Transparency is a Principle, Not a Tool for Manipulating the Public

The news that Sweden has introduced new labels listing the carbon dioxide emissions associated with food production is interesting. Grocery items and restaurant menus around the country now provide information designed to help consumers understand the climate change impact of the products they are buying.

The timing is interesting, because the news comes as certain people are beginning to question the value of labeling, and of the entire quest for transparency--for reasons that I find utterly misguided.

One set of questions was raised after it was revealed that health information labeling in New York had not changed eating habits among low-income consumers--research that caused some to question whether the labeling was "working."

Another was raised by a dense article in The New Republic by Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig.on "the perils of openness in government."

"There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption," Lessig argues. "Projects such as the one that the health care bill would launch--building a massive database of doctors who got money from private interests; or projects such as the ones (these are the really sexy innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote that the member has made.

"These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good.... But will the effect of these projects--at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations--really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?"

According to Lessig; "Not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it... People may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it... To know whether a particular transparency rule works, we need to trace just how the information will enter 'complex chains of comprehension.' We need to see what comparisons the data will enable, and whether those comparisons reveal something real.."

Actually, we don't.

Transparency is not a tool to manipulate people into behaving the way you want them to, it is a principle of good governance.

Its value is not contingent upon whether it leads people to draw the "right" conclusions or make the "right" decisions. It derives from the question of whether people have a right to make their own choices based on the principle of information consent.

Quite simply, I don't believe that institutions should be in the position of denying people information on the grounds that they might not use that information "appropriately" (which is to say, the way institutions have decided it should be used).

I don't believe "trust us to make decisions for you, even though we don't trust you to make them for yourself" is a tenable principle on which to run a business, a government or the world.