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T RANSPARENCY is a highly regarded value, a precept used for ideological purposes, and a subject of academic study. The following critical analysis attempts to show that transparency is overvalued. Moreover, its ideological usages cannot be justified, because a social science analysis shows that transparency cannot fulfill the functions its advocates assign to it, although it can play a limited role in their service. We shall see that in assessing transparency, one must take into account a continuum composed of the order of disutility and the level of information costs. The higher the score on both variables, the less useful transparency is. Moreover, these scores need not be particularly high to greatly limit the extent to which the public can rely on transparency for most purposes. I. TRANSPARENCY, WEAK AND STRONG, AND OTHER GOODSTransparency is generally defined as the principle of enabling the public to gain information about the operations and structures of a given entity. 1 Transparency is often considered synonymous with openness and disclosure, although one can find some subtle differences among these terms. 2 In public discourse, transparency is widely considered a "good" on the face of it, similar to privacy and free speech. Transparency is viewed as a self-evident good in Western society to the point that "we might almost say that 'moretransparent-than-thou' has become the secular equivalent of 'holier-than-thou' in modern debates over matters of organization and governance." 3 Transparency International, an organization that promotes transparency in many nations, both developing and industrialized, was founded in 1993 and has won much acclaim.