[notthegov]

If these benefits are legitimate, why can't they focus on 5 or 10 specific objectives, and write them in some concise form like the Bill of Rights? Why does it need to be 2,000 pages and full of complex, obsfucated concepts and details?

Is the only way for progress to happen?

And even if the TPP is completely beneficial, it is still part of the philosophy of economic integration. Which at its heart is promoting the centralization of power and the diminishment of classical liberalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_integration#Stages

[ThrustVectoring]

>Why does it need to be 2,000 pages and full of complex, obsfucated concepts and details?

The cynic in me says thinks of the TPP as a gigantic pile of economic concessions to specific corporate interests.

The more generous interpretation is that free trade creates winners and losers, but there's generally more winners than losers. The length of the agreement is then the result of multilateral negotiations. Each party realizes - in excruciating detail - how they're getting screwed, and attempts to negotiate concessions for agreeing to the entire thing.

[pzone]

Of course it's a gigantic pile of economic concessions. But mostly that's in the form of tariffs which aren't struck down as quickly as others. Some countries really really want to keep their little pet tariff, like Japan taxing automobile imports. They get to keep those taxes for 30+ years instead of reducing them to zero as quickly as we want. So no it's not perfect, but at least they agreed to move toward freer trade eventually.

[jonknee]

The Bill of Rights is really short and simple, but there have been millions of pages of legal precedent discussing and defining it ever since it was enacted. If you made TPP a concise document with 5-10 specific objectives they would all be litigated for decades to decide on the very same special cases that are detailed in the 2,000 page agreement.

[vonklaus]

The bill of rights is amazing and everything is an anti-pattern. The bill of rights explicitly says what you are allowed to never have done to you. Where as most laws try to prevent specific things. I am not saying law is black and white, but it is certainly difficult to understand, simplicity is important.

> If you made TPP a concise document with 5-10 specific objectives they would all be litigated for decades to decide on the very same special cases that are detailed in the 2,000 page agreement.

I started reading the TPP today, but I didn't get far enough to form an opinion, although I suspect that would be ideal. In a world changing as fast as ours having an agreement span 3 decades seems laughable.

[MichaelGG]

I don't really know, but I'm guessing it's a comprehensive deal. With tons of players with their own goals. So there's probably plenty of stuff like "your eggs aren't round enough to be labelled like that, but we'll allow them if we can call our meat like this". And "we don't like your copyright law, but in exchange for ... we'll allow it". Layer on exceptions and whatever else and the page count goes up real quick.

Even selling a company for just 8-figures is more than 5-10 pages and these deals far eclipse that amount and probably directly involve hundreds of people if not thousands.

[typon]

I would be okay with minutia or details like these, making it a highly complex trade agreement. What i can never swallow is the secrecy. If it really is a good trade deal, why not make it transparent? They should be publishing it online, searchable and indexable with consice summaries for every section. This deal will literally affect billions of people, the people have a right to know.

[pzone]

Here's a summary. https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...

Here's the full text. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...

Google mentioned in their press release that they were not happy about the secrecy in the negotiations. The negotiations were secret for the same reason diplomatic cables are secret. These agreements would involve things like Japan agreeing to to stop subsidizing rice farmers as long as it can keep its high auto tariffs for a few decades. It's nasty stuff, embarrassing to watch the sausage get made. But maybe it was a bad idea to do it all in secrecy.

[MichaelGG]

The reasoning provided is that negotiators can't do their jobs well if every single thing they ask for is publicized then politicized. Unfortunately this ends up with a treaty that no one wants to renegotiate, a take-it-or-leave-it deal with a bunch of sunk costs.

[vidarh]

There is a lot of middle ground between keeping something secret until there's something take-it-or-leave-it vs. publishing every "what if we do X, will you then let us do Y" back and forth. If more intermediate work products are unfit for public eyes, perhaps they shouldn't be going there in the first place.

[MichaelGG]

OK but what would they publish? General ideas? The details being published would only lead to a mess as each company could advertise and make a fuss over things. Or other countries might do the same to shift things in their favor. The end goal for each country is to do things to benefit themselves, even if it means making hard decisions.

It's not like spy exchange negotiations or all other sorts of diplomatic processes are public. And it's not that things are unfit for the public per se, just that publishing each move isn't beneficial.

Yikes I never thought I'd be defending TPP-like processes. Personally I think we're (the world) not yet ready for this level of globalisation, unfortunately.

[vidarh]

Spy exhanges and most diplomatic processes rarely gets enshrined in law. At least not without the resulting law being written in a far more open process afterwards (e.g. consider changes after the Troubles in Northern Ireland - the negotiations certainly didn't happen in the limelight, but the subsequent legal changes in the UK did happen in the open).

Whether or not "publishing each move" is beneficial depends on what "each move" is. I agree that at the most fine grained level, you don't want everyone to find out how far you were willing to go in conversations with one opposing negotiator, in case you need to negotiate similar clauses with someone else, for example.

But once you have agreed that you're giving X in return for Y, publishing that should not do much harm unless giving X is controversial. In which case the "harm" might be exactly what ought to happen.

Here's another example, which is more relevant:

During Norways EEA negotiations with the EU, the Norwegian press reported details pretty much daily. I just checked the archive of one of Norways largest papers to confirm my memory, and from '90 to '92, EEA was mentioned about 5000 times, and included things like government ministers informing the press about likely contents of Norwegian negotiation positions that had not yet been presented to the EU (but where the overall lines of the EU position was known - in one case I looked at, the minister confirmed that the Norwegian position would overall come close to what the EU had asked for in terms of regulation of granting operating licenses for EU companies in certain areas).

They certainly did not get access to everything, but they got regular briefings, and it contributed to ensuring the debate over whether or not to join the EEA shaped the negotiations, as the sitting, pro-EEA government got very clear signals about which concessions would cause the biggest problems with the opposition and/or cost them voters.

[haikuginger]

Bought a house recently- all in, there were around a hundred pages of paperwork.

[jdavis703]

Why should other countries give those "5 or 10 specific objectives" to American companies in exchange for nothing (since those countries don't really have an equivalent "tech" industry it really wouldn't be mutually beneficial). This is where things like allowing foreign workers to undercut American salaries comes into play.

[pzone]

Concise summary of the benefits: the signatory states will reduce tariffs on most trade toward zero over a period of several years.

This key point seems to get lost in the debate.