Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is July 10th, 2025, and my guest is writer and teacher, Lowry Presley, of Stanford University, where he is in the Department of Political Science, the Buccois Family Center for Ethics and Society, and the Stanford Civic Initiative. Our topic for today is his book, The Right to Oblivion, Privacy and the Good Life.

Larry, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

I want to tell listeners with children, we may touch on some adult topics in this conversation.

You may want to screen this accordingly.

We recently had Tiffany Jenkins on Econ Talk to talk about the boundary between the public and private sphere. Today we're going to look at related issues, but from a totally different perspective. And I want to start with a question. I love the word oblivion, Lowry, but what do you mean by the right to oblivion?

Well, first I should say that I chose the word oblivion as a sort of deliberately distancing or defamiliarizing word for what it is that privacy gives us, both to those who are outside

of privacy and those who are inside of it

protected. And the reason I did that is because I think we've lost sight of just the huge

variety of different kinds of concealment and obscurity there are and of their differences. So,

you know, just to list a couple

on top of my head, there's privacy, of course, but that's secrecy and confidentiality, anonymity,

mysteries, the forgotten, the loss. These are all ways to not know something. There are all kinds of

barriers to our perception and knowledge.

And my working assumption, and something I argue for throughout the book, is that we have different words for these different kinds of not knowing because they're meaningfully different.

And they're different, not just for the person within who's, you know, protected in some way, but also everybody without.

So the point of the book is to think about what is the specific form of unknowing or the specific type of barrier to knowledge or perception that privacy is, what role it plays in our lives,

...