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Dental Cartel
posted by Frank Pasquale
What is the future of American health care? Many believe that we need less reliance on government funding. The current state of American dentistry suggests the likely consequences of such a move–along with the imbalances caused by “marketization” that focuses on the demand side while neglecting a cartelized supply side.
As social stratification deepens, ever more sophisticated cosmetic dentistry becomes the norm for the wealthy. Meanwhile,
[M]any poor and lower-middle-class families do not receive adequate care, in part because most dentists want customers who can pay cash or have private insurance, and they do not accept Medicaid patients. As a result, publicly supported dental clinics have months-long waiting lists even for people who need major surgery for decayed teeth.
[E]ven as so many patients go untreated, business is booming for most dentists. They are making more money while working shorter hours, on average, even as the nation’s number of dentists, per person, has declined.
***
Even if more students wanted to enter the profession, states are not moving aggressively to expand dental schools or open new ones. Training dentists is expensive, because dental schools must provide hands-on training — unlike medical schools, which send doctors to hospitals for training after they graduate. Hospitals receive federal subsidies for the training they provide to medical interns and residents, but the equivalent system does not really exist in dentistry. Meanwhile, the A.D.A. does not support opening new dental schools or otherwise increasing the number of dentists. The association says it sees no nationwide shortage of dentists . . . .
So while the doctors’ lobby has finally acknowledged the need for more medical schools, the dental lobby is holding a hard line. One key question: is the problem that Medicaid underpays dentists, or the state’s failure to assure the training of enough dentists? Consider the hard line the dental lobby takes against the allied health professions:
Despite the rise in dental problems, state boards of dentists and the American Dental Association, the main lobbying group for dentists, have fought efforts to use dental hygienists and other non-dentists to provide basic care to people who do not have access to dentists.
***
“What we’re extremely uncomfortable with is that they need to drill teeth and sometimes extract teeth,” said . . . the association’s president. Use of therapists would create a two-tier system where some people have access to dentists, while others must settle for less-qualified practitioners, she said.
I have a few thoughts below the fold.
October 12, 2007 at 8:19 am
Posted in: Health Law
2 Comments
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The Inequality/Insecurity-Industrial Complex
posted by Frank Pasquale
If you want to see a film where lawyers are unabashedly portrayed as “the heros,” the free-wheeling documentary Manda Bala would be a great choice. Brazilian AG Claudio Fonteles and other attorneys pursue a corrupt politician for years. I won’t spoil the ending, but rather focus on how the film’s other main theme–the kidnapping crisis in Sao Paulo–challenges the idea that lawyers drag down the economy by redistributing (rather than creating) wealth.
Sao Paulo’s population of 20 million is a study in extremes. Millions lack basic infrastructure, but there is more money concentrated there than the rest of Latin America combined. Recalling Lang’s Metropolis, the upper class lives in high-rises and country houses, maintaining a massive fleet of helicopters to avoid the favelas and traffic below. The helicopters aren’t merely a convenience: an epidemic of kidnapping has made driving (even in bulletproof cars) extremely dangerous. The movie draws an uncomfortable parallel between the politicians who siphon off state funds designated for the poor northern provinces, and the kidnappers who demand ransom from wealthy urbanites: “One steals with the pen, the other with the gun.”
August 26, 2007 at 7:41 am
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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An Angel (Investor) in Devil’s Clothing
posted by Dave Hoffman
Today, the Conglomerate’s Junior Scholars Workshop is discussing Darian Ibrahim’s The (Not So) Puzzling Behavior of Angel Investors. I’ve offered some comments to the paper here; Larry Ribstein’s comments are here; Barbara Black’s here; and George Dent’s here.
The gist of my comment notes that Darian does a terrific job of showing that so-called angel investors’ seemingly philanthropic behavior can be explained using traditional wealth-maximizing incentive theory. For example, angels may not seek to control start-ups with formal contract mechanisms because to do so would reduce those start-ups’ abilities to find later VC investments and thus repay the angel investment. If this is a good model of angel behavior, the question I had was whether the law (or society more generally) ought to treat angels differently from other investors. I look forward to Darian’s response to this comment, and the other really thoughtful critiques. If you at all interested in the law of entrepreneurs, this is a can’t miss paper and workshop. Indeed, it has already inspired a really thoughtful comment by Jeff Lipshaw. Come on by!
July 11, 2007 at 10:57 am
Posted in: Conferences, Corporate Law, Economic Analysis of Law
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Abizaid to Taguba: Stop Snitchin’
posted by Frank Pasquale
Law and order types have been upset by the “stop snitchin’” phenomenon in American inner cities for some time. But as Alexandra Napatoff has noted, the “urban criminal entrepreneurs” who claim “that friends don’t snitch on friends” may well be as much a product as an enemy of current law enforcement practices. Sherrilynn Ifill has also insightfully commented on the wider cultural trend to “stop whistleblowin’,” and has suggested some basic protections that need to be in place:
Whistleblowers, whether in urban communities or in the government, are more inclined to speak out if they have assurances of protection, if they feel that their actions will be supported and corroborated by other members of their community, and if they trust the people or organizations with whom they share their confidential information.
Given the following exchange between General Abizaid and General Taguba after the publication of the latter’s report on Abu Ghraib, let’s hope the Army becomes more interested in the issue:
A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid’s driver and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”
“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”
Seymour Hersh reports the Taguba story here.
June 17, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Posted in: Administrative Law, Criminal Law, Culture, Current Events
3 Comments
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Black Boxes Bite Back
posted by Frank Pasquale
As interest rates jump, piggybacking has become all the rage in “credit repair” circles. For a fee, groups like Instant Credit Builders will let you “borrow” (part of) another person’s credit score by becoming an “authorized borrower” on his cards. Here is ICB’s overheated defense of the practice:
ICB has developed a system to counter the harmful societal impacts of an emerging market called “subprime lending”. Mob-like blood suckers under the umbrella of legitimate lending institutions are targeting those who have poor credit scores but fall short of being beyond credit risk acceptance.
To explain why subprime lenders are in such an opportunistic industry, take this example: The commission payable to a financial adviser or mortgage broker from an actual prime lender on a $100,000 deal yields a broker about $250. Yet the same $100,000 deal using a subprime lender yields them $2,000 to $2,500. This niche market banking industry is getting paid well to enslave most minorities, low-income borrowers, even victims of identity theft with interest rates that can be up to 3.5% higher than average.
Needless to say, mortgage lenders are hoppin’ mad. The godfather of credit scores, FICO, has claimed that “piggy-backing will soon come to an end on its watch.” One irony here is that, as lenders crack down, “they may actually increase demand for some of the services that these Web sites offer.”
A lot of the commentary on these sites has been harsh, but let me offer something like an “unclean hands” defense. Credit scores have long come under attack for having a “a disparate impact on poor and minority populations.” Moreover, the scoring is opaque; scorers claim that transparency would undermine their “trade secrets.” So consumers are navigating a world where they can have only a vague idea of the rules. Lenders shouldn’t be surprised when entrepreneurs reverse-engineer the ratings system and the technology bites back.
Moreover, these rules themselves may be self-fulfilling prophecies: if you decree that one missed $10 payment for a family of 4 earning $30,000 per year lowers their credit score by 200 points, they probably are going to end up being more likely to default because they are going to be paying much more in interest for any financing they get. Again, because the scores are black boxes, we have no assurance that the companies that offer them try to eliminate such endogenicity or whether they actually try to profit from such self-fulfilling prophecies.
As long as credit ratings are so shrouded in secrecy, the lenders who rely on them should expect gaming of the system. Watch for a debate over “black hat” vs. “white hat” credit repair builders as controversial (and interminable) as that now occurring in the world of search engine optimization.
June 16, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Posted in: Consumer Protection Law, Economic Analysis of Law, Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Technology
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Entrepreneurs for Guaranteed Health Insurance
posted by Frank Pasquale
I know many people who would love to start small businesses. They’ve got great ideas, loads of creativity, and even some financing. But the one thing stopping them is fear of losing health benefits. They remain tied to their current jobs out of fear that an arbitrary and dysfunctional insurance market will wipe out whatever gains they make.
Are they too risk-averse? Well, consider this story from today’s NYT:
After a long bout with emphysema an employee at Varney’s, a family-owned business in Manhattan, Kan., died several years ago. But for Varney’s health insurer, her legacy lived on. The next year, 2002, the insurer raised Varney’s premiums by 28 percent — even though most of the other three dozen employees were significantly younger and healthier than their departed colleague, who had been in her mid-70’s. And Varney’s premiums continued to climb.
So the current health insurance market encourages small businesses to get rid of their sickest and oldest employees….exactly the people who most need coverage and the social network a job can provide. And many small businesses choose not to insure at all, driving away potential employees and exacerbating America’s bigness complex.
You might think this situation would at least satisfy larger businesses–those big enough to negotiate lower group rates should get a competitive advantage. But many of them are sick of it, too. A Safeway that pays health benefits is rightly upset by the competitive advantage WalMart gains by failing to do so–or by offering stripped down plans.
My hope is that the economics of spillover effects will help us realize what a drag the lack of fairly priced, guaranteed health insurance is on labor mobility and entrepreneurial endeavors. Busineses need water, roads, electricity, and enforceable contracts to run efficiently. Perhaps guaranteed health insurance should be considered part of that essential infrastructure.
May 5, 2007 at 10:08 am
Posted in: Health Law
4 Comments
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Discount Caskets Online? Shop Costco!
posted by Dan Filler
I was feeling in a shopping sort of way this afternoon when I wandered over to Costco.com. There I discovered what others may have long known: the big box discount house sells caskets. What a lift for the spirits! The funeral business has always been notorious for its attractive business environment. Who wants to shop around for the best funeral value? And who wants to be seen as skimping on cheapo casket for a dead loved one? As a consequence, the industry hasn’t been subject to widespread discounting. (But see this.) And now, with the rise of the funeral home chain, the marketplace is amazingly seeing an INCREASE in funeral prices. Yet this situation clearly creates opportunities for entrepreneurs willing to take on the taboo and sell their product based on price (rather than, say, Dignity.) Somehow, I never saw Costco as such a niche player. Clearly, I was naive!
This discovery has led me to ponder a number of questions.
Do people skimp more on the box when they’re buying on the web, in the absence of sales pressure? Or do they buy fancier caskets because they’re more affordable? And who exactly skips overnight delivery, preferring to get their casket via “standard shipping”? (Do some people prepare for the big day, sticking the casket in the garage until it becomes necessary?)
How many people join Costco for the sole purpose of a buying a casket? Maybe Costco doesn’t even try to make money on this segment. Like discounted plasma TV’s and cases of Bounty, perhaps it’s just a loss leader, a way to drive business to the site.
“I came for the casket, but I stayed for digital videocamera.” Or something like that.
November 27, 2006 at 12:00 am
Posted in: Advertising, Culture
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The Next McDonald’s Coffee Case?
posted by Dave Hoffman
[An Indiana couple] have filed a lawsuit against Starbucks, accusing a [local] store of serving scalding hot chocolate that seriously burned their little girl.Michael and Alexis Brennan filed the suit Tuesday in Marion Superior Court on behalf of their daughter, Rachel. Rachel’s age is not included in the lawsuit, but it says she was in a child restraint seat in the back seat of the family car Nov. 2, 2004, when Alexis Brennan went to the Starbucks at 116th Street and I-69.
Brennan ordered a child’s hot chocolate with whipped cream and an adult hot chocolate without whipped cream at the drive-through. According to the lawsuit, Starbucks’ policy is to serve child drinks at lower temperature than adult drinks to avoid kids getting burned.
Brennan handed her daughter the child drink, and as she pulled away from the window, it spilled into Rachel’s lap.
The child was “screaming in pain,” and her mother pulled over, got Rachel out and removed her clothes to find the “skin on Rachel’s leg was falling off of her.” She suffered serious burns that required repeated medical attention and could require more medical attention, the lawsuit said. The parents are seeking unspecified damages.
Obviously, the kinds of cases that get turned (by certain interest groups) into urban legends about the tort system can’t be easily predicted. Some facts about this case – Starbuck’s policy of usually not serving hot drinks to children, the uncomfortable fact that the victim is a child and not an adult, and the alleged severe burns suffered – all might combine to make it less likely that norm entrepreneurs will seize upon this case as an example of the system run amok. But you never know – I did find the case on the Drudge Report, after all.
November 17, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Posted in: Tort Law
8 Comments
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Grimmelmann: “Is Fashion a Bad?”
posted by Frank Pasquale
I always enjoy James Grimmelmann’s blog and learn much from his articles. He combines a passion for precision with an unerring sense of the big picture. That’s evident today on the Picker MobBlog discussing Raustiala & Sprigman’s work on IP protections (or the lack thereof) in the fashion industry. Rather than engage the usual dialogue on innovation maximization, Grimmelmann asks flat out: is fashion a bad?
Sure, the fashion cycle may work for the fashion industry, but is that really something we should be glad about? . . . If low IP protection is good for the fashion industry because it enables rapid copying and a quick cycle of obsolescence, and if that cycle involves waste induced by conspicuous consumption, then isn’t a low IP regime a bad thing?
I’m sympathetic with Grimmelmann’s position, and this gap is symptomatic of a larger problem: “most economists believe that the core of economics can be developed with no assumptions at all about what an economy should aim to provide” (Dupre & Gagnier). But I also feel obliged to give the other side its due. And recently, one of the most enthusiastic exponents of laissez-faire here has been Virginia Postrel. Consider this encomium to style:
Even analysts who do not view luxury goods as waste do not [adequately] credit the goods’ intrinsic sensory appeal. . . . [They have] a hard time noticing any qualities beyond status badges and advertising-created brand personas. [But] more is going on. . . . People pet Armani clothes because the fabrics feel so good. Those clothes attract us as visual, tactile creatures, not because they are “rich in meaning” but because they are rich in pleasure. The garments’ utility includes the way they look and feel.
So the challenge for the latter-day Veblen is to disaggregate the “status-conferring” aspect of the fashion from its aesthetic, tactile, and expressive appeal (as Jeff Harrison notes). But as Veblen himself realized, this is an inquiry that has to share in both economic and humanistic approaches. And perhaps it even involves a bit of “norm entrepreneurship” in reinterpreting fashion . . .
November 14, 2006 at 9:20 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Intellectual Property, Legal Theory
14 Comments
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Outsourcing and Agency Costs
posted by Dave Hoffman
The Times reports that the exploding outsourcing industry in India has run into two sorts of problems: (1) domestic political instability resulting from a federal system; and (2) duty of care problems resulting in data breaches. The two articles, fronted together, remind me that I’ve not yet had a chance to plug George Geis’ provocative article on Business Outsourcing and the Agency Cost Problem. From his abstract:
Why has business outsourcing increased so rapidly over the past decade? The question is important for corporate law scholars because it raises foundational issues underlying the theory of the firm. Indeed, the decision to pool resources under centralized control presents a fundamental tension between the benefits of scale and the dangers of unchecked managerial discretion. The location of a firm’s borders – and thus the extent of outsourcing – can be viewed as an equilibrium of these competing effects.The conventional explanation for the rise in business outsourcing is that falling interaction costs have changed this balance by opening new markets where firms can source economic inputs for less. This Article offers a second account, however, for the outsourcing phenomenon – one that is rooted in agency theory. Like many other economic relationships, outsourcing projects generate agency risk because a vendor makes decisions that affect the wealth of the outsourcing firm.
This Article argues that business outsourcing has thrived in recent years not only because globalization has unlocked inexpensive production markets, but also because it is becoming easier for firms to monitor and prevent the agency costs of outsourcing. Drawing upon a detailed analysis of outsourcing contracts, it explores several strategies to minimize agency costs – shedding new light on the structure and terms of a typical outsourcing project. It then contends that the same forces that are opening new markets are also making it economical for firms to mitigate outsourcing agency risk. Taken together, this work adds another important, but previously neglected, context for understanding the essential tradeoffs that arise when economic ownership is divorced from control.
It is a terrific paper, I think, which might lead some folks to new applications of AC theory. One question I have concerns the role of consultants as norm entrepreneurs, and as developers of strategies to monitor outsourced agents. (If, indeed, outsourced firms ought to be thought of as agents). It is also interesting to think about agency costs and remedies in transnational contracts. If, as the Times reports, Bangalore will shut down today, which jurisdiction’s contract law on force majuere will shadow the resulting dispute?
October 5, 2006 at 11:13 am
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law
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Substance, Institutions, and the Real Value of Commercial Law Scholarship
posted by Nate Oman
As anyone who spends any time reading scholarship on contract law or commercial law can tell you, efficiency is a big deal. There are a lot of very smart people who spend a lot of their time worrying about whether this or that remedies rule is efficient or whether giving secured lenders complete priority in collateral is inefficient. I wonder, however, whether any of this stuff matters. What I am talking about is not the normal grumpiness that law and economics invokes in some — objections to the rational actor model, furious citations to Dworkin on the evils of efficiency as a normative criteria, or ritual invocations of various behavioral arguments — but rather the basic question of how much the content of the law matters. Imagine for a moment that you think that the primary goal of contract and commercial law ought to be the generation of wealth. Does the content of that law matter all that much?
In the context of American law this may seems like an odd question. After all, if we aren’t arguing about the content of the law, then what exactly would we be arguing about? The problem, it seems to me, is that the very success of American private law makes many of our discussions about it rather surreal. One can, of course, have lots of arguments about the extent to which the American markets that rely on American private law are efficient, or whether they would be made more efficient if we were to tweak this or that section of the Uniform Commercial Code. Yet, on the whole, it is difficult to deny that in the aggregate American markets are tremendously successful at creating wealth, indeed more wealth than has ever been seen by any society on the face of the planet ever in the history of the world. No small accomplishment that. On the other hand, there are places in the world where private law doesn’t seem to work particularly well, where whole societies are extremely poor, and the markets aren’t producing much in the way of wealth. My question, however, is the extent to which economic failure in such societies is a function of their substantive law or of their legal institutions.
October 3, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Economic Analysis of Law
2 Comments
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Introducing Drexel University College of Law: Drivers Wanted
posted by Dan Filler
I’ve been busy recently, helping construct a law school at Drexel University. So it seems appropriate to introduce the institution that stole my time (but never my affections) from Concurring Opinions. I hope to blog more about the process of builiding a law school in upcoming weeks.
What is Drexel University College of Law? It’s a new law school affiliated with Drexel University – a large research university located in Philadelphia, right next door to Penn. (Drexel students and faculty benefit tremendously from Penn’s massive investment in the University City neighborhood.) Drexel University’s recent history has been pretty remarkable. It has grown from being a solid engineering school to a major education destination in the region. The University increased its endowment from $90 million to $550 million in ten years, added a medical school, and doubled the undergraduate student body. A little over a year ago, the University announced a plan to open a law school. In the past hectic year, the College of Law was born – and it’s looking pretty good. We (notice how I move to first person plural now?) have a smart, productive and energetic faculty that is as impressive in person as it is on paper. (Puffery, anyone?) At the same time, our admissions team produced a quality entering class – despite the fact that Drexel cannot even seek ABA accreditation until next year.
Consistent with the University’s famous co-op program (“The Ultimate Internship”, according to Drexel’s registered trademark), the law school will have a experiential focus – with co-op placements available for all students. And playing on the U’s strengths, it will initially offer concentrations in health law, IP and entrepreneurial business. (We’ll leave the value of such concentrations for another day’s discussion.) What Drexel Law doesn’t have, for the next couple of months at least, is a building. But really, who needs a building?
My initial reviews of the experience of working at Drexel are pretty wonderful. I’m having a lot of fun, and I really look forward to work each day. (Farfegnugen, anyone?) Sure, little problems surface regularly, the buck stops with each of us, and each day’s agenda is subject to change. But this is entrepreneurship, on someone else’s dime. Anything is possible.
Oh. And one more thing: we’ll be doing some aggressive hiring this fall. People often talk about the amazing law faculty one could build if only one could start from scratch in today’s market. Funnily enough, that’s what we’re trying to do here. Our job annoucement is after the jump.
August 22, 2006 at 11:16 am
Posted in: Law School
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Entrepreneurs Gone Wild
posted by Dave Hoffman
Via Gordon Smith, I read this article about “Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis. Basically, he comes off as a potentially criminal 33-year-old-slimeball, who is overly happy about being marginally smarter than very drunk 18-year olds:
“My favorite is explaining to dumb chicks why the qwerty keyboard is called a qwerty keyboard, and why the letters aren’t in order,” [Francis] tells [the reporter]. “They’re, like, 18 years old, and they’re, like, ‘Wait a minute, there were typewriters?’ And you got to start there.”
It’s an article that’s worth reading, I think, because it reminds you that (1) business success has nothing to do with being a decent human being; (2) it is a mistake to physically assault a journalist doing a news story on you; (3) pornographers’ strategic veneration of the first amendment exceeds all others.
August 8, 2006 at 11:29 am
Posted in: Current Events
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Cyberspace as Marchland
posted by Bruce Boyden
The picture I provided to Dan for his introductory post was taken at South Point on the Big Island of Hawaii, which my wife and I visited last month on our honeymoon. South Point is, as the name implies, the southernmost point on the Big Island and therefore the southernmost point in the United States. It is accessible only via an 11-mile-long, one-lane, barely paved road that cuts directly through a sparsely inhabited, windswept plain to the ocean. At the end of the road, the only signs of life are the makeshift parking lot for visitors, a nondescript navigational beacon, and a rickety pair of boat launches. The area is as isolated as it looks. Although other parts of the island are booming, particularly the area around Kona, the south side of the island, and South Point in particular, has been left behind. The guide books all warn against paying for parking at the nearby “Visitor’s Center;” in fact it is an abandoned building, and the people charging are squatters, not state employees. The proprietor at one of the B&B’s we stayed at told us that people go to live at South Point when they don’t want to be found.
The area is also littered with the remains of failed business ventures. One of the more spectacular of these is the wind farm just north of South Point, pictured above. I have no idea who built the wind farm, or why. But there are now several dozen wind mills standing in various states of disrepair. A few still spin, making a plaintive low whistle that you can listen to if you stop the car and turn the engine off (your entertainment mileage may vary). Most are rusted in place. Several have one or more blades missing. The scene reminded me of what Shelley must have had in mind when he wrote Ozymandias, thinking of Luxor and knowing little of ancient Egypt’s history:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The whole thing strikes me as an apt metaphor for cyberspace. Getting there requires tying South Point and Ozymandias to colonial America, turbulence, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and peer-to-peer filesharing.
July 11, 2006 at 11:41 am
Posted in: History of Law, Technology
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Markets for Markets
posted by Miriam Cherry
Rob Rogers and I recently completed an article on the development of information markets. Our motivating question was to ask why information markets have covered certain subject areas, sometimes of minor importance (like the Michael Jackson trial), while neglecting other subject areas of greater social or monetary significance. We trace part of the answer to the choice of business model that information market entrepreneurs have chosen to employ, but part of it remains unexplained and is, we propose, a product of the random walk. The article is here.
June 15, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law
7 Comments
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Fat: The Terror Within
posted by Dave Hoffman
William Saletan has an interesting column up today on the anti-fat litigation and regulatory movement newly afoot. The Surgeon General apparently said the fight against obesity would “dwarf 9-11.” Saletan previews the stages of the coming battle: (1) activists will define the harmed class as a particularly susceptible one (kids); (2) experts will show how that the food industry and its audience (the obese) are externalizing costs on the rest of society; and (3) regulators will redefine junk-food as non-food.
This stages-of-battle could probably be generalized to most consumer protection/muckracking crusades. But why do we need all of this work to justify paternalistic interventions?
There are a few reasons, I think, but the most significant is that libertarians have been, relative to their number in American society, remarkably successful norm entrepreneurs. Over time, they have encouraged folks to think of consumption as an (a) individualized; (b) expression of freedom; that (c) is the product of free choice. And why not? The alternative, that folks’ tastes are created and managed by industry, that choice is limited, and that bad decisions abound, leads to increasingly large regulatory interventions that almost always turn sour.
The idea that we’re about to see a real resurgence of federal regulation seems farfetched, and I have to think that if obesity lawsuits ever got purchase (which they have not, to date) we’d see a rush to congress for immunity/preemption. That’s because, as Saletan alludes to, but my co-blogger Dan Filler has nailed, obesity is an example of a “risk society panic,” with no clear moral victims, but more importantly, no folk devils to focus society’s ire. Thus, whatever strategy activists come up with in the battle against fat, to justify uprooting the libertarian background rule, we’ll need a villain.
April 18, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Posted in: Consumer Protection Law
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Group Polarization and Internet Shaming
posted by Daniel Solove
I’ve discussed Internet shaming in a series of posts, most recently in a post about a shaming incident carried out against a business. The post sparked a thought-provoking discussion in the comments. Adam wrote: “What exactly is ‘mob justice’ on the internet? A crowd of people waving web browsers? Angry bloggers complaining about poor service?”
My concern with Internet shaming is that it often spirals out of control. It goes too far. Consider the case of the “dog poop girl” from Korea, who was shamed extensively over the Internet for not cleaning up her dog’s poop on a subway train. I argued that the blogosphere can turn into “a cyber-posse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital scarlet letters.”
Internet shaming is problematic for its permanence, but it is also problematic for its viciousness and extremism. One explanation for why Internet shaming can turn into a form of mob justice is a phenomenon known as group polarization. In a recent post at the Chicago Law Faculty Blog, Cass Sunstein writes:
December 4, 2005 at 1:09 am
Posted in: Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Sociology of Law
2 Comments
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