Larry Summers: Data collection is the ultimate public good

Wow, this is naive. He's only thinking about the positive, honest applications of collected data.

I've noticed before this tendency of some elite-educated elite-circle types to forget that one-sided self-interest (at best) and full-blown psychopathy (at worst) are a "thing" that happens in the real world.

Some people take a conspiracy theory view on this blind spot, but from what I've seen there's a component of actual naivete here. When you're surrounded by the best of the best and the system's been quite good to you and you're effectively living in a post-scarcity world, it's easy to forget that the elite win-win bubble you inhabit is not reality.

The real world does not consist of a bunch of Gentlemen of Harvard patting each other on the back. The real world is lies and cheating and domination and death. The reality is that we still live in a Darwinian world of scarcity and suffering and we are less than ten generations away from a time when murder was a normal thing you saw every day. (If you're lucky and live in the "developed world." Easily a billion people still live that kind of brutish life.)

Machiavellian personality traits and brutal zero-sum political behaviors are a product of this Darwinian reality, and they have not gone away.

The playing field for data collection and use is not level. Access to data is nearly always gated, and someone with money (corporation, rich individual, organized crime, government) can afford both to purchase more data and to crunch and analyze it more. The latter takes capital and labor/time, things the rich and powerful have a lot more of than everyone else.

Can I pull Facebook's entire data set (even in a very anonymized form) and use it to ask analytical questions about, say, the dynamics of privilege in society? No, of course not. First of all I don't have access. Secondly, I don't have the money to warehouse and crunch it all (hardware and/or cloud storage). Third, I don't have time. But someone with deep pockets and access can ask any question they want about me (as an individual or as a "class").

Summers talks about how more data will hold leaders accountable. How? Why? The leaders (political and economic) are the only ones who can access and use it.

It's the height of naivete to think that this advantage will only be used to cure disease, transition to renewable energy, and prevent conflict. It will also be used to cause disease, murder, pollute, exploit, and create conflict. Slavery, pollution (transferring your externalities onto others), dishonest propaganda, peddling addiction, and war are all very profitable for those positioned to profit from them... usually quite a bit more so than hospitals and schools. ... and we haven't even brought up dangerous fanatics yet. Osama bin Laden was not poor.

Does Larry think only those rich and powerful with positive motives will use these powers?

Edit: to understand elite naivete more, if you live in the affluent West start looking into how your products are made in China and the working conditions of the average Chinese peasant worker. We are guilty of it too. We forget that this kind of abuse and exploitation happens because it's out of sight, out of mind. The elite in our own culture can easily do the same; they're as insulated from the evils of our culture as we are from what goes on "over there." If you live, work, and study in the orbit of other "top people" and are insulated from your externalities by layers of lawyers and corporate power, the world can easily start looking like some kind of Starfleet Academy utopia.