Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [9]
Now imagine we’ve rubbed a lodestone on the metal casing of the compass, near the mark for “west.” The arrow shifts. Slightly. That shift is called the “magnetic deviation.” It represents the error induced by the added magnetic field.
Magnetic north was the intended dependence. Tracking magnetic north is the purpose of the device. The lodestone creates a competing dependence. That competing dependence produces an error. A corruption. And we can see that error as a metaphor for the corruption that I am describing by the term dependence corruption.
If small enough, the magnetic deviation could allow us to believe that the compass remains true. Yet it is not true. However subtle, however close, however ambiguous the effect might be, the deviation corrupts.
Depending on the context, depending on the time, depending on the people, that corruption will matter. Repairing it, at least sometimes, will be critical.
CHAPTER 2
Good Questions, Raised
1.
It is late at night, a sleepless night, as all nights have been since the birth of your child. The kid is crying. You stumble into her room to change her. She is frantic, maybe afraid. You fumble in the dark for the pacifier, which will magically turn this anxious source of joy into a sleeping baby. You give her the pacifier. She starts sucking. And then an evil demon drops a single thought into your head, a question perfectly crafted to keep you up for the rest of the night: How do you know that plastic is safe?
And not just that plastic. What about the plastic of her cereal bowl? Or her bottle? Or the soft spoon you use to feed her? Or anything else that she puts in her mouth, which of course, for months of her life, is absolutely anything she can touch?
If you’re like I was about a decade ago (and this is not a fact I’m proud of), you’ll answer that question with a calming reassurance: Obviously the plastic is safe. We spend billions running agencies designed to ensure the safety of the stuff we put in our mouths. How could it possibly be that the safety of something a baby puts into his mouth could still be in doubt? A hundred years of consumer safety law haven’t left something as obvious as that untested.
I would have delivered that lecture to myself with some pride. This isn’t a political issue. There’s no Republican in the U.S. Congress who believes that the products our children consume should be unsafe or untested. Instead, we have all come to the view that the complexity of modern society demands this minimal regulatory assurance at least.
Not all societies are yet at this place. The weekend my wife and I discovered she was pregnant with our first child, we were in China. In the paper that morning was the story of a Chinese businessman who had been convicted for selling sugar water as baby formula. Parents who had relied upon the assurances of safety printed on the bottles watched in horror as their children bloated and died. The owner of the factory defended himself in a Chinese court with words Charles Dickens might have penned: “No one forced these parents to use my formula. They chose to use it. Any deaths are their own fault, not mine.”
But in fact, the demon pestering you as you lie awake in bed after putting your child back to sleep has asked a pretty good question. For years my wife imported our pacifiers from Europe. Until I began the research for this book, I never asked why. “BPA” (aka Bisphenol A), she said. In America, the vast majority of soft plastic for children contains BPA. In many countries around Europe that chemical has been removed from children’s products.
Why?
Among the complexities in the development of a fetus is the precision of its timing. Certain things must happen at certain times, and ordinarily they do. At certain times, for example, exposure of the fetus to estrogen can be harmful. At those precise times, the fetus develops a protective layer, a sex-hormone-binding globulin, that blocks