Mandated disclosure reigns triumphant. Disclosure requirements appear everywhere:   tort law (“duty to warn”); consumer protection (“truth in lending”); bioethics and health care (“informed consent”); online contracting (“opportunity to read”); food law (“nutrition data”); campaign finance regulation; privacy protection; insurance regulation; and more. Corporate scandals and financial crises ceaselessly spawn new disclosure laws: the Securities Act of 1933; the Truth-in-Lending laws of the 1960s and 1970s; the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002; and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010.

As we explain in our book, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure , mandated disclosure’s triumph is understandable. Mandated disclosure aspires to help people making complex decisions. It does so by requiring more sophisticated or knowledgable specialists to reveal information to less sophisticated or knowledgable individuals so that the latter can choose sensibly and the disclosers do not abuse their position. The theory is seductively plausible. After all, don’t people make poor decisions because they have poor information? Won’t they make good decisions with good information?

Mandated disclosure also alluringly fits all ideologies. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein like it because it is “libertarian paternalistic.” Corporations would prefer to disclose than face other forms of regulation. So legislatures pass disclosure mandates, sometimes unanimously.

But mandated disclosure is much like Kennedy’s description of his rising public approval ratings after the Bay of Pigs: “The worse I do, the more popular I get.” Or it’s like Dr. Johnson’s description of second marriages: “the triumph of hope over experience.”

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