Well, this is turning into an interesting discussion.

Before making a substantial response, I know of a couple of webpages that you might find interesting.

1) Extreme transparency: UC Berkeley recently decided to contract with Google (rather than Microsoft) to provide email services. They even went to the bother of making an point-by-point list the criteria upon which they compared the two providers.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/berkeley-google-docs-microsoft/

2) Biologists are debating how important “high impact” journals are to one’s career advancement. This is closely linked to transparency in publishing and hiring:

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=911

Okay, now for substance… on the issue of transparency, I agree that more transparency is desirable. I think that most economists would agree (more information makes markets work more efficiently). I also agree that some people use information asymmetry as a strategy, but also I suspect that it is only a feasible strategy in a monopsony situation. Even leaving aside the strategic impulse to keep others in the dark, I think it would be hard to attain anything close to perfect transparency (though we can definitely have more transparency than today). Primarily, this is simply because it takes effort to convey information, and we (as individuals or a community) will only dedicate limited effort to conveying information. There is also the issue of “lawsuit protection” — at least in the more subtle form of not wanting to aggravate anyone.

For instance, I was recently recruiting some college students to help me with my research. While I’m not paying them anything, it will take a substantial amount of my time to train them, so I can’t just accept everyone who wants to work with me. I was looking to fill two positions, and I interviewed a few students for each. I gave each student a brief description of why I was unable to work with them. For one position it was easy… I went with the student that had the most experience and the most background knowledge. Interestingly, I decided to work with two students even though I had originally only sought one. For the other position, an explanation would be harder. The student I took had less experience and knowledge than the others I spoke with, but she was damn smart. This was clear from the interview. Maybe the other students were just as smart and well prepared as this student, but I have no way to know that because they didn’t have the personality that showed it in the interview. I doubt that any standardized test could substitute what can be learned from a conversation. I needed to make a decision and get on with the project… not spend forever evaluating candidates.

So what was I supposed to tell the students I rejected? That the younger student was just smarter? If I did that, would they try to convince me to reconsider? Would they be offended? A vague answer (“it just wouldn’t work out”) is often the quickest and least risky way to turn someone down.

Last two things briefly…

“identical jobs”: I only listed that criteria as part of the condition under which networking would be irrelevant. If jobs are not identical, then there would still be the drive to get a better (subjective) job .

The closing line to this essay seems to bemoan the fact that to have the benefits of society we have to be sociable — that to benefit from economic cooperation, we have to convince others that we are worth cooperating with. I don’t understand what plausible alternative there is. We are social organisms — we exist in a specific location with specific social connections. The idea that we can interact with “society” as a whole is bizarre, but unfortunately common. It’s a common delusion that I’ve had to dismiss from my own thinking over the years. People like to think that they are omniscient and objective, when they have VERY limited information and necessarily process it in a subjective manner. Frankly, I think that it’s a statist myth that is reinforced by the statist news media (with their obsession on elections and state policy), but it probably also arises from our training to think objectively.