Jesse Eisinger at
ProPublica: “Louis Brandeis was wrong. The lawyer and Supreme Court justice famously declared that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we have unquestioningly embraced that advice ever since.
All this sunlight is blinding. As new scholarship is demonstrating, the value of all this information is unproved. Paradoxically, disclosure can be useless — and sometimes actually harmful or counterproductive.
“We are doing disclosure as a regulatory move all over the board,” says Adam J. Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown, “The funny thing is, we are doing this
despite very little evidence of its efficacy.”…
Of course, some disclosure works. Professor Levitin cites two examples. The first is an olfactory disclosure. Methane doesn’t have any scent, but a foul smell is added to alert people to a gas leak. The second is ATM. fees. A study in Australia showed that once fees were disclosed, people avoided the high-fee machines and took out more when they had to go to them.
But to Omri Ben-Shahar, co-author of a recent book, ”
More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,” these are cherry-picked examples in a world awash in useless disclosures. Of course, information is valuable. But disclosure as a regulatory mechanism doesn’t work nearly well enough, he argues.
First, it really works only when things are simple. As soon as transactions become complex, disclosure starts to stumble. Buying a car, for instance, turns out to be several transactions: the purchase itself, the financing, maybe the trade-in of old car and various insurance and warranty decisions. These are all subject to various disclosure rules, but making the choices clear and useful has proved nigh impossible.
In complex transactions, we then must rely on intermediaries to give us advice. Because they are often conflicted, they, too, become subject to disclosure obligations. Ah, even more boilerplate to puzzle over!
And then there’s the harm. Over the years, banks that sold complex securities often stuck impossible-to-understand clauses deep in prospectuses that “disclosed” what was really going on. When the securities blew up, as they often did, banks then fended off lawsuits by arguing they had done everything the law required and were therefore not liable.
“That’s the harm of disclosure,” Professor Ben-Shahar said. “It provides a safe harbor for practices that smell bad. It sanitizes every bad practice.”
The anti-disclosure movement is taking on the ”
Nudge” school, embraced by the Obama administration and promoted most prominently by Cass R. Sunstein, a scholar at Harvard, and Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago. These nudgers believe that small policies will prod people to do what’s in their best interests.
The real-world evidence in favor of nudging is thin. …
The ever-alluring notion is that we are just one or two changes away from having meaningful disclosure. If we could only have annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings in plain English, we could finally understand what’s going on at corporations. A University of San Diego Law School professor, Frank Partnoy, and I
called for better bank disclosure in an article in The Atlantic a few years ago.
Professor Ben-Shahar mocks it. ” ‘Plain English!’ ‘Make it simple.’ That is the deus ex machina, the god that will solve everything,” he said.
Complex things are, sadly, complex. A mortgage is not an easy transaction to understand. People are not good at predicting their future behavior and so don’t know what options are best for them. “The project of simplification is facing a very poor empirical track record and very powerful theoretical problem,” he said.
What to do instead? Hard and fast rules. If lawmakers want to end a bad practice, ban it. Having them admit it is not enough. (
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