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Information is power. It drives commerce, protects nations, and forms the backbone of systems that range from health care to high finance. Yet despite the avalanche of data available in today´s information age, neither institutions nor individuals get the information they truly need to make well-informed decisions. Faulty information and sub-optimal decision-making create an imbalance of power that is exaggerated as governments and corporations amass enormous databases on each of us. Who has more power: the government, in possession of uncounted terabytes of data (some of it obtained by cybersnooping), or the ordinary citizen, trying to get in touch with a government agency? InMissed Information,David Sarokin and Jay Schulkin explore information-not information technology, but information itself-as a central part of our lives and institutions. They show that providing better information and better access to it improves the quality of our decisions and makes for a more vibrant participatory society.

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David Sarokin is an environmental scientist with the Environmental Protection Agency. Jay Schulkin is Research Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University, where he is also a member of the Center for the Brain Basis of Cognition.

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