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I carefully framed the world "disability" above to mean some disadvantage you were either born with or acquired very young, something that's fundamentally unfai

I carefully framed the world "disability" above to mean some disadvantage you were either born with or acquired very young, something that's fundamentally unfair or injust. You can't choose to be allergic, you can't work very hard and eventually overcome your allergies. Fate just struck you, and that's that. I'm not sure I view 'information asymmetries' in the same light. Clearly some information (like passphrases or source code) are asymmetrical by design, and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. I'm "disabled" in the sense that I can't read SJ's e-mail; forcing him to open his inbox would probably be "leveling the playing field" for a lot of people, but none of this is unfairness or injustice. Quite the contrary, forcing his inbox open would be an injustice. Sure, there are cases when you're investigating something else and you need to, but there's warrants and process and all that. There's a fundamental understanding that it's very very bad and only if we absolutely have to. Similarly, meddling in the app store, private property of apple, would be an injustice. Sure, I think it needs work; what apple's doing is meanspirited. But it's their sandbox, and they need to be the ones to clean up the mess. Boycotts, nonrenewing contracts, etc., all put legitimate pressure on a company, governments work with illegitimate pressure (which can be useful if something really really bad is happening. But that isn't this situation).

stanleydrew 17y ago
First let me state that I don't think there's a role for government intervention in the case of the iPhone or iTunes right now. I am absolutely advocating for people to make a decision not to own Apple products based on the way they are treating their customers. Now to the point. I think maybe you are misunderstanding what I mean by information asymmetry. Obviously there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's or an individual's right to privacy. I don't think anyone would say it's ok to force SJ to open his inbox in order to have that information spread widely. But there are times when the benefit of open information outweighs the cost imposed. And sometimes the only way to reliably eliminate information asymmetries is for the government to step in, because the free market isn't capable of self-imposed openness. Consider cigarettes. No, I wasn't born with an inability to discover that cigarettes are highly addictive and likely cause lung cancer. I could have done a bunch of research and maybe run some experiments to determine those things. But before the landmark Surgeon General's warning in 1966 tobacco companies had pretty effectively suppressed that information. Things started to change when that warning was required on every pack of cigarettes so that every consumer was at least aware of the risks of smoking. This is the kind of information asymmetry that the government (and you) should care about eliminating. When companies wield (political, economic, etc.) power to keep consumers in the dark. No we're not disadvantaged from birth, we're disadvantaged due to lack of resources. I think you'd be surprised how bad many aspects of our lives would be without government intervention in a lot of information asymmetry situations.
- drewcrawford 17y ago
  What the cigarette companies perpetrated in the 60s was fraud. This was not mere 'information asymmetry'--this was flat-out lying about what was in a product, which is its own special category of badness (to start with, it's a breach of contract, in some sense). Also, as an important (but logically irrelevant) corollary, people died. I don't think that "information asymmetry" is ever sufficient cause for government action. And I don't think "there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's... right to privacy". That's a weak tautology, like saying "People shouldn't have to walk through metal detectors, and should still be perfectly safe in planes." It's vague enough to be agreeable without actually having said anything. It's easy enough to look at the Hoover Dam and say "Look at this dam! Without government intervention this dam would not exist!" The fallacy is to suggest that the choice is between the hoover dam and nothing. In fact, it's the choice between the dam and where the money would have been spent. Was the hoover dam better than whatever the market could have done with the money? I don't know, but that's an extremely difficult position to argue--you have to argue against everything. What you're saying is, basically, the government intervened to force companies to give us information. Is that good? I'm not so sure. We started (seriously, anyway) regulating the financial markets shortly after the great depression. Then the market got too complicated for the regulators, and it crashed, so we wrote more complicated regulation. Wash, rinse, repeat. There are still as many Madoffs today as there were in the 1890s--the only operative difference is that they've been regulated into a complexity that could potentially fool even me. Meanwhile startups are too scared to IPO, which is the secret cost everybody overlooks (what we would build with the hoover dam). By and large, you still have the same percentage of bad apples. Information has simply inflated over the years. Still the same asymmetries, just a higher floor. And what's really perverse about the whole thing--you see huge gains in the floor during the highest asymmetries. Think about the great economic booms--railroads, industrial revolution, even recently with MS Windows and/or Office. These are periods of huge economic growth, of technology raising everyone's standards of living. And they're the periods of patents, of lawsuits, anticompetiveness, and huge economic disparities. At the risk of committing a huge causal fallacy, I posit that asymmetry, informational or otherwise, is necessary for these gains. Or at least more necessary than most of us feel comfortable with.

stanleydrew 17y ago

First let me state that I don't think there's a role for government intervention in the case of the iPhone or iTunes right now. I am absolutely advocating for people to make a decision not to own Apple products based on the way they are treating their customers. Now to the point. I think maybe you are misunderstanding what I mean by information asymmetry. Obviously there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's or an individual's right to privacy. I don't think anyone would say it's ok to force SJ to open his inbox in order to have that information spread widely. But there are times when the benefit of open information outweighs the cost imposed. And sometimes the only way to reliably eliminate information asymmetries is for the government to step in, because the free market isn't capable of self-imposed openness. Consider cigarettes. No, I wasn't born with an inability to discover that cigarettes are highly addictive and likely cause lung cancer. I could have done a bunch of research and maybe run some experiments to determine those things. But before the landmark Surgeon General's warning in 1966 tobacco companies had pretty effectively suppressed that information. Things started to change when that warning was required on every pack of cigarettes so that every consumer was at least aware of the risks of smoking. This is the kind of information asymmetry that the government (and you) should care about eliminating. When companies wield (political, economic, etc.) power to keep consumers in the dark. No we're not disadvantaged from birth, we're disadvantaged due to lack of resources. I think you'd be surprised how bad many aspects of our lives would be without government intervention in a lot of information asymmetry situations.

drewcrawford 17y ago
What the cigarette companies perpetrated in the 60s was fraud. This was not mere 'information asymmetry'--this was flat-out lying about what was in a product, which is its own special category of badness (to start with, it's a breach of contract, in some sense). Also, as an important (but logically irrelevant) corollary, people died. I don't think that "information asymmetry" is ever sufficient cause for government action. And I don't think "there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's... right to privacy". That's a weak tautology, like saying "People shouldn't have to walk through metal detectors, and should still be perfectly safe in planes." It's vague enough to be agreeable without actually having said anything. It's easy enough to look at the Hoover Dam and say "Look at this dam! Without government intervention this dam would not exist!" The fallacy is to suggest that the choice is between the hoover dam and nothing. In fact, it's the choice between the dam and where the money would have been spent. Was the hoover dam better than whatever the market could have done with the money? I don't know, but that's an extremely difficult position to argue--you have to argue against everything. What you're saying is, basically, the government intervened to force companies to give us information. Is that good? I'm not so sure. We started (seriously, anyway) regulating the financial markets shortly after the great depression. Then the market got too complicated for the regulators, and it crashed, so we wrote more complicated regulation. Wash, rinse, repeat. There are still as many Madoffs today as there were in the 1890s--the only operative difference is that they've been regulated into a complexity that could potentially fool even me. Meanwhile startups are too scared to IPO, which is the secret cost everybody overlooks (what we would build with the hoover dam). By and large, you still have the same percentage of bad apples. Information has simply inflated over the years. Still the same asymmetries, just a higher floor. And what's really perverse about the whole thing--you see huge gains in the floor during the highest asymmetries. Think about the great economic booms--railroads, industrial revolution, even recently with MS Windows and/or Office. These are periods of huge economic growth, of technology raising everyone's standards of living. And they're the periods of patents, of lawsuits, anticompetiveness, and huge economic disparities. At the risk of committing a huge causal fallacy, I posit that asymmetry, informational or otherwise, is necessary for these gains. Or at least more necessary than most of us feel comfortable with.