owned by their clients, but since the proliferation of real-estate websites, the gap between the two prices has shrunk by a third.       It would be naïve to suppose that people abuse information only when they are acting as experts or agents of commerce. Agents and ex- perts are people too-which suggests that we are likely to abuse infor- mation in our personal lives as well, whether by withholding true information or editing the information we choose to put forth. A real- estate agent may wink and nod when she lists a "well-maintained" house, but we each have our equivalent hedges. Think about how you describe yourself during a job interview ver- sus how you might describe yourself on a first date. (For even more fun, compare that first-date conversation to a conversation with the same person during your tenth year of marriage.) Or think about how you might present yourself if you were going on national television for the first time. What sort of image would you want to project? Per- haps you want to seem clever or kind or good-looking; presumably you dont want to come off as cruel or bigoted. During the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, its members took pride in publicly disparaging anybody who wasnt a conservative white Christian. But public big- otry has since been vastly curtailed. (Stetson Kennedy, now eighty- eight years old, attributes this evolution in some part to his long-ago "Frown Power" campaign.) Even subtle displays of bigotry, if they be-     come public, are now costly. Trent Lott, the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, learned this in 2002 after making a toast at a one hun- dredth birthday party for Strom Thurmond, his fellow senator and fellow southerner. Lott made a reference in his toast to Thurmonds 1948 campaign for president, which was built on a platform of segre- gation; Mississippi-Lotts home state-was one of just four states that Thurmond carried. "Were proud of it," Lott told the partygoers.