Special issue on “the behavioural turn in public policy: new evidence from experiments”


Introduction to the special issue in Economia Politica by Francesco Bogliacino, Cristiano Codagnone and Giuseppe A. Veltri: “Since the publication of the best seller Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein 2008), the growth in the relevance of ‘Behavioural Economics’ (BE) and ‘Nudging’ has been exponential, both in terms of the adoption of behavioural perspectives in policy making and of ongoing academic research. With some simplification three strands can be singled out. First, the widespread application and institutionalisation of behaviourally inspired policy-making beyond the two initial cases of the US and the UK (Lunn 2014; Sousa Lourenço et al. 2016). Second, a discussion within the field of economics as to the place and contribution of BE toward ‘Evidence Based Economics’ (Chetty 2015; Thaler 2016). Third, the explosion between 2010 and 2016 of a multidisciplinary and multi-domain meta-literature of commentaries and essays for and against ‘Nudging’ that deal with its conceptual, theoretical, and philosophical underpinnings, as well as with its political and ethical implications…

In this editorial we briefly consider the three trends outlined above (diffusion of behavioural policy-making, evidence-based economics, and the meta-literature on nudging) and argue in favour of a fruitful dialogue, which is currently missing. In doing this, we sketch the policy triangle of politics, value and evidence as a potential guidance…(More).

Information Isn’t Just Power


Review by Lucy Bernholz  in the Stanford Social Innovation Review:  “Information is power.” This truism pervades Missed Information, an effort by two scientists to examine the role that information now plays as the raw material of modern scholarship, public policy, and institutional behavior. The scholars—David Sarokin, an environmental scientist for the US government, and Jay Schulkin, a research professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University—make this basic case convincingly. In its ever-present, digital, and networked form, data doesn’t just shape government policies and actions—it also creates its own host of controversies. Government policies about collecting, storing, and analyzing information fuel protests and political lobbying, opposing movements for openness and surveillance, and individual acts seen as both treason and heroism. The very fact that two scholars from such different fields are collaborating on this subject is evidence that digitized information has become the lingua franca of present-day affairs.

To Sarokin and Schulkin, the main downside to all this newly available information is that it creates an imbalance of power in who can access and control it. Governments and businesses have visibility into the lives of citizens and customers that is not reciprocated. The US government knows our every move, but we know what our government is doing only when a whistleblower tells us. Businesses have ever more data and ever-finer ways to sort and sift it, yet customers know next to nothing about what is being done with it.

The authors argue, however, that new digital networks also provide opportunities to recalibrate the balance of information and return some power to ordinary citizens. These negotiations are under way all around us. Our current political debates about security versus privacy, and the nature and scope of government transparency, show how the lines of control between governments and the governed are being redrawn. In health care, consumers, advocates, and public policymakers are starting to create online ratings of hospitals, doctors, and the costs of medical procedures. The traditional oneway street of corporate annual reporting is being supplemented by consumer ratings, customer feedback loops, and new information about supply chains and environmental and social factors. Sarokin and Schulkin go to great lengths to show the potential of tools such as comparison guides for patients or sustainability indices for shoppers to enable more informed user decisions.

This argument is important, but it is incomplete. The book’s title, Missed Information, refers to “information that is unintentionally (for the most part) overlooked in the decision-making process—overlooked both by those who provide information and by those who use it.” What is missing from the book, ironically, is a compelling discussion of why this “missed information” is missing. ….

Grouping the book with others of the “Big Data Will Save Us” genre isn’t entirely fair. Sarokin and Schulkin go to great lengths to point out how much of the information we collect is never used for anything, good or bad….(More)”

Using Cloud Computing to Untangle How Trees Can Cool Cities


 at CoolGreenScience: “We’ve all used Google Earth — to explore remote destinations around the world or to check out our house from above. But Google Earth Engine is a valuable tool for conservationists and geographers like myself that allows us to tackle some tricky remote-sensing analysis.

After having completed a few smaller spatial science projects in the cloud (mostly on the Google Earth Engine, or GEE, platform), I decided to give it a real workout — by analyzing more than 300 gigabytes of data across 28 United States and seven Chinese cities.

This project was part of a larger study looking at trees in cities. Why trees? Trees provide numerous valuable ecosystem services to communities: benefits associated with air and water quality, energy conservation, cooler air temperatures, and many other environmental and social benefits.

It’s easy to understand the benefits of trees: stand outside on a hot sunny day and you immediately feel cooler in the shade of a tree. But what’s not as obvious as the cooling effect are tree’s ability to remove particulate matter (PM2.5) floating around in the air we breath. And this important, as this type of air pollution is implicated in the deaths of ~3 million people per year.

The Conservancy researched the relationship between city air quality and the cooling effects of trees. Results of this study will inform the Global Cities Program initiative on Planting Healthy Air for cities ­­— the objective being to show how much trees can clean and cool, how much it will cost, and so forth….(More)”

The Data Visualisation Catalogue


The Data Visualisation Catalogue is an on-going project developed by Severino Ribecca.

Originally, this project was a way for me to develop my own knowledge of data visualisation and create a reference tool for me to use in the future for my own work. However, I felt it would also be useful to both designers and also anyone in a field that requires the use of data visualisation regularly.

Although there have been a few attempts in the past to catalogue some of the established data visualisation methods, there is no website that is really comprehensive, detailed or helps you decide the right method for your needs.

I will be adding in new visualisation methods, bit-by-bit, as I research each method to find the best way to explain how it works and what it is best suited for.

Most of the data visualised in the website’s example images is dummy data….(More)”

Harass Map


Crowdsourced effort  to “Mapping Harassment and Help in the US …in the wake of the 2016 US elections reports of harassment and hate crimes directed at minority groups of all kinds have been widespread. The purpose of this multi-team effort is to collect and map reports of harassment and hate crimes against minority communities. We also seek to collect and map reports of minority communities being helped….This project is a collaboration between CrisisMappers, Harvard University, MIT and UCLA.

Once you submit a report, volunteers will review it to make sure the incident has not already been reported. Volunteers will also seek to verify the incident when and where possible….(More)”

Radical thinking reveals the secrets of making change happen


Extract from his new book in The Guardian where “Duncan Green explores how change actually occurs – and what that means: Political and economic earthquakes are often sudden and unforeseeable, despite the false pundits who pop up later to claim they predicted them all along – take the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2008 global financial crisis, or the Arab Spring (and ensuing winter). Even at a personal level, change is largely unpredictable: how many of us can say our lives have gone according to the plans we had as 16-year-olds?

The essential mystery of the future poses a huge challenge to activists. If change is only explicable in the rear-view mirror, how can we accurately envision the future changes we seek, let alone achieve them? How can we be sure our proposals will make things better, and not fall victim to unintended consequences? People employ many concepts to grapple with such questions. I find “systems” and “complexity” two of the most helpful.

A “system” is an interconnected set of elements coherently organised in a way that achieves something. It is more than the sum of its parts: a body is more than an aggregate of individual cells; a university is not merely an agglomeration of individual students, professors, and buildings; an ecosystem is not just a set of individual plants and animals.

A defining property of human systems is complexity: because of the sheer number of relationships and feedback loops among their many elements, they cannot be reduced to simple chains of cause and effect. Think of a crowd on a city street, or a flock of starlings wheeling in the sky at dusk. Even with supercomputers, it is impossible to predict the movement of any given person or starling, but there is order; amazingly few collisions occur even on the most crowded streets.

In complex systems, change results from the interplay of many diverse and apparently unrelated factors. Those of us engaged in seeking change need to identify which elements are important and understand how they interact.

My interest in systems thinking began when collecting stories for my book FromPoverty to Power. The light-bulb moment came on a visit to India’s Bundelkhandregion, where the poor fishing communities of Tikamgarh had won rights to more than 150 large ponds. In that struggle numerous factors interacted to create change. First, a technological shift triggered changes in behaviour: the introduction of new varieties of fish, which made the ponds more profitable,induced landlords to seize ponds that had been communal. Conflict then built pressure for government action: a group of 12 brave young fishers in one village fought back, prompting a series of violent clashes that radicalized and inspired other communities; women’s groups were organized for the first time, taking control of nine ponds. Enlightened politicians and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helped pass new laws and the police amazed everyone by enforcing them.

The fishing communities were the real heroes of the story. They tenaciously faced down a violent campaign of intimidation, moved from direct action to advocacy, and ended up winning not only access to the ponds but a series of legal and policy changes that benefited all fishing families.

The neat narrative sequence of cause and effect I’ve just written, of course, is only possible in hindsight. In the thick of the action, no-one could have said why the various actors acted as they did, or what transformed the relative power of each. Tikamgarh’s experience highlights how unpredictable is the interaction between structures (such as state institutions), agency (by communities and individuals), and the broader context (characterized by shifts in technology,environment, demography, or norms).

Unfortunately, the way we commonly think about change projects onto the future the neat narratives we draw from the past. Many of the mental models we use are linear plans – “if A,then B” – with profound consequences in terms of failure, frustration, and missed opportunities. AsMike Tyson memorably said, “Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth”….(More)

See also http://how-change-happens.com/

Africa’s health won’t improve without reliable data and collaboration


 and  at the Conversation: “…Africa has a data problem. This is true in many sectors. When it comes to health there’s both a lack of basic population data about disease and an absence of information about what impact, if any, interventions involving social determinants of health – housing, nutrition and the like – are having.

Simply put, researchers often don’t know who is sick or what people are being exposed to that, if addressed, could prevent disease and improve health. They cannot say if poor sanitation is the biggest culprit, or if substandard housing in a particular region is to blame. They don’t have the data that explains which populations are most vulnerable.

These data are required to inform development of innovative interventions that apply a “Health in All Policies” approach to address social determinants of health and improve health equity.

To address this, health data need to be integrated with social determinant data about areas like food, housing, and physical activity or mobility. Even where population data are available, they are not always reliable. There’s often an issue of compatability: different sectors collect different kinds of information using varying methodologies.

Different sectors also use different indicators to collect information on the same social determinant of health. This makes data integration challenging.

Without clear, focused, reliable data it’s difficult to understand what a society’s problems are and what specific solutions – which may lie outside the health sector – might be suitable for that unique context.

Scaling up innovations

Some remarkable work is being done to tackle Africa’s health problems. This ranges from technological innovations to harnessing indigenous knowledge for change. Both approaches are vital. But it’s hard for these to be scaled up either in terms of numbers or reach.

This boils down to a lack of funding or a lack of access to funding. Too many potentially excellent projects remain stuck at the pilot phase, which has limited value for ordinary people…..

Governments need to develop health equity surveillance systems to overcome the current lack of data. It’s also crucial that governments integrate and monitor health and social determinants of health indicators in one central system. This would provide a better understanding of health inequity in a given context.

For this to happen, governments must work with public and private sector stakeholders and nongovernmental organisations – not just in health, but beyond it so that social determinants of health can be better measured and captured.

The data that already exists at sub-national, national, regional and continental level mustn’t just be brushed aside. It should be archived and digitised so that it isn’t lost.

Researchers have a role to play here. They have to harmonise and be innovative in the methodologies they use for data collection. If researchers can work together across the breadth of sectors and disciplines that influence health, important information won’t slip through the cracks.

When it comes to scaling up innovation, governments need to step up to the plate. It’s crucial that they support successful health innovations, whether these are rooted in indigenous knowledge or are new technologies. And since – as we’ve already shown – health issues aren’t the exclusive preserve of the health sector, governments should look to different sectors and innovative partnerships to generate support and funding….(More)”

Is Open Data the Death of FOIA?


Beth Noveck at the Yale Law Journal: “For fifty years, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been the platinum standard for open government in the United States. The statute is considered the legal bedrock of the public’s right to know about the workings of our government. More than one hundred countries and all fifty states have enacted their own freedom of information laws. At the same time, FOIA’s many limitations have also become evident: a cumbersome process, delays in responses, and redactions that frustrate journalists and other information seekers. Politically-motivated nuisance requests bedevil government agencies.With over 700,000 FOIA requests filed every year, the federal government faces the costs of a mounting backlog.

In recent years, however, an entirely different approach to government transparency in line with the era of big data has emerged: open government data. Open government data —generally shortened to open data—has many definitions but is generally considered to be publicly available information that can be universally and readily accessed, used, and redistributed free of charge in digital form. Open data is not limited to statistics, but also includes text such as the United States Federal Register, the daily newspaper of government, which was released as open data in bulk form in 2010.

To understand how significant the open data movement is for FOIA, this Essay discusses the impact of open data on the institutions and functions of government and the ways open data contrasts markedly with FOIA. Open data emphasizes the proactive publication of whole classes of information. Open data includes data about the workings of government but also data collected by the government about the economy and society posted online in a centralized repository for use by the wider public, including academic users seeking information as the basis for original research and commercial users looking to create new products and services. For example, Pixar used open data from the United States Geological Survey to create more realistic detail in scenes from its movie The Good Dinosaur.

By contrast, FOIA promotes ex post publication of information created by the government especially about its own workings in response to specific demands by individual requestors. I argue that open data’s more systematic and collaborative approach represents a radical and welcome departure from FOIA because open data concentrates on information as a means to solve problems to the end of improving government effectiveness. Open data is legitimated by the improved outcomes it yields and grounded in a theory of government effectiveness and, as a result, eschews the adversarial and ad hoc FOIA approach. Ultimately, however, each tactic offers important complementary benefits. The proactive information disclosure regime of open data is strengthened by FOIA’s rights of legal enforcement. Together, they stand to become the hallmark of government transparency in the fifty years ahead….(More)”.

Comparing resistance to open data performance measurement


Paper by Gregory Michener and Otavio Ritter in Public Administration : “Much is known about governmental resistance to disclosure laws, less so about multi-stakeholder resistance to open data. This study compares open data initiatives within the primary and secondary school systems of Brazil and the UK, focusing on stakeholder resistance and corresponding policy solutions. The analytical framework is based on the ‘Three-Ps’ of open data resistance to performance metrics, corresponding to professional, political, and privacy-related concerns. Evidence shows that resistance is highly nuanced, as stakeholders alternately serve as both principals and agents. School administrators, for example, are simultaneously principals to service providers and teachers, and at once agents to parents and politicians. Relying on a different systems comparison, in-depth interviews, and newspaper content analyses, we find that similar stakeholders across countries demonstrate strikingly divergent levels of resistance. In overcoming stakeholder resistance – across socioeconomic divides – context conscientious ‘data-informed’ evaluations may promote greater acceptance than narrowly ‘data-driven’ performance measurements…(More)”

Towards a DataPlace: mapping data in a game to encourage participatory design in smart cities


Paper by Barker, Matthew; Wolff, Annika and van der Linden, Janet: “The smart city has been envisioned as a place where citizens can participate in city decision making and in the design of city services. As a key part of this vision, pervasive digital technology and open data legislation are being framed as vehicles for citizens to access rich data about their city. It has become apparent though, that simply providing access to these resources does not automatically lead to the development of data-driven applications. If we are going to engage more of the citizenry in smart city design and raise productivity, we are going to need to make the data itself more accessible, engaging and intelligible for non-experts. This ongoing study is exploring one method for doing so. As part of the MK:Smart City project team, we are developing a tangible data look-up interface that acts as an alternative to the conventional DataBase. This interface, or DataPlace as we are calling it, takes the form of a map, which the user places sensors on to physically capture real-time data. This is a simulation of the physical act of capturing data in the real world. We discuss the design of the DataPlace prototype under development and the planned user trials to test out our hypothesis; that a DataPlace can make handling data more accessible, intelligible and engaging for non-experts than conventional interface types….(More)”