The Netflix documentary Athlete A is an excellent piece! It is easy to shed a few tears when (1) the sexual predator Larry Nassar was sentenced 60 years by the federal court and 40 to 175 years by two state courts; (2) when Maggie Nichol was first deprived of the chance to represent the US to the 2016 Rio Olympic Games after her complaint against Larry Nassar, but later won gold metals; and (3) when victims hug inside the court (Rachel Denhollander, Jessica Howard and Jamie Dantzescher, especially Rachel who agreed to show up in the video with her real name and face).

It is also easy to ask why it took so long for sex offenders to be caught and paid the price. The short answer is that justice is a game and unless players make the right moves with institutions and preinstitutions, justice will not arrive simply because someone has done something terrible and should be punished.

The Power of Victim Empathy

One of the key reasons for victims to come forward, as shown in the documentary, was that they simply cannot sleep well — knowing the terrible experiences that happened to them would happen to others. Jamie Dantzescher put it simply that “I can’t live with that!” This is a powerful force that helps justice to arrive years or even decades later but does arrive. The US is still the place where justice is more likely to be served than many if not most other countries, despite its demographic complexity and size of population. This in turn accumulates into soft power that is powerful enough for the country to attract talents and resources from all over the world.

Economics has been assuming or arguing that self-interests are the most important drivers for things to happen. This is still right if we expand self-interests to cover the thinking of others. In other words, we could call empathy as self-interest, because not acting on the empathy thoughts could upset oneself, such that reporting it has a lower cost than not reporting it.

Finally, Americans talk to each other more often than the average people in other countries. This actually helps increase victim empathy. If nothing else, talking to each other will help each victim see the scope of the crime or criminal. In the documentary, there was a scene when Maggie asked another gymnast whether she had the same experience with Larry Nassar. If each victim were to keep it to herself, nobody would know how bad the crime is. Even more amazingly, someone else overheard the conversation and was concerned enough to inform Maggies’ mother about it. Little things like these add up to a safer, more connected world among victims or potential victims.

The Power of Entity Specific Rules

The power from the opposite direction that could slow down or under rare circumstances even prevent justice is habits, tradition or history. At the beginning of the movie, one of the investigative reporters at the IndyStar, a small local newspaper, wondered why people had not reported sexual abuse cases to the police, as is required by the law. Unfortunately, even the US gymnastic committee, with its highest ranking officer Stephen Penny, Jr., would rather follow the internal way of handling things than following the law. In his deposition Mr. Penny said their internal policy was to dismiss the complaint as hearsay unless it was signed by the victim or the parents. Penny also asked Maggie’s mother not to talk to anyone else in order “not to interfere the investigation,” which is obviously a lie.

Like I said in another blog, these internal policies, habits or traditions make up a part of preinstitutions because, unlike laws or institutions, they vary widely and change frequently. Further, not all preinstitutions work in the opposite direction of institutions, but some do. When that happens, preinstitutions become the de facto substitute of institutions.

Finally, how long the entity specific rules last, that is, how long agents would follow the internal policies rather than the law, is more likely to be determined by preinstitutions (e.g., change of CEO, a brave whistle blower, a media investigation) than by institutions.

The Power of Denial & Blames

If victim empathy is the only thing we have, things would be easier. But no, female victims frequently suffer from doubt, denials and shifted blames. Some men are particularly guilty but unfortunately these people do carry negative power to discourage the potential whistle blowers from moving forward. Like the power of entity specific rules, this one is also preinstitutional in nature and it is hard to quantify but without a doubt the amount of time that could be saved from this negative power is strictly positive, leading to a Pareto improvement.