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The Crisis Report — 09
President Biden is going to COP27
He is going in a position of weakness. The world is changing faster than the US can respond. We are in serious trouble.
One of the “traps” it’s easy to fall into when you are well informed on a topic. Is to assume everyone else is as informed as you are. That “information” is evenly distributed and the playing field is level.
This is a fallacy. Information is never evenly distributed or shared. Because it’s valuable and because it comes at a cost.
There is a cliche that “Information is Power”. It’s a cliche because it’s true. There are all sorts of “secret” information that are used by the wealthy and powerful to further enrich themselves.
A trivial example is real estate manipulation. The wealthy often “find out” in advance about future government development plans. This allows them to purchase land cheaply and then sell it at massive profits.
This happened in San Francisco in the late 19th century. The wealthy bought up most of the land on the western side of the peninsula for next to nothing. It was undeveloped and mostly sand dunes.
They then funded a “grass roots” public campaign to create a great park on the western edge of the city. As part of that development a streetcar system would be created to carry people from the urban core to this great new “Golden Gate” park.
While this wasn’t necessarily a “bad” idea. Voters would probably have felt differently about it. If they had known that the “public” was paying for the infrastructure. That made the “worthless” land the wealthy had bought up a few years earlier, suddenly incredibly valuable.
They voted for a park. Not knowing they were being led by the nose to make the wealthy, even wealthier.
The right “Information”, at the right time, can make a person extremely wealthy or give them power. This kind of information is never shared publicly.
But even on a more basic level, information is always unevenly distributed in a society. Because there is a “cost” to being informed.
