"Secrecy Serves to Entrench Incumbents"

Below is Excerpt 2 from a lecture given by renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz
On Liberty, the Right to Know, and Public Discourse:
The Role of Transparency in Public Life


I have already called attention to several of these adverse effects: Secrecy provides the fertile ground on which special interests work; secrecy serves to entrench incumbents, discourage public participation in democratic processes, and undermines the ability of the press to provide an effective check against the abuses of government. But the adverse effects are more pervasive.

To maintain secrecy, often the circle of those involved in decision making is greatly circumscribed; those who are able to provide valuable insights are cut out of the discussion. The quality of decision making is thereby weakened. There is, again, a vicious circle. With more mistakes, public officials become more defensive; to protect themselves, they seek even more secrecy, narrowing in the circle still further, eroding still further the quality of decision-making.

Public programs may be designed not on the basis of the impact that they have, but on (government officials’ beliefs about) the perceptions of those impacts. Those perceptions will be affected by the information that is publicly available; program design may be as sensitive to those perceptions (and the extent to which they can be controlled) as to their real impact.

There is still one more, related effect: as the space of informed discourse about a host of important issues gets circumscribed, attention gets focused more and more on value issues. It takes an enormous amount of information to make judgments concerning complex economic issues. It takes far less (or a far different kind of) information to come to a view concerning abortion or family values. Thus, secrecy has distorted the arena of politics. The adverse effects of secrecy are multiple: not only are important areas of public policy not dealt with effectively, but also debate focuses disproportionately on issues which are often far more divisive.

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Without a doubt the Dunderdale government will seek naturally divisive issues such as hating Ottawa or Quebec in order to avoid real debate on issues such as Muskrat Falls.

This government and it's Secrecy Act are very dangerous to the well-being of our society.

Secrecy and the Consequences - Dunderdale vs. Stiglitz

I will over the next couple of days take excerpts from a lecture given by Joseph E. Stiglitz- Economist.

Below you will find some information about this professional followed by Exerpt 1 of the lecture. 

As a public - the current "secrecy" bill before our House of Assembly - should be frightening. You and I need to be very afraid of what the Dunderdale government is doing and why.

Appointments:

University Professor. Teaching at the Columbia Business School, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Department of Economics) and the School of International and Public Affairs

Co-founder and Co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD)

Co-Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought

Chair of the Management Board, Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester

Member, CFTC-SEC Advisory Committee on Emerging Regulatory Issues

President of the International Economic Association, 2011-2014

A Modest Proposal for International Monetary Reform, paper presented at the June 

2008 meeting of the International Economic Association, Istanbul.

Sharing the Burden of Saving the Planet: Global Social Justice for Sustainable Development, Keynote speech at the June 2008 meeting of the International Economic Association, Istanbul (see the powerpoint here).

Co-Chair of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

GDP Fetishism, Project Syndicate, September 2009.

GSP Seen as Inadequate Measure of Economic Health, by David Jolly, New York Times, September 14, 2009.

Towards A Better Measure of Well-Being, Financial Times, September 13, 2009.

Chair of the Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System

One Small Step Forward, The Guardian (UK), June 28, 2009.

Recommendations for Immediate Action, a statement from the first meeting of the Comission of Experts, January 4-6, 2009, New York.

West urged to increase aid to poor nations, article about the Commission by Heather 

Stewart, The Guardian (UK), January 11, 2009.

UN Panel Calls for Council to Replace G20, by Harvey Morris, Financial Times, March 22, 2009.

Dollar Reserve Reform Urged, by Harvey Morris, Financial Times, March 27, 2009.

Final Report of the UN Commission of Experts, released September 21, 2009

Excerpt 1

To me, the most compelling argument for openness is the positive Madisonian one: meaningful participation in democratic processes requires informed participants. Secrecy reduces the information available to the citizenry, hobbling their ability to participate meaningfully. Any of us who has participated in a board of directors knows that the power of a board to exercise direction and discipline is limited by the information at its disposal. 

Management knows this, and often attempts to control the flow of information. We often speak of government being accountable, accountable to the people. But if effective democratic oversight is to be achieved, then the voters have to be informed: they have to know what alternative actions were available, and what the results might have been. Those in government typically have far more information relevant to the decisions being made than do those outside government, just as management of a firm typically has far more information about the firm’s markets, prospects, and technology than do shareholders, let alone other outsiders. Indeed, managers are paid to gather this information.

The question is, given that the public has paid for the gathering of government information, who owns the information? Is it the private province of the government official, or does it belong to the public at large? I would argue that information gathered by public officials at public expense is owned by the public— just as the chairs and buildings and other physical assets used by government belong to the public. We have come to emphasize the importance of intellectual property. The information produced, gathered, and processed by public officials is intellectual property, no less than a patentable innovation would be. To use that intellectual property for private is just as serious an offense against the public as any other appropriation of public property for private purposes.