Who Benefits From Us Not Knowing the Full Picture?
How information asymmetry shapes what we buy and believe.
I’m glad you’re here for this one. There’s an announcement at the end about what’s coming next for Card Catalog.
In 1967, the New England Journal of Medicine published a review of the scientific literature on diet and heart disease. Three Harvard scientists examined the evidence and reached a conclusion that would echo through American kitchens for the next fifty years: dietary fat, not sugar, was the primary driver behind rising rates of coronary disease. National dietary guidelines shifted accordingly. Food manufacturers raced to reformulate their products as low-fat, loading them with sugar to compensate for the lost flavor. Grocery store shelves filled with fat-free cookies and reduced-fat peanut butter, products stamped with the word “healthy” that were anything but.
Nearly fifty years later, Cristin Kearns, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, uncovered internal documents from the Sugar Research Foundation showing that the organization had paid the Harvard researchers $6,500 (the equivalent of around $65,000 in 2026) to produce the review. The foundation had selected which studies to include and steered the conclusions toward exonerating sugar. The funding was never disclosed, and at the time the journal didn't require its authors to reveal who was paying them.
For half a century, the dietary choices of hundreds of millions of people were built on conclusions the sugar industry had purchased. The industry knew its product was implicated in heart disease. The rest of the world was deciding what to feed their families based on a review designed to make sure they’d never find that out.
Economists call this information asymmetry: a situation where one party in an exchange holds far more relevant knowledge than the other, and that gap gives the more-informed party the power to shape the outcome. The concept operates at every scale, from a corporation redirecting an entire nation's dietary policy to a contractor charging for repairs a homeowner can't evaluate. The term entered modern economics in 1970, when George Akerlof published his analysis of the used car market and demonstrated that when sellers know whether a vehicle is reliable but buyers can only guess, the market itself degrades. Buyers assume the worst and offer less; sellers of good cars refuse those prices and walk away. Akerlof's insight, which won him a Nobel Prize in 2001, was that the knowledge gap between parties doesn't just create unfairness in individual transactions; it corrodes the integrity of entire systems.
The sugar industry’s campaign illustrates something larger than one company’s deception. It shows information asymmetry functioning as an ongoing investment in controlling what the public could know, sustained across decades because the gap itself is a profit engine. A gap that valuable never closes from the inside; ending it took an outsider willing to spend years of research the industry assumed no one ever would undertake.
Underneath that campaign, and underneath every case like it, sits a single question: who benefits from my not knowing? That question changes what we look at. Instead of asking whether a claim sounds “right”, we ask who’s telling us and what they get if we believe them. Asked of the 1967 review, the question turns straight to who paid for the research, which is exactly what the sugar industry had kept hidden. But a question like that only occurs to us once something feels off, and the best-built gaps make sure nothing ever does. Their targets get no flicker of doubt to work with. The hardest asymmetries are the ones engineered so well that we never sense them at all.
This is not a new problem. The same pattern runs through every society that ever kept records, long before anyone called it information asymmetry.
A pattern as old as civilization
The pattern shows up in some of the earliest writing humans produced. In ancient Sumer, a professional class of scribes mastered cuneiform, the wedge-shaped writing system pressed into clay tablets to record grain stores, property boundaries, debts, and legal agreements. Most Sumerians had no practical need to read these records, though. The majority were farmers and herders, so the scribes served a functional role: translating administrative information for people who needed the results but not the process (much the way an accountant processes tax records today).
The scribes weren’t hoarding secrets, and the farmers had no reason to learn cuneiform - so asymmetry grew out of specialization rather than any intent to exploit. And yet over generations, the scribal class accumulated influence because they controlled the interpretation of records that governed everyone’s economic life. A system that began as a practical division of labor hardened into structural authority, and the people who could read the records came to shape what those records said. The Sumerian case demonstrates that information asymmetry doesn’t require a villain; the pattern can emerge from perfectly reasonable arrangements and still concentrate power on one side.
In later examples, the link between knowledge and power is harder to miss. Medieval European monasteries preserved much of the classical learning that survived in the Latin West, and monks who could read Latin occupied positions of authority in a largely illiterate society. Colonial administrators in British India maintained legal codes in English that ruled local populations speaking dozens of other languages, a linguistic barrier that forced reliance on those who could speak the governing language. Across much of the antebellum South, laws made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read, because slaveholders understood what literacy would do to the existing power structure. These cases range from specialization hardening into privilege to deliberate suppression designed to preserve control, but the common thread persists: wherever knowledge concentrates on one side, the other side loses ground.
Telling a helpful gap from a harmful one
Strung together, those cases make information asymmetry look like nothing but a threat, which misses half of what these gaps do. Many knowledge gaps serve us rather than disempower us, and complex societies couldn't run without them. We rely on exactly this kind of gap every time we trust an expert to know what we don't. For example, a dentist spends years learning to spot hairline tooth fractures we’d never see in a mirror, or a pilot reads cockpit systems we’d need months of training to follow. We’re glad to stay on the uninformed side of both, since closing either gap would cost years of study we have no reason to take on.
What separates a functional asymmetry from an exploitative one is whether the person holding more knowledge is using that advantage to serve the relationship or to exploit the gap. For example, two doctors can see the same symptom. One explains the treatment options and walks the patient through the alternatives and risks. The other orders unnecessary tests that funnel revenue to an imaging lab they co-own. The knowledge gap between doctor and patient is identical in both scenarios, but what changes the patient’s experience entirely is whether the doctor treats that gap as a responsibility or as an opportunity for extraction.
This cuts both ways, because we’re rarely only on the receiving end of a knowledge gap. Every one of us holds an information advantage somewhere: as the parent who understands the family finances, the manager who knows why a decision was really made, the friend with a medical background, or the colleague who’s been at the company longest. When we’re the one who knows more, the question turns inward: are we sharing what we know so the other person can decide for themselves, or holding it back to keep them dependent on us?
On the other side of that gap, where we’re the one who knows less, the hard part is judging how far to trust the one who knows more. Refusing to trust any expert would cut us off from knowledge we need, and taking everything on faith leaves us exposed the moment someone exploits the gap. What protects us is the ability to tell an expert who informs us from one who exploits us, and reading a situation closely enough to know which we’re facing.
Who profits when the gap stays open
The exploitative kind gives itself away in one respect: the party benefiting from the gap spends money and effort to keep it open. When a company lobbies against ingredient disclosure laws, or a financial institution buries fee structures in legally dense documents, the asymmetry isn’t a byproduct of complexity. These are calculated investments in keeping the public less informed, because an informed public would make different choices.
Food packaging is where many of us run into this first. In December 2024, the FDA finalized a rule tightening the criteria food manufacturers must meet to call a product “healthy,” the first revision to that standard since the 1990s. The original criteria set no limit on added sugars, so a sugary cereal could qualify for the label while foods like nuts and salmon could not. A loose standard served the companies using it, because a shopper reading “healthy” on a package had no easy way to know how little the word guaranteed. The same opacity shapes pharmaceutical pricing, where rebates and negotiated discounts are buried across a complex supply chain, leaving patients and even physicians unable to determine what a medication truly costs or why one option is priced far above another.
The pattern extends into political life as well, where the connection between campaign funding and policy positions is the kind of information that would change how voters evaluate their representatives. Dark money channels exist specifically to prevent voters from drawing that connection. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, spending by groups that don’t disclose their donors reached a record $1.9 billion in the 2024 federal election cycle. The legal structures that allow this spending were designed to keep the distance between what politicians know about their own funding and what voters can discover as wide as possible.
Financial services follow a similar logic, with banks and credit card companies designing fee structures that are technically disclosed in fine print but practically illegible. And social media platforms know far more than we do about how their recommendation algorithms shape what we see and how our behavioral data feeds the engagement machine, while we encounter only a feed. The privacy policies and terms of service governing these exchanges are written to go unread; a Carnegie Mellon study estimated that reading the privacy policy of every website a person visits in a year would consume roughly 244 hours.
And a more concentrated version of this gap is taking shape now: in systems built on artificial intelligence. The companies training large language models know what data the models learned from and how the systems are tuned to respond, while the rest of us see only a confident answer in a chat window. There’s no source attached and no easy way to tell whether a given response reflects the weight of evidence or the preferences of whoever built the tool. As these systems move into research, healthcare, hiring, and lending, the distance between what their makers promote and what the rest of us can see keeps widening.
The sectors differ, but they share one aim: making the answer so costly to dig up that the question of who profits from our not knowing rarely gets asked.
Four questions for any information exchange
Asking that question anyway, and the ones that follow from it, is the everyday work of information literacy. Information never reaches us in a neutral state: every study, news report, product claim, and policy brief is shaped by someone’s choices about what to include and what to leave out, and the skill is reading those choices, not only the content. Librarians have spent a long time turning that skill into questions anyone can use. Four of them do most of the work, each coming at a claim from a different angle to surface who shaped it and how their motives influence what we end up seeing.
Who benefits from this, and what do they gain?
Every piece of information reaches us through someone’s effort, and that someone has reasons for producing the content. A clinical trial funded by the manufacturer of the drug being tested carries different weight than one conducted by independent researchers. A policy paper from a think tank funded by the fossil fuel industry operates differently than the same research produced by an academic institution with no industry ties. Funding doesn’t automatically invalidate findings, but it shapes what gets asked and how the results get framed. The same logic carries into personal situations, where the question becomes who stands to gain if we accept what we’re being told without pushing back.
How to find out: Most studies and reports include funding disclosures at the bottom or in an acknowledgments section. A web search for an organization’s name plus the word “funding” or “donors” will often surface what their website doesn’t. For personal situations, ask ourselves who stands to benefit if we take the recommended action.
What’s being emphasized, and what’s been left out?
Spotting an omission is harder than catching a false claim, because we have to notice something that isn’t there. The move is to ask what a transparent version would have to include, then see what’s missing. A credit card advertises “0% APR for one year” in large type while the rate it later jumps to sits in the fine print, and a cereal stamped “good source of fiber” says nothing about the sugar that dwarfs the fiber. What a message leaves out often tells us more about its intent than what it puts forward.
How to find out: Compare how multiple sources cover the same topic. If several sources mention a detail that the one we’re reading omits, that absence tells us something about the priorities of the omitting source. For products, compare what the marketing says with what independent reviewers report.
What would someone with a different stake in this say?
The move here is what fact-checkers call lateral reading: rather than reading a single source more closely, we leave it to see what independent sources with different motives say about the same claim. If a supplement company says its product boosts immune function, we can search for what the National Institutes of Health says about the same ingredient. If a landlord calls an apartment's rent the market rate, we can look up what comparable units in the same zip code go for.
How to find out: Start a fresh search on the source itself, the company or author behind the claim, and read what independent outlets and reference databases say about them. In personal situations, ask a trusted friend or advisor who has no stake in the outcome.
Have we gone to the original, or stopped at the summary?
Most claims reach us at second or third hand (for example, a headline summarizing a study or a campaign ad describing a record), and each retelling is a chance to bend what the original said. Going to the source lets us see whether the summary was fair, and lets us turn these first three questions on the original itself. Keep in mind, this doesn’t make a primary source trustworthy on its own; the 1967 review was a primary source, and the results had been bought. But the value here is the chance to weigh the evidence ourselves instead of accepting a secondhand version.
How to find out: Follow a claim back to its primary record - the actual study or filing - rather than the version someone summarized for us. Scientific papers are searchable worldwide through PubMed, and many governments keep public registers of court records, company filings, lawmakers’ votes, and public spending, though the databases differ from one country to the next. When the trail is hard to follow, a reference librarian can point us to the right one.
None of this is a checklist to run in order. Asked at the right moment, any one of these questions can tip the power balance of a lopsided exchange back toward ourselves. The hard part, though, isn’t necessarily knowing which question to ask; it’s asking that question out loud, and following through to find the answer. The discomfort we feel doing that is sometimes what the more-informed party is counting on.
When we don’t know we’re in the dark
All of this assumes we can feel the gap in the first place. The hardest asymmetries give us nothing to work against, arriving as consensus and the ordinary background of what everyone “already knows”. The work then shifts from reacting to a bad exchange toward questioning the things we never thought to question.
Since the gap won’t announce itself, we turn the question on our own certainties. What am I taking as fact, and where did it come from? Comfortable, unchecked beliefs that feel like tradition often started as someone’s sales pitch. One of these is the rule that an engagement ring should cost two months’ salary, which a De Beers ad campaign invented to sell more diamonds. When a belief leads back to a marketing line instead of evidence, we’ve found the gap that was hiding inside the consensus.
The De Beers story is easy to trace because its history is on the record. Most concealment leaves no such trail, and we catch it instead as a mismatch between sources that should agree. When everything we read shares the same interests, nothing ever contradicts anything else and a hidden gap stays hidden. Reading sources whose interests clash, such as the trade journal alongside the consumer group report, is what surfaces the disagreement that finally makes us stop and ask.
But even these methods have a limit. Some gaps are buried too deep for any one of us to reach, no matter how carefully we look. Uncovering the low-fat story took researchers years in the archives, well beyond what one reader could manage. That is what investigative reporters and regulators are for: they can spend months on an investigation and force a company to disclose what it hides. So we don’t have to carry this alone. Our part is to support that work and to spread what it finds, so a gap one person uncovers becomes something all of us know.
The pattern in plain sight
Information asymmetry will always be a part of life. Specialization guarantees that someone will always know more than the person across the table; that’s a feature of complex societies rather than a flaw. But what changes is how we hold that fact. We can stop treating knowledge gaps as fixed conditions we’re stuck with, and start treating them as distances we can question and close.
One question travels everywhere information reaches us shaped by someone’s motive: who benefits from my not knowing? When no gap is visible at all, we turn the same question on our own settled beliefs: what are we treating as fact, and who benefits if we never check where it came from? We don’t have to answer either one perfectly. We only have to remember to ask, and then do the work the question points us toward - whether that means looking up who funded a study or comparing a claim against a source with nothing to gain.
Every question we ask and every source we verify narrows the distance between what we know and what the other party assumed we’d never find out. What one of us uncovers and shares narrows that distance for everyone else. The sugar industry counted on fifty years of no one looking. The companies and platforms that profit from information asymmetry today are counting on the same thing. The tools for checking have never been more widely available, and they’re strongest when we use them together.
A few readers have asked how to support the work outside of a subscription, so here’s another option. If something here has resonated with you or been helpful, this is one more way to show appreciation. Thank you for reading, always.
You might also like:
The Rise of the Grifter Guru: Inside the self-help industry’s plagiarism problem, and what it teaches us about evaluating any source.
What to Do When Information Is Skewed, Censored, or Silenced: Skills that outlast the systems trying to suppress them.
The information diet isn’t enough. What we need is an information village.: What changes when we go beyond optimizing our consumption and start building shared infrastructure.
Special announcement!
I've been building something I'm excited to share. On June 23, the Card Catalog Classroom opens!
The Classroom modules are the heart of the project. Every teachable article you’ve read here will become a structured lesson you can move through, with prompts and exercises a standalone piece can’t carry. This will extend both the actionability and the usefulness of what we discuss in the articles. Future recorded workshops will live there too.
Alongside the lessons is the Reference Collection: a browsable directory of every archive, database, history, and tip I’ve ever pointed to in a Note. Instead of scrolling through my feed to find that one thing I mentioned, you’ll be able to search the entire collection in a more organized and accessible way. Every new Note on those topics folds in automatically, so the collection keeps growing as we go. I firmly believe that good information is findable information, and this is how I’m putting that into practice.
One thing to mention: Substack does not yet natively host things like courses or directories, so these paid subscriber benefits will be hosted on Circle. Substack stays exactly where it is for the free articles and Notes, but Circle gives me the structure to organize everything properly. And when the time comes to open up an information village, Circle is where that will live too.
Paid subscription pricing is also shifting when the Classroom launches. Right now it’s $8 a month/$80 a year, and those rates will move to $10 monthly/$100 annual. Anyone who becomes a paid subscriber before June 23 will be grandfathered in at the current rate of $8 monthly/$80 annual, permanently. Even if there's another increase down the line, you'll always be locked in at what you signed up at. It’s how I want to say thank you to readers who’ve been here since the beginning!
Nothing in the current paid tier is going away. The existing benefits (AI Briefings, Librarian Hotline, Research Packets, Founding Member Report) will continue to be published on Substack as they always have, and they'll also be featured and findable in the Circle library along with everything else. And all the new services for paid subscribers (the Classroom modules and the Reference Collection) are going to live in Circle, organized in a way that’s far easier to use, learn from, and reference. A dedicated email is coming soon with the full breakdown of what to expect - more coming soon. ☺️
The sectors differ, but they share one aim: making the answer so costly to dig up that the question of who profits from our not knowing rarely gets asked. Or in Latin: Cui bono [who benefits]?
Looking at who benefits from something is core to motive behind any information being presented by an author/speaker to a reader/listener. When I read the articles you provide for free, I immediately sense that I am receiving information that is of value to me and that I can use for my benefit. Today's post was my impetus for becoming a paid subscriber. Each post I've read so far has been informative, useful and of high value. That type of value should be compensated. I'm looking forward to working through the archive.
Your four questions for analyzing the external context of an information exchange in order to evaluate the claims/arguments of that information exchange are excellent and like all of the information you've presented so far cause me to think more deeply about information I consume.
In addition to questioning the information presented, I've also found that it's very important to question myself and my responses to information presented. I've been blessed with good mentors and one of them passed on wisdom I've used for many years in the following maxim.
Be righteous in your beliefs but be open to being wrong.
So, when I'm presented with information I ask myself the following questions about my reaction to the information?
What is making me accept or reject the information presented? By asking this question, I have to think about not only the information presented but whether I need to learn something more before I accept or reject the information/arguments/claims presented. Basically, I have to engage my curiosity rather than suppressing my curiosity for the sake of expediency.
Has something changed? My beliefs have been developed over years and decades of living. Things that have become beliefs are based on very long experience not just something I recently read or heard. By asking this question, I have to think about what may have changed that makes the new information correct and my belief wrong. It forces me to dig into what might have changed and again, engage my curiosity.
If I change a belief, what else must I change? My actions and decisions are based in large measure (and to some extent emotion) by my beliefs. By asking this question, I have to think about whether 'm going to change a belief. If so, I have to think about whether there is anything in my status quo life that should also change?
Am I feeling an emotional reaction to this information? If information presented to me stokes a strong emotional reaction, this question reminds me to slow down before acting so I have time to bypass the emotional surge and engage the logical part of my brain.
“What separates a functional asymmetry from an exploitative one is whether the person holding more knowledge is using that advantage to serve the relationship or to exploit the gap.”
Ultimately, it all comes down to the ETHICS of the person holding the knowledge advantage. Cui bono? Caveat emptor!
Your educational modules hosted outside the Substack platform sound fantastic, Hana. Vastly expands your teaching function and impact! 👏