Where Looking Away Is Structured: The Portability of Strategic Inattention

A recurring finding in the economics of oversight is that a monitor can rationally choose not to observe, so that a failure to detect is an equilibrium outcome rather than a lapse. This paper asks how far that mechanism travels. It argues that strategic inattention is a portable mechanism, fully characterized by four structural conditions: (C1) blame attributed to a monitor rises with what the monitor could observe; (C2) the domain contains a subdomain in which observation carries little direct production value; (C3) the collapse of oversight is visible while its quiet recovery is not; and (C4) rotation destroys the relationship capital on which observation depends. The central result is one of localization : in any domain meeting these conditions, looking away does not spread across the whole domain but concentrates in the low-production-value subdomain — the framework predicts where a structural blind spot forms, not merely that one might. The leading application is the school: instruction, where observing pupils is itself the productive act, is active; pastoral and safety oversight, where observation mostly assigns responsibility, is where the trap structures. A measurement layer follows — Japan’s recognized bullying-case counts ( 認知件数 ) are shown to identify only a product of suppression and recognition, and the education ministry’s own stance that a school reporting zero recognized cases is the suspicious one is an administrative rediscovery of a programme theorem. Throughout, the discipline is explicit: only the direction of each transported result survives, every threshold and magnitude is flagged as domain-specific, and four further candidate domains are run through the checklist without being verified.