see here for backstory). Mostly I like it, though.
Anyway, here’s the point of today’s post. Lives Less Ordinary has multiple episodes about people who grew up in criminal families and then, sometime during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood had to come to terms with what it meant to grow up around adults who were involved in violent crime. Sometimes it took awhile–I can only imagine that it’s something you’ll never get over.
So here’s my question. What’s it like to be the child of a white-collar criminal?
The reason I ask is because, with white-collar crime, it seems that it would be easier to remain in denial, to imagine that the parent did nothing wrong or that it was just a misunderstanding. I’d think that it would ultimately worse someone to avoid coming to terms with the crimes committed by the parent. But I don’t really know. On this blog we often discuss white-collar crime or white-collar unethical behavior, and sometimes I kind of wonder what it would be like to be in the family of such a person.
P.S. Last year we discussed what it was like to be the parents of a white-collar criminal, but this was a bit different than the Lives Less Ordinary stories in that the parents in question actively profited from their son’s crimes. Just horrible parents, in my opinion. Standing by your child even when he does wrong, that I understand. But joining in the crime . . . jeez. The parents are supposed to be the mature ones here! Talk about setting a bad example.
I wrote a manuscript earlier this year, and I think in light of reading and searching about scientific fraud I came across a paper titled “White-collar criminality” by Edwin H. Sutherland (1940). I think he coined the term “white-collar criminality”. Some quotes:
“One of these neglected areas is the criminal behavior of business and professional men, which will be analyzed in this paper.” (p. 2)
“White-collar criminality is found in every occupation, as can be discovered readily in casual conversation with a representative of an occupation by asking him, “What crooked practices are found in your occupation ?” (p. 2)
“These varied types of white-collar crimes in business and the professions consist principally of violation of delegated or implied trust, and many of them can be reduced to two categories: misrepresentation of asset values and duplicity in the manipulation of power. The first is approximately the same as fraud or swindling; the second is similar to the double-cross.”
The fraud and swindling can possibly be tied to certain questionable research practices and scientific misconcuct, at least to a certain extent I reason. Perhaps certain situations like scientific fraud can be seen as “white-collar criminality”. I wrote the following in the manuscript I referred to earlier:
“Perhaps scientific misconduct like fabrication and falsification fits with the images and conceptualizations of psychopathy in the form of “the con artist” and “the swindler psychopath” mentioned elsewhere in this manuscript. Certain cases of scientists with retracted papers due to “statistical irregularities”, “misrepresentation”, fabrication and/or falsification who also lied about
receiving grants (see Bartlett, 2015) or told false stories about supposed data-collection procedures (see Levelt et al., 2012, p. 43-44) fit these images.”
“On this blog we often discuss white-collar crime or white-collar unethical behavior, and sometimes I kind of wonder what it would be like to be in the family of such a person.”
If the Stapel fraud mentioned in my earlier comment I am replying to here can be seen as “White-collar criminality” there is something written in his book which may be relevant. Stapel writes about an american colleague who e-mails him.
“She tells me that she’s put me through what she calls her elevator test. She imagined with whom she’d rather be stuck in an elevator: with me, a fallen dreamer who naively refused to think about the consequences of his actions and hence caused a huge pile of trouble, but is otherwise a nice person who tries to be a good father and, she thinks, didn’t mean to hurt anyone; or one of her numerous colleagues who are maybe a bit more scrupulous in their treatment of research data, but who are rarely home, have trouble restraining themselves at conferences, and cheat on their spouses repeatedly. She’d rather be in that elevator with somebody who’s made professional mistakes, but who’s still an OK
person, than with somebody whose work is just fine, but whose personal life is an immoral mess.” (p. 193)
I think some reasoning, or whatever word is appropriate here, like this might also happen with (some) family members.
This is Richard Nixon thinking he’s better company than Donald Trump.
Setting up the comparisons determines the winner.
I reason what’s noteworthy here is also the colleague who may have views that makes it possible for him to set up the comparison in the first place. That is, if that story can be trusted of course. This is what he further wrote about that colleague:
“She’s shocked and thinks what I’ve done is terrible, but she can imagine how it could have happened. We’re all constantly fighting the temptation to make things seem a little bit neater than they actually are.
Everyone leaves things out, or does a little selective “cleaning” of their data. We’re under pressure, we want to carry on being able to pay the mortgage, and we want our kids to go to good school and have a carefree life, not wanting for anything. Does that justify what I did? No, of course not, but it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, she writes. Quite the opposite, in fact: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” (p. 193).
In light of the blog post and what family members of white-collar criminals might think, I think these kinds of reactions might come close to how I imagine things might go. Stapel also writes some things about his family members if I am not mistaken, which sort of all go in a similar way. A quick search just now resulted in the following quotes, but please check and verify yourself, I am doing a quick search here in the translated book from 2014. The following remark concerns the reaction from his wife if I am not mistaken when he told her of the fraud:
“She’d got pretty angry and done a lot of shouting, but now she was mostly sad. Sad, but also determined. She loved me, and we had to go on. (p. 141).
This is about his brothers when he tells them he committed fraud after a game of tennis:
“They listen. They’ve had the shock of their lives. But they’re still my brothers.” (p. 143).
This is about the reaction from his father and mother:
“I explain that I’ve confessed, that I’ve admitted to faking research data, and so I have to face the consequences: I’m going to be fired and I’ll be entitled to nothing. My father sits there, not saying much. He can’t really take it all in.” (p. 145).
“Never forget that we love you, son. We love you,” says my mother to me. They don’t understand. My mother begins to cry. She’ll be doing a lot of that in the next few months. Not because what I’ve done is so terrible—although it is—but because it’s so hard to understand.” (p. 145).
Anyway, in my view it’s just one case of scientific fraud, which may or may not be seen as white-collar criminality. And these stories and accounts by Stapel may or may not be true, who knows. I just thought it might be a relevant, and concrete, example in light of the blog post.
Anon:
I hate this kind of argument, for reasons I discussed here. There are lots of good scientists who don’t lie and cheat at work and are also nice people, good parents, etc.
For Stapel to say what he says seems like a very weak attempt at self-justification, as if he had some quota of lying and cheating within him, and he expended it in his work. What a stupid, asshole thing for him to say. If he really had a quota of lying and cheating within him, and he had to spend it somewhere, he should’ve joined a goddam bowling league and cheated there, maybe he also could’ve cheated at online chess and some other things, but while sparing taxpayers, students, and the scientific community,
Stapel says a lot of things in that book. Some things seem to me to indicate that he acknowledges his options and choices and responsibility and those kinds of things. I wonder however how to interpret things, or if what he wrote can be trusted, etc. Anyway, here’s an example of something he also wrote:
“But what we do know is that the interaction between me and my environment had a unique chemistry, which slowly but surely became more dangerous, more toxic. I saw the cookie jar, and everything became possible. Others didn’t see it, or if they did, they thought about the problems and the risks, acted differently, were smarter, were wiser, felt the moral pressure to conform.
I, me, always me.
It’s not the environment. It’s me.” (p. 149)
Ano:
That’s good. It would be even better if he would accept that a person can be a moral and productive scientists and also a good person and a good parent.
Ah, I think I have found where I read the reference to the Sutherland (1940) paper. I think it may have been in the paper titled “White-collar criminals: The ‘kinder, gentler’ offender?” by F. S. Perri (2011). Some quotes from that paper:
“Yet, relative to street crimes, little is known about white‐collar crimes in behavioural terms, and further research is needed to refine the behavioural traits of WCCs, whether they work within an organisation or operate individually.” (p. 236).
“Dr. Hare once indicated that if he was not studying psychopaths in prison, he would be studying them at the Stock Exchange.” (p. 236).
“At best, this paper illustrates that white‐collar criminals can harbor negative behavioral traits that serve as fraud offender risk factors coupled with exacting financial, emotional and physical damage upon its victims. Yet, there is great need for sound empirical research to refine offender profiling for this offender group.” (p. 236).
In light of these quotes, I think it might be appropriate to state that I may have sort of atttempted to study psychopaths or psychopathy via the manuscript I wrote and referred to earlier. This was not done in prisons, and also not at the Stock Exchange, but in research and sources regarding academia at large and psychological science in particular.
I came up with a summarizing list of possible characteristics of “the prototypical psychopathic psychological scientist” based on some combination of research findings, conjecturing, etc. regarding scientific misconduct, QRPs, academia at large, psychopathy, etc. Here’s the list for some possible pondering or potentially useful awareness:
• High social status, absent or limited aggressive antisocial behavior, and possibly high intelligence
• Desire to have power and status
• Competitive world-view and hyper-competitive attitude
• Weak moral identity and low moral standards
• Selfish, egocentric, and lacking in empathy
• Narcissistic, possibly grandiose
• Bold
• Superficially charming
• Mean
• Untrustworthy, deceitful, and manipulative
• Irresponsible, unreliable, and unconscientious
• Lacking in remorse
I’d say the research community employs a gang initiation ritual where immense social pressure is applied to cut some corner (use NHST rather than science, phack, etc) so you are essentially blackmailed from calling other people out on it.
No one says it outright, but doing a good job is barely (or rarely) feasible in the expected timeframe. It just takes twice as long to come up with a quantitative model, perform your internal replications, etc vs testing a strawman, committing logical fallacies, and using a “significant difference” stopping rule.
Outright fraud is considered going to far, but there is a large buffet of lesser “crimes” that are sanctioned for the task.
Your comment reminded me of two papers. The first one is titled “How academia resembles a drug gang” by Afonso (2014). A quote from that one:
“So what you have is an increasing number of PhD graduates arriving every year into the market hoping to secure a permanent position as a professor and enjoying freedom and – reasonably – high salaries, a bit like the rank-‐and-‐file drug dealer hoping to become a drug lord. To achieve that, they are ready to forgo the income and security that they could have in other areas of employment by accepting insecure working conditions in the hope of securing jobs that are not expanding at the same rate.” (p. 2).
Perhaps the “increasing number of PhD graduates” may not only be “accepting insecure working conditions” but also accept, and even consciously or unconcsiously participate in, certain questionable practices. Or as Binswanger (2014) writes in his paper titled “Excellence by nonsense: The competition for publications in modern science”:
“In turn, young scientists are socialized by the established scientific system in a way that the perverse effects caused by this development already appear to be normal to them.” (p. 67)
John le Carré’s father was a white-collar criminal. He writes about how knowing about his father’s cons hurt him in A Perfect Spy.
Daniel:
Yes, and also there was the father of Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff. These fathers were a special kind of white-collar criminal–the charismatic con man, a figure who is glamorous enough in the public imagination that Le Carre and the Wolffs went to special effort to debunk the myth. I’m also interested in the more mundane version, the embezzlers, tax cheats, stock manipulators, polluters, and the like.
Damn. I was going to recommend The Duke of Deception but you beat me to it.
There might be something in the book “Why They Do It” by Eugene Soltes. He interviewed a whole bunch of white collar criminals at length, including Madoff, who (Soltes argues) is kind of an outlier. There is some stuff about the families in there, but I can’t remember how much. (Even though I helped edit the manuscript—that was over a decade ago!) One child of a white collar criminal whose outcome I haven’t forgotten is a guy named Dan Bilzerian. You can google him if you want.
Pretty comfy, judging by Jared Kushner.
I had a friend in high school whose father and uncle had been imprisoned for stock market fraud of some kind (I think they ran a stock market brokerage and embezzled money from their clients). My friend’s parents were divorced; he lived with his mother (who had two other children with the fraudster). His mother seemed like a very decent person, struggling to bring up her kids on what – I’m guessing – was a fairly low income. But my friend, a highly intelligent guy, seemed to hero-worship his father and somewhat look down on his mother. No doubt this was because he saw his mother each day. His father, on the other hand, would take my friend out on his sail boat from time to time, invite him to a lavish dinner every few months, etc. It’s easy to be a hero to your kid if you don’t see him that often and treat him generously when you do … I have no idea how my friend’s father and his uncle managed to hold on to their sail boat and their membership in our city’s exclusive yacht club (this is a city on the Great Lakes) even after they’d been jailed. I was invited out on their boat a few times for a sail around the harbour, along with two or three other guys in our high school gang. It was a good time; gins and tonics were served. The two men, my friend’s father and his uncle, had a kind of sleazy charm. One shocking thing his father told me on the boat will never leave me. Addressing me by name, he said in a friendly way: “I’m delighted you’re friends with my son. You’re a racial mix of English and German, the two main Aryan stocks – a perfect genetic mix. We, the X family, are mainly English, but there’s some German in us way back”. I am, in fact, about half English and German by descent, and like every human being, I enjoy being praised, but I’m not a racist, and being praised for this reason was abhorrent to me. Ever since, I’ve been wondering if white-collar criminals are more likely to have right-wing, racist views than the average person. That’s certainly the impression I get from following the recent political news, but it’s purely anecdotal. There’s potential for an interesting study here.
Thinking a bit about why “child of white collar criminal” was dissonant to me, and landing on: I implicitly make it “*young* child.” It’s no good to be an adult child of a criminal, but the real tragic case is when you’re still under the care of your criminal parent, making you another powerless victim. And so my dissonance is from (a) white collar crime mostly requires some abuse of authority, (b) but authority takes a while to accumulate, so (c) it’s hard to have a young child and also enough gathered authority such that your abuse makes it onto podcasts.
I can’t imagine that it feels so horrible or strange or uncomfortable. Probably most people brush it off with hardly a thought. “My dad made up some data and got fired from his job (where most people do it to one degree or another but dont’ get caught)”; or “my dad scammed a few million from some retirees (but most of them were wealthy, educated and should have known better)”. Sounds about as bad as getting flat tire. There are also lots of ppl who are totaly honest but produce horrible work. What’s the diff? Just using science as an example, fake data, biased work, both overturned later on. Both screw the taxpayer but one is supposedly “honest”. Does that really make it better? Is “my dad got busted for faking data” better than “my dad flogged a bogus [younameit] theory for decades and refused to accept evidence to the contrary to his dying day. But was he always honest”?
My parents did a lot of stuff to us kids that was really shitty but perfectly legal. My poor middle sister was the subject of relentless emotional abuse from my mom. She’s messed up to this day. I hardly would expect her to be overly upset if she found out my mom had committed some white colar crime. More likely the people who can’t rationalize it away and forgive it are ppl looking for an axe to grind over some other insult and whatever hurt or anger or other emotion they feel is just the resurgence of the feelings of the prior insult – and maybe that’s justified too.
Flat:
I kinda know what you mean, but I’m pretty sure that most people’s parents didn’t commit crimes at work (and, no, I’m not counting stealing pens or getting a friend to clock you out as crimes in this sense). So if your dad really was an embezzler or your mom really was a school administrator who faked test scores or whatever, I think you’d know that this was unusual.
I’m not so interested in the category of “Crime” (that is, something which technically meets the definition of some legal statute as something the judicial system can prosecute you for).
Much more interesting is the category of “repeated harm”… Its easy to accidentally do some harm every so often by being careless or whatever, but when your job involves regularly harming others it’s a very different situation.
Lots of studies suggest that unpaid wages or wage violations of various kinds are common: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/ Disney settled a $230 billion dollar wage theft case in 2024 alone. Whether it’s “crime” or not is immaterial to me, it’s repeated systematic harm. It’s so common that at least maybe 10-15% of family households must have a parent complicit in it.
There’s the US health insurance system, which is set up to extract money by denying services making the appeal difficult, consistently preventing people from getting things that they are contractually entitled to… It’s repeated harm. Everyone in the entire health insurance industry is complicit in that. That must be some several percent of families…
As already mentioned, the research industry has quite a bit of deception involved. Both people promoting things they kind of know are false, people twisting the truth about what they research implies to get grants, etc. A fair amount of repeated harm there. That’s $50-100B a year with the federal bio funding alone, many many people involved there are doing routine harm, though let’s say maybe 10-20% of them are kind of actively knowingly doing harm… A bunch of people dont’ even know better really.
Then there’s David Graeber’s whole Bullshit Jobs theory, where when asked if they personally think their job is bullshit and has no redeeming societal value or is even harmful, some staggering fraction of people say yes… 20-30%? Tons and tons of corporate lawyers, HR people, technologists, and soforth. People working at Twitter/X training Grok to propagandized Musks fantasies? People forcing Amazon drivers to pee in bottles or take a dump in people’s gutters rather than risk losing their job for being 4 minutes late? If you go to work and do things that make the world worse or just sit around pretending to do something that might have value but not accomplishing it or whatever… and you’d admit it yourself in an anonymous interview, how is that not harm?
So, let me just say that tentatively I’d guess 20-30% of middle class parents routinely harm others to some significant extent, are aware of it, and justify it as just “what they have to do to get along”. They’re not exactly wrong. The system we have in place is set up to cause harm repeatedly for the benefit of the very wealthy and puts people in jeopardy if they refuse to play along. All the guys designing the Ford Pinto or doing the ad campaigns or paid research for cigarettes, or working for RFK Jr removing vaccines from the market etc etc know what I’m talking about.
Should say $230Million wage case for Disney… typo
Two categories of white collar crime occur to me – though they overlap and there may be more.
One is embezzlement, where the crucial act is transferring money from an account your oversee to your own purse. It seems as if a lot of people, especially gamblers, slide into this, starting with “borrowing” money they plan to return, and getting steadily deeper.
Much nastier is confidence trickery, and especially affinity fraud, which requires sociopathy from the start.
In either case, there’s the excuse that big businesses do this all the time and get away with it.
Dan Davies addressed types of fraud in Lying for Money (2018). He noticed that his favourite reference book on fraud is very often borrowed from libraries and not returned.
His category of market crimes seems especially relevant to this blog, because the difference between a California startup being expected to lie about what its product can do, but a Canadian minerals executive going to jail for salting an assay, sounds a lot like the difference between a sociologist who is expected to use shoddy methods and hype up the press release, and a psychologist who takes early retirement for research fraud. The acts are analgous but the social norms make one a crime and the other just business.
Well, a few things. First, there is more family-that-crimes-together in the WCC world than you might think. Partly because there are a lot of family businesses. So you get parents/children, spouses, siblings. And when you are doing frauds a lot of time you need other people, as straw buyers, as people who provide the appearance of respectability, as people who co-sign audits and tax returns. (Yes it’s a statistical issue that all these conspirators are not independent of each other.)
I think that pretty often kids defend their parents, whatever they do wrong.
Actually, look at the Madoffs. From Wikipedia
At the firm, he employed his brother Peter Madoff as senior managing director and chief compliance officer, Peter’s daughter Shana Madoff as the firm’s rules and compliance officer and attorney, and his sons Mark Madoff and Andrew Madoff. Mark hanged himself in 2010, exactly two years after his father’s arrest,[10][11][12][13] Peter was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2012,[14] and Andrew died of lymphoma on September 3, 2014.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff