Reformers rarely feel responsible for the bad that their fantastic new reform effects. Their focus is always on the good. The bad is someone else’s problem. It may well be asking too much to imagine more than this. But as we see the consequences of changes that many of us view as good, we might wonder whether more good might have been done had more responsibility been in the mix. The music industry was never going to like the Internet, but its war against the technology might well have been less hysterical and self-defeating if better and more balanced alternatives had been pressed from the beginning. No one can dislike Craigslist (or Craig), but we all would have benefited from a clearer recognition of what was about to be lost. Internet triumphalism is not a public good.
Likewise with transparency. There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it. Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant. But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well.
Lawrence Lessig is professor of law and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin). He is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation and on the board of Maplight.org
Intellectual rigor. Honest reporting. Influential analysis. Don't miss another issue of the magazine considered "required reading" by the world's top decision-makers. Subscribe today.
COMMENTS (1)
Regarding a general lack of transparency in government:
Until we are fully briefed on all that is not transparent in our government how can we possibly suggest what should be?
What do we really know about all these secrets? What do we know about how they become secrets....about who decides this...about what criteria they are based on?
From Watergate on we have learned that governnent officials lie to us. Over and over and over and over and over again. And these lies are facilitated by an immense wall of secrecy that pervades so many important policy decisions. Matters that can literally revolve around life and death for example. Matters of war.
Besides, transparency that involves the relationshi ... view full comment
Regarding a general lack of transparency in government:
Until we are fully briefed on all that is not transparent in our government how can we possibly suggest what should be?
What do we really know about all these secrets? What do we know about how they become secrets....about who decides this...about what criteria they are based on?
From Watergate on we have learned that governnent officials lie to us. Over and over and over and over and over again. And these lies are facilitated by an immense wall of secrecy that pervades so many important policy decisions. Matters that can literally revolve around life and death for example. Matters of war.
Besides, transparency that involves the relationship between doctors and drug companies or Congress and Wall Street is virtually meaningless unless local and national news orgnizations make a concerted effort to get this information out to the public. Do any of us honestly imagine most voters will go online to ferret out the informtion themselves?
So, why doesn't the mainstream media pursue this? I read article after article on the healthcare debate here at TNR for example and hardly ever run across the sort of information readily available to The Editors at sites like OpenSecrets.org. Why is that?
But of much greater importance: Until we have an electorate far more politically sophisticated than the millions upon millions of dittoheads we must endure election cycle after election cycle even the stuff that is not secret is minimally effective in changing the way money is for all practical purposes the "legislative process" in Washington.
LL
...there is also little doubt that it is impossible to know whether any particular contribution or contributions brought about a particular vote, or was inspired by a particular vote. Put differently, if there are benign as well as malign contributions, it is impossible to know for any particular contribution which of the two it is.
gw:
Yes, candidate X can receive $200,000 from industry Y; and candidate X can then vote [by and large] for the interests of industry Y; but there is no way to crawl inside the candidate's head and prove that the latter is consciously connected to the former.
Plausable deniability is built right into these transactions. In fact it is built into virtually every human transaction in which one cannot determine or disclose beyond a shadow of a doubt what another's INTENTION was. It depends on how one wants to define what is or is not "plausable". After all, can anyone demonstrate definitively that Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist etc. voted for Bush in 2000 because, like them, he was a conservative. Oh no, they'll insist, it was simply what an impartial reading of Constitution called for!!
But passing laws to obviate this through "public financing" isn't the way to go here. Instead, progressives should be out in the communities; they must become activists organizing a political movement that will elect Congresswomen and Congressmen who refuse to be bought and paid for in the first place. You don't need transparency in campaign financing if the candidates refuse to play the game, do you?
But again what is the role of the mainstream media in all this? Do not these news organs receive enormous sums of money through advertising FROM THE VERY SAME PEOPLE who buy legislation in Congress? What about the lack of transparency here?
LL:
In the context of public health, where doctors are forced to reveal any connection with industry, I cannot begin to imagine what that solution would look like. The citizenry is not remotely willing to fund publicly the research necessary to support drug development today.
george:
If laws prohibit doctors from accepting gratuities from those who would profit by drugs or sevices the doctors pushed on patients what would be the need for transparency? Instead, we would need an efficient and effective regulatory agency to make certain this sort of thing did not happen at all. To link a patient's health to a profitable transaction for Drug Company Z, is simply outrageous. Why would we need to focus on full disclosure when there should be nothiong to disclose in the first place if these exchanges were prohibited and the laws were vigorously enforced?
george walton
j