Missed information : better information for building a wealthier, more sustainable future

261 Pages·2017·8.408 MB·English

by  David Sarokin, Jay Schulkin

Missed Information

Missed Information
Better Information for a Wealthier, Fairer, and More Sustainable World
David Sarokin and Jay Schulkin
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
The opinions expressed in this book are the authors’ and not those of the institu-
tions with which they are affiliated.
Set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and
bound in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-0-262-03492-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 Information: A Brief Modern History 15
2 Information and the Market Economy 25
3 Health Care Viewed through the Lens of Information 45
4 Corporate Transparency 73
5 Something Is Missing 103
6 Where Does Sustainability Information Come From? 115
7 Finding Things Out: Foraging for Coherence in the Information
Age 141
8 Openness and Secrecy: The Essential Tension of Government-Held
Information 171
9 Information as a Policy Tool: The Toxics Release Inventory 203
10 Tools, Power, and Participation: Information in the Decades
Ahead 213
Epilogue 231
Notes 237
References, Resources, and Additional Reading 239
Index 249

Preface
We’d like to take a page or two to introduce ourselves.
We have been friends since our days as undergraduate roommates back
in 1973 at SUNY Purchase, where David majored in environmental science
and Jay studied philosophy and neurobiology. Our friendship morphed
into a collaboration with our first jointly authored paper, “Environmental-
ism and the right-to-know: Expanding the practice of democracy,” pub-
lished in Ecological Economics in 1991. Even then, our focus was on the
importance of information as an instrument of public policy, as a means of
fostering participation, and as a tool for identifying and synthesizing the
concerns of broad swaths of the general public.
The focus on information is also evident in our other co-authored works
on issues ranging from banking to environmental justice. Our conversa-
tions have evolved, meandered, stalled, matured, occasionally startled us,
and eventually led us to write this book.
We share an optimistic outlook. Optimism that collaborations can lead
to interesting ideas, interesting ideas can spur broader conversations, con-
versations can define worthwhile actions, actions can happen, and, with
luck, the world becomes a better place, even if only by the smallest of frail
increments. Missed Information embraces that outlook. The world runs on
information, and by improving the quality of information going into our
human-built systems we get better results coming out. Let’s flip the old
cautionary axiom on its head: Instead of “garbage in, garbage out,” we can
focus on “quality in, quality out.” The trick, of course, lies in figuring out
what high-quality information looks like and finding ways to bring it for-
ward, streamline its management, and make it available while keeping it
secure. In this book we examine these challenges and present what we hope
are a few interesting ideas of our own to get conversations going.
viii  Preface
There are several people we want to acknowledge.
Paul Kleindorfer of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylva-
nia was a wonderful colleague of Jay; the book is partly dedicated to him.
He loved the very idea of what we have set out to do here.
Our thanks as well to George Loewenstein from Carnegie Mellon, who
has been a wonderful colleague; to Warren Muir, for immediately recogniz-
ing the significance of information as a new tool of environmental policy,
and championing its use ever since; to Joanna Underwood, for doing the
same and for founding a research organization with information in its very
title; to Sarah Shaw, for always challenging us and always being on the
lookout for new information tools; and to April Oliver, for endless honesty
and critical acumen.