What Can We Learn from Wikileaks About Market Regulation–or, Is Transparency Always a Good Thing?
In the wake of the Wikileaks debacle, we have started to see some conversation in the editorial pages about whether transparency is always a good thing in international affairs. The point is that there are times when allowing the parties to talk in private may help to reach optimal outcomes for all sides. As we learn more about the personalities and motivations behind the leaks, also, the image of the whistleblower as the pure-hearted pursuer of truth and justice is getting a bit tarnished. It is a complicated issue, with room for reasonable people to disagree, but that in itself is news: it used to be that if you were against transparency you had to be for cronyism, corruption, and fraud, and in fact everybody everywhere felt compelled to assert that they were of course in favor of full public disclosure. Now we are not quite so sure. I think that some of the heatlhy skepticism–or at least complexity of thought–about transparency that is coming into the public debate about foreign a
