A brilliant classmate at Northwestern University on his way to medical school used to break into “On the Sunny Side of the Street” every once in a while. I don’t remember exactly why, but it’s a wonderful memory.
And I’m not sure why that comes to mind now, but there’s probably a cognitive relation among the ideas I’m pondering about transparency and understanding. The hackneyed metaphor of sunlight as a disinfectant and my time at the SEC are probably related.
Ever since deciding to study journalism at NU nearly three decades ago, a big idea in my life has been that transparency is a good thing. By transparency, I mean the availability of reasonably useful and accurate information to decision makers.
Transparency is vital whether the decision maker is a consumer making a buying decision, a voter making a voting decision, an entrepreneur making a business decision, an investor making an investment decision, a lawyer making a decision about what advice to provide, a church making a decision about where to focus its service, a judge making a judgment, a policy maker making a policy decision, or any of an infinite number of examples.
Tomorrow, I take a step toward understanding transparency from the other side of the street.
Transparency, for all of its power, depends on our ability to use the information available to us to make decisions. Many of my Facebook friends and I were extraordinarily fortunate to have teachers in our lives like Gary Geivet, Jan Palmer, Bill Roberts, Chuck Jurisch, and scores more who helped us use the information available to us to make decisions in our lives.
My latest big decision has me reporting to Hoover High School in San Diego tomorrow morning as a student teacher to prepare for the school year that starts Tuesday. What that means for me is that instead of focusing more on how information is disseminated, which was a big part of my career as a reporter, on the Hill, at the EEOC, and at the SEC, I’ll be focusing more on how information is consumed.
I’ve completed the prerequisites for San Diego State University’s School of Teacher Education credential program. I’ve started classes in teaching theory and learning technology the past few days. (Or is it learning theory and teaching technology?) This afternoon is my first class in English teaching methods. I was fortunate to pass California’s tests to teach English and Social Science, which includes history, economics, and geography. Eventually, I hope to teach several subjects.
In a world where technology is changing things faster than many of us prefer, but where it also holds the promise of revolutionizing education for the better, I’ve been fortunate to stay in touch with people from all stages of my career. Thank you to everyone for their support as I contemplated this transition!
To the extent possible, I hope to continue to kibitz and advise and consult on things like CLOUD and XBRL and providing transparency. However, the limited number of hours in the day will necessitate a considerable reduction in my availability. So far, everyone understands that my students must come first. As I make the transition from focusing on the availability of information to focusing on the understanding of information, I expect to gain more insight into what happens on both sides of the street. So far, both are getting sunnier!
I’ve been the strongest possible advocate for global free trade ever since my Soviet Economic Institutions professor diverged from the syllabus to draw Ricardo’s theory on the board and prove unequivocally and concisely that it makes everyone better off. I still am. Dennis Santiago, however, makes strong arguments for local investing for California and Los Angeles — and good news: they don’t contradict the case for global free trade. Continue reading ‘Local Investing Can Build Global Markets’
Some choices are better made economically, with individuals able to decide for themselves how to maximize their own utility by allocating their own resources as they see fit. Other choices are better made politically, with groups deciding how to allocate their collective resources to maximize their collective utility.Continue reading ‘Economic Choice vs. Political Choice’
If you’re not one of the 41,697 who have read this on Scribd or among those who have read it elsewhere, take a look. Among my favorites are facts, sleep, attention, and thnx.
The House approved S. 303 by voice vote on Monday, Dec. 14. The bill text and debate are immediately below; the debate starts on page H14837. An easier-to-read version of S. 303 is also below. The most important part of the bill, about data standard requirements, is in xml format here.
Back on June 17, I blogged about the Government Information Transparency Act. The goal of government information transparency took a step closer to reality today when the co-sponsors of the bill, Reps. Edolphus Towns and Darrell Issa, added their bill’s provisions to a Senate bill to improve the federal grant system. The gist of the legislation is that when it is implemented, taxpayers will get protection via transparency and rules-based reporting in a way that’s similar to how investors now get better information from public companies via a combination of U.S. GAAP and XBRL. The good news is that government grant accounting is a heck of a lot less complicated than U.S. GAAP, so that protection should be faster to arrive, much less expensive to implement, and even more reliable.
Here’s video of this landmark meeting to advance government transparency:
Economic Transparency
Also today, the SEC posted a new more detailed comment on a pending rulemaking about how asset-backed securities are disclosed. It’s 13 pages of plain English. (See background, including excerpt from a speech by SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro.) Of the millions of words written about the financial crisis, these pages include just about every word you need to know:
Edgar Online re ABS: Modernize Disclosure, Cut Costs, Achieve Transparency, Restart Securitization
Even better, unlike most of those other millions of words, these words include an explanation of how to reconcile the interests of Wall Street in profits with the interests of all Americans in healthy, working, fair, transparent capital markets. Let’s hope the words spoken on Capitol Hill today and the words posted by the SEC today all matter — soon.
