Mandated Disclosure Laws -- Another Policy Failure That Politicians Can't Resist

Forbes ^ | September 8, 2014 | George Leef

[reaganaut1]

Having information is good, right? Information helps people make good decisions, so it’s obvious that laws mandating disclosure of information must be a benefit to the public.

That’s the logic behind many laws and regulations anyway. And like the logic behind many laws, it’s mistaken. So say professors Omri Ben-Shahar (University of Chicago) and Carl Schneider (University of Michigan) in their recent book More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, published in April by Princeton.

Think about those tedious documents you so often have to sign before you can get something you want – they are the subject of this book. And while such documents are as boring as anything can be, the book is engaging, witty, and above all powerfully argued.

The villains of the book are the Disclosurites. Disclosurites is the term that the authors have coined for those who are responsible for putting us in the “kudzu-like” grip of information mandates. The Disclosurites are the contemporary policy wonks and politicians who insist that Americans must be given voluminous amounts of information prior to making decisions so that those decisions will be “fully informed.”

Mandated disclosure is not merely a failure because it seldom helps anyone make a better choice, but it can even be counterproductive. With so much information cascading down on them, consumers, patients, and others may miss the information that would actually matter to them.

[camle]

sounds like someone is vying to filter what information we receive (if anything) so that they can channel public opinion.

us plebes can’t possibly be smart enough to absorb everything, let’s just tell then what we want them to know...they’ll follow along like good little sheep

[goldstategop]

The argument presented is that mandated disclosure burdens people with too much information and makes it harder for them to know what information is really relevant. That is, it operates exactly the opposite of its intended aim, to empower people to make the right decisions.

As it often turns out, the information is too complex, vague or falls far short of what people need to make the right decisions. And whether the intended information is relevant to a particular situation cannot exactly be foreseen in advance. And many people would rather avoid dealing with what they don’t want to know.

Mandated disclosure works at cross-purpose with human nature. People only want to know the things necessary to do what they need to do and not more. Simply feeding them more information does not make their tasks easier or simplify their lives. And it imposes costs people would rather do without in the first place.