Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jeffrey D. Sachs: “Today’s most urgent problems are fundamentally global. They require nothing less than concerted, planetwide action if we are to secure a long-term future. But humanity’s story has always been on a global scale. In this book, Jeffrey D. Sachs, renowned economist and expert on sustainable development, turns to world history to shed light on how we can meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century.

Sachs takes readers through a series of seven distinct waves of technological and institutional change, starting with the original settling of the planet by early modern humans through long-distance migration and ending with reflections on today’s globalization. Along the way, he considers how the interplay of geography, technology, and institutions influenced the Neolithic revolution; the role of the horse in the emergence of empires; the spread of large land-based empires in the classical age; the rise of global empires after the opening of sea routes from Europe to Asia and the Americas; and the industrial age. The dynamics of these past waves, Sachs demonstrates, offer fresh perspective on the ongoing processes taking place in our own time—a globalization based on digital technologies. Sachs emphasizes the need for new methods of international governance and cooperation to prevent conflicts and to achieve economic, social, and environmental objectives aligned with sustainable development. The Ages of Globalization is a vital book for all readers aiming to make sense of our rapidly changing world….(More)”.

The GovLab: “Three months ago, COVID-19 brought much of the world to a halt. Faced with the unprecedented challenges brought by the virus, The GovLab put forth a Call for Action to develop the responsible data infrastructure needed to address the pandemic and other dynamic threats. With our partners, we initiated several projects to achieve the goals outlined in the call.

Today we are launching a new hub for The GovLab’s #Data4COVID19 efforts at data4covid19.org. This site brings together our efforts to implement the Call for Action including developing a governance framework, building capacity, establishing data stewardship and a network of data stewards, and engaging people.

You can also use the site to share your updates and efforts with The GovLab team or subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed….(More)’.

Judy Dempsey’s Strategic Europe: “Mathilde Bouyé associate at the Climate Program Of The World Resources Institute: “…the impact of citizens’ deliberation depends on the link to decisionmaking, which varies with each country’s democratic culture. The UK climate assembly informed powerful parliamentary committees, while the French government created a precedent by committing to send the Citizens’ Convention on Climate’s proposals for adoption “without any filter….”

Jan Eichhorn,  Research Director Of D|Part and Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at The University Of Edinburgh: “The climate crisis is so complex that no single action can be the answer to it. However, because of the complexity, formats that can connect otherwise distant actors meaningfully can play a very helpful role. Citizens’ assemblies fit that bill.

If well designed, such assemblies connect expertise with life realities, broaden the horizon of policymakers on what publics may be willing or even excited to consider, and enable publics to learn about options they did not know about. Rather than stoking divisions between people and businesses or between activists and state officials, they can foster common ground and create shared purpose, which is needed to combat comprehensive challenges like the climate crisis….”

Tim Hughes, Director of Involve: “…they are only one way in which people can be—and need to be—involved in decisionmaking. Underpinning citizens’ assemblies are the principles of participation—people being involved in the decisions that affect their lives—and deliberation—people sharing and testing ideas through inclusive and respectful conversations.

It is these principles that we need to build into decisionmaking at all levels of society in order to develop the ideas, energy, and ownership to answer the crisis.”

Mariann Őry,  Head Of The Foreign Desk And Senior Editor At Magyar Hírlap: “Citizens’ initiatives have proven to be effective in reaching a number of goals, but the pressure they can put on stakeholders is not always enough.

It’s not even the most reliable political force: remember that the enthusiasm and momentum of the climate protests has basically vanished since the start of the coronavirus crisis, as if people simply lost interest—though this is surely not the case. A difference can be made on the level of political leaders and, very importantly, on the level of the biggest actors of industry….(More)”.

Emily A. Vogels, Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson at Pew Research: “A large share of experts and analysts worry that people’s technology use will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation in the coming decade. Yet they also foresee significant social and civic innovation between now and 2030 to try to address emerging issues.

In this new report, technology experts who shared serious concerns for democracy in a recent Pew Research Center canvassing weigh in with their views about the likely changes and reforms that might occur in the coming years.

Overall, 697 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to the following query:

Social and civic innovation and its impact on the new difficulties of the digital age: As the Industrial Revolution swept through societies, people eventually took steps to mitigate abuses and harms that emerged. For instance, new laws were enacted to make workplaces safer and protect children; standards were created for product safety and effectiveness; new kinds of organizations came into being to help workers (e.g., labor unions) and make urban life more meaningful (e.g., settlement houses, Boys/Girls Clubs); new educational institutions were created (e.g., trade schools); household roles in families were reconfigured.

Today’s “techlash” illuminates the issues that have surfaced in the digital era. We seek your insights as to whether and how reforms to ease these problems and others might unfold.

The question: Will significant social and civic innovation occur between now and 2030? By “social and civic innovation,” we mean the creation of things like new technology tools, legal protections, social norms, new or reconfigured groups and communities, educational efforts and other strategies to address digital-age challenges.

Some 84% of these respondents say there will be significant social and civic innovation between now and 2030, while 16% say there will not be significant social and civic innovation in the timeframe.

Asked a follow-up question about whether humans’ use of technology will lead to or prevent significant social and civic innovation, 69% of these expert respondents said they expect that technology use will help significantly mitigate problems, 20% predicted that technology use will effectively prevent significant mitigation of problems and 11% responded that it is likely that technology use will have no effect on social and civic innovation.

This is a nonscientific canvassing of experts, based on a non-random sample. The results represent only the opinions of individuals who responded to the query and are not projectable to any other population. The methodology underlying this canvassing is elaborated here. The bulk of this report covers these experts’ written answers explaining their responses.

Respondents in this canvassing sound three broad themes about the changing technology landscape and how it will impact citizens’ political and social activities.

First, they predict that overall connectivity between people and their devices will increase as more digital applications emerge that allow people to create, share and observe information. This trend could accelerate as people employ smart agents and bots to interact with other people or other people’s avatars. These experts say persistent and expanded human connectivity will affect the way people engage with each other as citizens and influence how they work to build groups aimed at impacting policy and politics. Some argue this will change the way people interact with democratic institutions….(More)”.

Essay by David S. Jones and Stefan Helmreich: “…Is the most recent rise in new cases—the sharp increase in case counts and hospitalizations reported this week in several states—a second wave, or rather a second peak of a first wave? Will the world see a devastating second wave in the fall?

Such imagery of waves has pervaded talk about the propagation of the infection from the beginning. On January 29, just under a month after the first instances of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, Chinese health officials published a clinical report about their first 425 cases, describing them as “the first wave of the epidemic.” On March 4 the French epidemiologist Antoine Flahault asked, “Has China just experienced a herald wave, to use terminology borrowed from those who study tsunamis, and is the big wave still to come?” The Asia Times warned shortly thereafter that “a second deadly wave of COVID-19 could crash over China like a tsunami.” A tsunami, however, struck elsewhere, with the epidemic surging in Iran, Italy, France, and then the United States. By the end of April, with the United States having passed one million cases, the wave forecasts had become bleaker. Prominent epidemiologists predicted three possible future “wave scenarios”—described by one Boston reporter as “seascapes,” characterized either by oscillating outbreaks, the arrival of a “monster wave,” or a persistent and rolling crisis.

From Kristine Moore et al., “The Future of the COVID-19 Pandemic” (April 30, 2020). Used with permission from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota.

While this language may be new to much of the public, the figure of the wave has long been employed to describe, analyze, and predict the behavior of epidemics. Understanding this history can help us better appreciate the conceptual inheritances of a scientific discipline suddenly at the center of public discussion. It can also help us judge the utility as well as limitations of those representations of epidemiological waves now in play in thinking about the science and policy of COVID-19. As the statistician Edward Tufte writes in his classic work The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), “At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning about quantitative information.” The wave, operating as a hybrid of the diagrammatic, mathematical, and pictorial, certainly does help to visualize and think about COVID-19 data, but it also does much more. The wave image has become an instrument for public health management and prediction—even prophecy—offering a synoptic, schematic view of the dynamics it describes.

This essay sketches this backstory of epidemic waves, which falls roughly into three eras: waves emerge first as a device of data visualization, then evolve into an object of mathematical modeling and causal investigation and finally morph into a tool of persuasion, intervention, and governance. Accounts of the wave-like rise and fall of rates of illness and death in populations first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, with England a key player in developments that saw government officials collect data permitting the graphical tabulation of disease trends over time. During this period the wave image was primarily metaphorical, a heuristic way of talking about patterns in data. Using curving numerical plots, epidemiologists offered analogies between the spread of infection and the travel of waves, sometimes transposing the temporal tracing of epidemic data onto maps of geographical space. Exactly what mix of forces—natural or social—generated these “epidemic waves” remained a source of speculation….(More)”.

Book by Evan Michelson: “An increasingly important and often overlooked issue in science and technology policy is recognizing the role that philanthropies play in setting the direction of research. In an era where public and private resources for science are strained, the practices that foundations adopt to advance basic and applied research needs to be better understood. This first-of-its-kind study provides a detailed assessment of the current state of science philanthropy. This examination is particularly timely, given that science philanthropies will have an increasingly important and outsized role to play in advancing responsible innovation and in shaping how research is conducted.

Philanthropy and the Future of Science and Technology surveys the landscape of contemporary philanthropic involvement in science and technology by combining theoretical insights drawn from the responsible research and innovation (RRI) framework with empirical analysis investigating an array of detailed examples and case studies. Insights from interviews conducted with foundation representatives, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of sectors add real-world perspective. A wide range of philanthropic interventions are explored, focusing on support for individuals, institutions, and networks, with attention paid to the role that science philanthropies play in helping to establish and coordinate multi-sectoral funding partnerships. Novel approaches to science philanthropy are also considered, including the emergence of crowdfunding and the development of new institutional mechanisms to advance scientific research. The discussion concludes with an imaginative look into the future, outlining a series of lessons learned that can guide how new and established science philanthropies operate and envisioning alternative scenarios for the future that can inform how science philanthropy progresses over the coming decades.

This book offers a major contribution to the advancement of philanthropic investment in science and technology. Thus, it will be of considerable interest to researchers and students in public policy, public administration, political science, science and technology studies, sociology of science, and related disciplines….(More)”.

Paper by Mária Žuffová: “In election times, political parties promise in their manifestos to pass reforms increasing access to government information to root out corruption and improve public service delivery. Scholars have already offered several fascinating explanations of why governments adopt transparency policies that constrain their choices. However, knowledge of their impacts is limited. Does greater access to information deliver on its promises as an anti-corruption policy? While some research has already addressed this question in relation to freedom of information laws, the emergence of new digital technologies enabled new policies, such as open government data. Its effects on corruption remain empirically underexplored due to its novelty and a lack of measurements. In this article, I provide the first empirical study of the relationship between open government data, relative to FOI laws, and corruption. I propose a theoretical framework, which specifies conditions necessary for FOI laws and open government data to affect corruption levels, and I test it on a novel cross-country dataset.

The results suggest that the effects of open government data on corruption are conditional upon the quality of media and internet freedom. Moreover, other factors, such as free and fair elections, independent and accountable judiciary, or economic development, are far more critical for tackling corruption than increasing access to information. These findings are important for policies. In particular, digital transparency reforms will not yield results in the anti-corruption fight unless robust provisions safeguarding media and internet freedom complement them….(More)”.

Richard Thaler at a Special Edition of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes: “I have long considered all my co-editors of this special issue to be good friends. That is, until they asked me to write an editorial on the topic of “what is next?” When a bunch of experts in judgment and decision-making ask you to do something they know to be impossible, you should be suspicious, right? Do they think I don’t know that predicting the future of science is impossible?

They slyly assigned Katy Milkman the job of luring me into agreeing. The first request came via email with what had to be a deliberately impenetrable subject heading: “Ask for OBHDP Special Issue You’re Co-Editing: 1–3 Paragraphs on the Future of Nudge.” The other three co-editors were copied, the message was long and complicated, and, to top it off, the first word of the subject was “Ask.” Katy surely knew there was no chance I would read that email, which of course was part of her cunning strategy. She figured that when she sent the inevitable follow-up email I would feel guilty about not responding to the first one. Guilt is a powerful nudge.

The expected second email came three days later, this time with a catchier one-word subject line: “Noodge.” (Have I mentioned that these emails arrived in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown?) This new email began by acknowledging that the first one had been too long and poorly timed, lulling me into a false sense of security that I was being excused and off the hook. But then, Katy launched the heavy artillery. She framed her request in a way that made my acceptance the default option: “Hope you’re up for writing 1–3 paragraphs, but let me know if not and we’ll manage. :)” We all know that defaults are powerful, but did she really think this was going to work on me? Although I was mildly miffed at the brazen noodging, I find it hard to say “no” to Katy, so I stuck to my usual strategy of lying low and ignored this email as well, foolishly hoping she would give up.

That hope was dashed a week later when the third email arrived with the subject line: “pretty please with sugar on top. :)” Plus, she pulled out another trick she had up her sleeve: a deadline! “The introduction is due in just a few days!” She was telling me that this assignment, which I had never agreed to do, was almost overdue. Of course, she also knew I was trapped in my home with very few excuses. Seeing no plausible escape route at this point, I capitulated and agreed to her request.

Conclusion: nudging works! Even on me.

Recall her request was that I write one to three paragraphs. This is already the sixth paragraph so by all rights I should already be done. Certainly, I will not be lured into making any forecasts. Phil Tetlock is her colleague! But since the word processor is already open, I will instead offer a few thoughts about my hopes and dreams for this enterprise.

My first hope is that the range of “nudges” expands. We know a lot about the effect of the kinds of strategies Katy used in her emails to me such as defaults, reminders, deadlines, guilt, salience, and norms. Come to think of it, I am surprised Katy didn’t try “90 percent of all recipients of my emails agree to do what I ask.” While I concede that these ploys often (though not always) work, it can’t be that they span the entire behavioral science repertoire. So I am hoping to see studies using a different set of behavioral insights. I am sure there are good ones out there….(More)”.

Andrea Saltelli et al at Nature: “The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates perfectly how the operation of science changes when questions of urgency, stakes, values and uncertainty collide — in the ‘post-normal’ regime.

Well before the coronavirus pandemic, statisticians were debating how to prevent malpractice such as p-hacking, particularly when it could influence policy¹. Now, computer modelling is in the limelight, with politicians presenting their policies as dictated by ‘science’². Yet there is no substantial aspect of this pandemic for which any researcher can currently provide precise, reliable numbers. Known unknowns include the prevalence and fatality and reproduction rates of the virus in populations. There are few estimates of the number of asymptomatic infections, and they are highly variable. We know even less about the seasonality of infections and how immunity works, not to mention the impact of social-distancing interventions in diverse, complex societies.

Mathematical models produce highly uncertain numbers that predict future infections, hospitalizations and deaths under various scenarios. Rather than using models to inform their understanding, political rivals often brandish them to support predetermined agendas. To make sure predictions do not become adjuncts to a political cause, modellers, decision makers and citizens need to establish new social norms. Modellers must not be permitted to project more certainty than their models deserve; and politicians must not be allowed to offload accountability to models of their choosing^2,3.

This is important because, when used appropriately, models serve society extremely well: perhaps the best known are those used in weather forecasting. These models have been honed by testing millions of forecasts against reality. So, too, have ways to communicate results to diverse users, from the Digital Marine Weather Dissemination System for ocean-going vessels to the hourly forecasts accumulated by weather.com. Picnickers, airline executives and fishers alike understand both that the modelling outputs are fundamentally uncertain, and how to factor the predictions into decisions.

Here we present a manifesto for best practices for responsible mathematical modelling. Many groups before us have described the best ways to apply modelling insights to policies, including for diseases⁴ (see also Supplementary information). We distil five simple principles to help society demand the quality it needs from modelling….(More)”.

United Nations: “As structural UN reforms consolidate, we are focused on building the data, digital, technology and innovation capabilities that the UN needs to succeed in the 21st century. The Secretary General’s “Data Strategy for Action by Everyone, Everywhere” is our agenda for the data-driven transformation.

Data permeates all aspects of our work, and its power—harnessed responsibly—is critical to the global agendas we serve. The UN family’s footprint, expertise and connectedness create unique opportunities to advance global “data action” with insight, impact and integrity. To help unlock more potential, 50 UN entities jointly designed this Strategy as a comprehensive playbook for data-driven change based on global best practice…

Our strategy pursues a simple idea: we focus not on process, but on learning, iteratively, to deliver data use cases that add value for stakeholders based on our vision, outcomes and principles. Use cases – purposes for which data is used – already permeate our organization. We will systematically identify and deliver them through dedicated data action portfolios. While new capabilities will in part emerge through “learning by doing”, we will also strengthen organizational enablers to deliver on our vision, including shifts in people and culture, partnerships, data governance and technology….(More)”.