Stefaan Verhulst

Collected Essays by Moshe Maor: “…explains the phenomenon of sustained policy overinvestment or overreaction over extended periods. These long-term patterns of policy overproduction, known as policy bubbles, arise from psychological dynamics, institutional routines, and deliberate strategic action that generate positive feedback loops and lock policymakers into persistent overinvestment.

Leading expert Moshe Maor underscores the need to examine policy bubbles across their full life cycle: emergence, maturation, and termination or incorporation. Drawing on diverse case studies — including the NATO expansion foreign policy bubble, the corresponding political bubble in the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. crime policy bubble — the book traces the full life cycle of real-world policy bubbles and outlines how governments can better detect, understand, and respond to them. Through this analysis, Maor provides a comprehensive account of how policy bubbles persist and why uncovering their underlying drivers is essential for designing proportionate, evidence-aligned, and resilient policies.

Investigating a highly relevant policy anomaly, Policy Bubbles is an essential resource for scholars and students of public policy, public administration, and public management. Economists studying financial and asset bubbles, as well as government analysts, will likewise benefit from its groundbreaking insights…(More)”

Report by UNDP: “This report draws on workshops, stakeholder sessions, and in-country engagements with eleven countries and territories conducted through UNDP’s AI Trust & Safety Re-imagination Programme. It does not rank countries or propose a universal regulatory model. It surfaces what is already happening: the decisions being made, the risks materializing, and the governance approaches that are working under real institutional constraints. 

The central finding is straightforward. Many of the most consequential AI governance decisions are not being made in policy frameworks. They are being made in procurement offices, vendor contracts, software update cycles, and the informal decisions of civil servants and institutional teams navigating AI use without clear guidance, approval processes, or accountability pathways. Getting governance right means embedding it in these operational settings, not treating it as a separate layer above them…(More)”

The Economist: “…the British state’s ability to function is about to get dramatically worse—a warning to rich democracies everywhere. Citizens frustrated by the poor deal they get from the authorities are turning to artificial intelligence to file objections and appeals, and claim their dues. The resulting deluge of complaints, and demands, will overwhelm bureaucracies built for the age of the post and the telephone. Too little is being done to prevent the state from drowning.

This inundation has been dubbed “agentic flooding”, and its tides are lapping at bureaucracies everywhere, from tax appeals to welfare claims to parking tickets. The waters are rising alarmingly fast in Britain. As we report this week, while worries about AI dwell on the threats to safety and jobs, the backlog in employment tribunals has quietly risen by 55% in a year, in large part due to AI-fuelled claims. Demand for emergency injunctions has surged 100-fold. And the AI tide has only just begun to come in….

At first sight this looks like a cracking result for fed-up citizens. No one likes parking tickets. The poor could exercise their lawful rights as successfully as the sharp-elbowed middle classes do today. Yet it threatens to become a tragedy of the commons. If the state is overwhelmed and cannot function, everyone loses. When 20th-century governments created broad rights, they had the noble ideal of making citizenship meaningful. The public would be heard in consultations, get information under transparency laws and win redress for maladministration from a panoply of ombudsmen, tribunals, commissioners and judges. But these analogue systems assumed that few people would have the time or temperament to pursue their rights to the bitter end; and that of those who did, few would have the money to pay for a lawyer…(More)”.

Book by Gil Durán: “When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.

Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.

The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.

The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now…(More)”.

Essay by Anne Lawrence-Mathers: “Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.

Its complex diagrams were at the center of its appeal. Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Nor do they act as models to be replicated in three-dimensional form as pieces of magical equipment. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters.³ Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.

Several factors made the Ars notoria fundamentally different from other magical texts. First, this is not a text in conflict with the church. In fact, the rituals framing and shaping usage of the images are presented as extremely pious, and the texts to be recited are identified as prayers. The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”, and are claimed to preserve both the names of angels and words used to communicate with them. Second, the advantages offered are relatively virtuous: contact with spiritual beings and full knowledge of the subjects taught in medieval universities. Such claims cut little ice with thirteenth-century theologians, however, who saw clear links to things condemned as superstitious and demonic by St Augustine, despite the text’s assertion that it contains wisdom revealed to King Solomon…(More)”.

Paper by Alberto Bitonti and Sergiu Gherghina: “This article reviews the literature on deliberative quality, a key concept used in deliberative democracy scholarship to assess how closely actual deliberation approximates normative ideals. It traces the development of deliberative theory from early models through to more inclusive and systemic approaches. The review maps the main empirical tools developed to measure deliberative quality, which differ in their normative assumptions, methodological designs, and levels of analysis. While the proliferation of approaches reflects the richness of the field, it also creates challenges regarding empirical comparability and theoretical clarity. The article concludes with a section highlighting a research agenda calling for conceptual alignment and methodological refinement to support future research on deliberation, especially in contexts where deliberative processes are becoming increasingly institutionalised and often proposed as responses to political polarisation and democratic distrust. We provide a comprehensive and systematic overview for scholars interested in deliberative processes and their normative and empirical evaluation…(More)”.

Project by AidData: “… has compiled an inventory of key development data assets, which will feed into future work to track funding to this data ecosystem.

Our interactive Data Asset Inventory provides granular detail on 496 assets published by 230 organizations across 7 of the most important sectors for development: agriculture and food security, disaster response, education, environment, gender, governance, and health.

Explore the public beta, and share your feedback to inform the next phase of this effort. Are there important data assets you work with that are missing from our inventory?…(More)”.

Report by Tessa Dunlop, Ventseslav Kozarev, Ângela Guimarães Pereira and Paulo Rosa: “Citizen engagement processes can be transformative, especially for participating citizens. But what is their impact on policymaking, democratic systems and the broader public? This report maps a range of impacts across policy, institutions and society. Qualitative interview and survey data reveal that public administrations that engaged in citizen participation saw significant benefits, including improved policymaking, stronger democracies, greater legitimacy and increased trust in government, so much so that they are ready to conduct other participatory exercises. The study suggests and illustrates a number of indirect impact pathways, indicating that the extent of policy impact may be underestimated. Furthermore, citizen engagement drives culture change within institutions and enhances their capacity to engage more directly with citizens. Looking through a relational lens, citizen engagement processes foster closer connections between citizens and policymaking, but also between stakeholders, civil society, citizens, policymakers, and others. Key factors include the commitment of institutions and policymakers, and public communication about citizen engagement processes. Overall, the key message is that desired impact should be the starting point of citizen engagement processes, not an afterthought – support may erode if citizens and policymakers cannot see tangible outcomes. Commissioning bodies and organisers should prioritise commitment, legitimacy, and integration to ensure meaningful impacts…(More)”.

Book by Marion K. Poetz and Henry Sauermann: “…explores how millions of people can significantly contribute to scientific research with their effort and experience, even if they are not working at scientific institutions and may not have formal scientific training. 

Drawing on a strong foundation of scholarship on crowd involvement, this book helps researchers recognize and understand the benefits and challenges of crowd involvement across key stages of the scientific process. Designed as a practical toolkit, it enables scientists to critically assess the potential of crowd participation, determine when it can be most effective, and implement it to achieve meaningful scientific and societal outcomes.

The book also discusses how recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) shape the role of crowds in scientific research and can enhance the effectiveness of crowd science projects…(More)”

Paper by Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan: “In 1932, Bernard Baruch, a wealthy financier who made his fortune on Wall Street in the early 20th century, contributed the foreword to a reprint of the 1852 edition of Charles Mackay’s classic book on markets, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Invoking a dictum from Friedrich von Schiller, a German poet and philosopher, Baruch wrote: “Anyone taken as an individual, is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd, heat once becomes a blockhead.” He added, “Without due recognition of crowd-thinking (which often seems crowdmadness) our theories of economics leave much to be desired.” About 40 years later, Eugene Fama, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, published “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work.” It is among the most famous papers ever written in finance. This might be considered the theory Baruch had in mind. Fama posited, “A market in which prices always ‘fully reflect’ available information is called ‘efficient.’” Fama found that strategies investors commonly applied to try to outperform the market, including using past price patterns to project the future and doing fundamental analysis to distinguish between price and value, failed in their objective. In other words, there is no reliable way to take advantage of the blockheads. Nearly all those who study markets carefully agree that they appear sensible for the most part, as theory would have it, but periodically go bonkers. Having one framework to accommodate both realities is useful. James Surowiecki wrote about such an approach in 2004. Riffing on Mackay’s madness of crowds, Surowiecki called his book, The Wisdom of Crowds. He showed that crowds can be remarkably accurate in reflecting objective values or outcomes. Indeed, the prices generated by collectives commonly converge on the proper theoretical price in experimental settings…(More)”