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Comment by chiaro | Hacker News Reader

Trade deals are developed in secret for the same reason that all legislation is (before being presented for a democratic vote). The negotiation process is hamstrung by too many interests, with domestic lobbies preventing anything from being discussed at all. This is a point of interest in game theory. Paper here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706785

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I can't believe you get down-voted for stating the obvious; so many otherwise-smart people jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon for this one. Lots of bad parts to TPP, but the "secrecy" was not one of them.

You are being distracted by irrelevancies if you think this was the main issue. And probably quite foolish if you think democracy means 100% of people give their input to 100% of decisions.

Those pesky voters, getting in the way of any decent democratically elected Congress! I quite agree, all legislation should be formulated in secrecy and foisted on them at the last moment.

The only thing that could improve this situation is that deals should be formed in complete secrecy, with no input from Congress or the Senate and should be ratified solely by the President via a treaty process.

You really want to ensure the Great Unwashed and those incompetents they elect indirectly don't get any where near trade deals, otherwise they might possible make "improvements" such as forcing through openness, accountability, fairness and equality! All of which are totally the anathema of good backroom deals.

The US constitution was another document planned in secrecy and passed by the public. This isn't denigrative of democracy at all, despite the flowery rhetoric. It just leads to better outcomes, as Putnam's paper outlines.

It's a pretty seminal work, I'd encourage reading it.

(8000+ citations, https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?view_op=view_citatio... )

Thank you, I'll have a read of that. It is interesting that these better outcomes were achieved because the gigantic amount of work that was done in secret is now being overturned because of serious and legitimate complaints about the terms of the agreement. That doesn't sound like a particularly good outcome at all!

This is the tariff elimination schedule for the US in the TPP. It's 386 pages long. If each of the industries effected by it were able to voice their concerns publicly/politically rather than simply furthering their interests in closed negotiation, any trade deal would be politically untenable. The alternative outcome doesn't exist.

http://dfat.gov.au/trade/agreements/tpp/official-documents/D...

The fact remains, the TPP is about to be completely undone. That's not exactly particularly effective.

To me secrecy sort of makes sense because it's a negotiation.

You don't want to show your cards in a negotiation, right? So how could the President and Congress say to the American people "this is what we're going to offer and accept from China" and pretend that the Chinese aren't going to hear it too?

Secrecy is often a horrible idea but this is a really complicated issue.

Brexit -- do you think it's good or bad? Because that is democracy.

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