RE: The Future of Secrecy

From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 18 2003 - 14:23:18 MDT

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    On 6/18/2003, Christopher Camp wrote:
    > >It turns out that economists can trace most of the social problems in the
    > >world to secrets, things some people know that other people do not. ...
    >----
    >I'm not sure I follow you here. I'm going to take secrecy and imperfect
    >information to be virtually synonymous ...

    Er, this is really very different. The usual phrase is "asymmetric
    information." Imperfect info is pretty much guaranteed by the nature of
    the universe, while asymmetric info is not.

    >It seems a bit strong to say some secrets are verifiable. At this point I
    >think there is only justification for saying some secrets may be verifiable.
    >Verifiability seems to be a high order procedure that rests itself upon
    >concepts like truth - which seem to be rather undeveloped. ...

    You've lost me, here and in the rest of your post.

    Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
    Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
    MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
    703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323



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