 In
June 1988, Richard J. Mahoney, the president of the giant Monsanto Corporation,
received word from his staff that the company, in order to comply with
a new federal regulation, would soon be reporting to the U.S.
Environmental
Protection Agency that in the previous year it released 374 million
pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment.
Mahoney’s
response shocked regulators, businesspeople, and environmentalists:
he issued a memorandum to his managers pledging that the company would
eliminate 90 percent of its toxic pollution in less than five years.
No less remarkable, five years later Mahoney announced that this ambitious
goal had been achieved.
This
anecdote and other similar success stories based on the 1986 law establishing
the Toxics Release Inventory have generated widespread enthusiasm for
citizens’ “right to know” as a new, almost magical tool
for achieving remarkable improvements in environmental conditions –and
for potentially addressing a host of other social problems as well.As
a result, government-mandated information disclosure has now become
nearly as important a public policy instrument as traditional regulatory
controls and government’s power to tax and spend.
In
her fascinating and exhaustively researched new book, Democracy
By Disclosure:The Rise of Technopopulism,
Mary
Graham, the president of the Governance Institute in Washington, D.C.,
and a 1970 graduate of Georgetown Law Center, sets out to preserve this
promising new policy tool from the peril of misplaced enthusiasm. Her
goal is to sound a “cautionary note,” both about the daunting
legal, technical, financial, and political obstacles to the successful
use of this tool, and about the need for major improvements to increase
disclosure programs’ chances for long-term success.
Ms.
Graham approaches this abstract
topic largely by telling a good story – or, more precisely, three
good stories. She explores her topic by recounting the birth and development
of three distinct right-to-know programs: the EPA’s toxic chemical
inventory that spurred Mr. Mahoney to action; the federal initiatives
in the 1990s to improve
the accuracy and completeness of claims that certain foods either increase
or reduce the risk of cancer and other diseases; and the effort during
the latter part of the 1990s to educate the public about the tens of
thousands of lives lost annually to medical errors.
The lessons Ms. Graham
draws from these experiments are sobering. Each of these programs, for
a variety of different reasons, suffers from major deficiencies in the
quality and quantity of the information imparted to the public. For
example, EPA’s toxics inventory, to avoid obvious scientific and
technical challenges, reports toxic releases in terms of pounds of material
discharged into the environment, without
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seeking
to identify the relative toxicity, or the level of public exposure, associated
with each chemical.
The
unfortunate (but arguably unavoidable) result is an inventory that provides
no direct information about what matters most: the actual level of risks
to human health caused by toxic releases. Even more troubling, to the
extent the inventory may lead citizens to confuse volume with risk, it
may actually lead them to focus their attention on chemicals that present
a relatively low risk and to give relatively scant attention to chemicals
that carry greater risk.
Ms.
Graham also rehacounts how interest group politics spe
the dimensions, and even the viability, of certain disclosure programs.
Fast-food outlets and convenience stores successfully lobbied to obtain
an exemption from new food labeling requirements, leaving a gaping hole
in a program designed to help the public choose healthier foods. In the
dispute over disclosure of medical errors, medical organizations successfully
blocked federal legislation to require public
disclosure of errors committed at the nation’s hospitals.
Beyond
the numerous obstacles to collecting and disseminating accurate information,
Ms. Graham raises a host of questions about the public’s capacity
to assimilate and effectively use vast quantities of data.At the simplest
level, do citizens with demanding jobs, aging parents to care for, and
little league teams to coach, have the time and energy to deal with the
volumes of data that federal legal mandates and the Internet now make
available to them? So far, Graham reports, the evidence is mixed.
On
a more complicated level (and it is here that Ms. Graham reaches beyond
conventional legal and policy analysis to the realm of psychology), are
ordinary citizens capable of making reasoned choices about the risks they
willingly accept and those they choose to avoid? Heuristics allow individuals
to place the information
they receive in context, but they also can interfere with accurate understanding
of risks. Some data suggest that citizens, arguably improperly, assign
greater weight to remote risks of catastrophic events than to more familiar
but statistically more lethal risks.
Perhaps
the greatest challenge to information disclosure as a policy tool has
arisen in the aftermath of September 11.With the nation facing dangerous,
creative new enemies, the federal government has
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restricted access to information across the board, including environmental
data, which could possibly be useful to ter-rorists.This has included
EPA Web site information about accidents, risks, and emergency plans
for factories that handle dangerous chemicals. As Ms. Graham succinctly
puts it,“In a crisis atmosphere, the balance between the values
of informing the public about health and safety risks and the value
of guarding such information to protect national security tipped toward
secrecy.”
According
to Ms. Graham, the larger lesson from the significant limitations and
inherent weaknesses of right to know programs is that, for all their
early successes and potential promise, these programs are unlikely to
be a panacea, to protect the environment or to achieve any other social
goal.A broad range of private and public tools will, apparently, be
required to achieve social progress.
At
the same time, Ms. Graham offers specific prescriptions on how right-to-know
programs can be incrementally improved, including: focusing disclosure
programs on the greatest risks; improving, to the extent possible, the
metrics used to report information to the public; developing a continuum
of information disclosure under which the quantity of information released
varies with the strength of competing values, such as national security;
and designing dynamic programs that can be adapted to changes in the
character and significance of the information disclosed, and that are
based on experience gained from administration of the programs.
Over
70 years ago, Louis Brandeis wrote: “Publicity is justly commended
as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to
be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
When it comes to actually implementing this hopeful prescription, Ms.
Graham teaches, things get a lot more complicated.
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