Collection

Is behavioural economics ready to save the world?

Curated on May 10, 2016October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by Trenton G Smith of Behavioral Economics and Public Health : “Modern medicine has long doled out helpful advice to ailing patients about not only drug treatments, but also diet, exercise, alcohol abuse, and many other lifestyle decisions. And for just as long, patients have been failing to follow doctors’ orders. Many of today’s most pressing public health problems would disappear if people would just make better choices.

Enter behavioural economics. A fairly recent offshoot of the dismal science, behavioural economics aims to take the coldly rational decision makers who normally populate economic theories, and instil in them a host of human foibles. Neoclassical (ie, conventional) economics, after all is the study of optimising behaviour in the presence of material constraints—why not add constraints on cognitive capacity, or self-control, or susceptibility to the formation of bad habits? The hope is that by incorporating insights from other behavioural sciences (most notably cognitive psychology and neuroscience) while retaining the methodological rigour of neoclassical economics, behavioural economics will yield a more richly descriptive theory of human behaviour, and generate new and important insights to better inform public policy.

Policy makers have taken notice. In an era in which free-market rhetoric dominates the political landscape, the idea that small changes to public health policies might serve to nudge consumers towards healthier behaviours holds great appeal. Even though some (irrational) consumers might be better off, the argument goes, if certain unhealthy food products were banned (or worse, taxed), this approach would infringe on the rights of the many consumers who want to indulge occasionally, and fully understand the consequences. If governments could instead use evidence from consumer science to make food labels more effective, or to improve the way that healthy foods are presented in school cafeterias, more politically unpalatable interventions in the marketplace might not be needed. This idea, dubbed “libertarian paternalism” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, has been pursued with gusto in both the UK (David Cameron’s Government formed the Behavioural Insights Team—unofficially described as the Nudge Unit) and the USA (where Sunstein spent time in the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs).

Whatever public health practitioners might think about these developments—or indeed, of economics as a discipline—this turn of events has rather suddenly given scholars at the cutting edge of consumer science an influential voice in the regulatory process, and some of the best and brightest have stepped up to contribute. Behavioral Economics & Public Health (edited by Christina Roberto and Ichiro Kawachi) is the product of a 2014 Harvard University exploratory workshop on applying social science insights to public health. As might be expected in a volume that aims to bring together two such inherently multidisciplinary fields, the book’s 11 chapters offer an eclectic mix of perspectives. The editors begin with an excellent overview of the field of behavioural economics and its applications to public health, and an economic perspective can also be found in four of the other chapters: Justin White and William Dow write about intertemporal choice, Kristina Lewis and Jason Block review the use of incentives to promote health, Michael Sanders and Michael Hallsworth describe their experience working within the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, and Frederick Zimmerman concludes with a thoughtful critique of the field of behavioural economics. The other contributions are largely from the perspectives of psychology and marketing: Dennis Runger and Wendy Wood discuss habit formation, Rebecca Ferrer and colleagues emphasise the importance of emotion in decision making, Brent McFerran discusses social norms in the context of obesity, Jason Riis and Rebecca Ratner explain why some public health communication strategies are more effective than others, and Zoe Chance and colleagues and Brian Wansink offer frameworks for designing environments (eg, in schools and workplaces) that are conducive to healthy choices.

This collection of essays holds many hidden gems, but the one that surprised me the most was the attention given (by Runger and Wood briefly, and Zimmerman extensively) to a dirty little secret that behavioural economists rarely mention: once it is acknowledged that sometimes-irrational consumers can be manipulated into making healthy choices, it does not require much of a leap to conclude that business interests can—and do—use the same methods to push back in the other direction. This conclusion leads Zimmerman to a discussion of power in the marketplace and in our collective political economy, and to a call to action on these larger structural issues in society that neoclassical theory has long neglected….(More; Book)

The New Power Politics: Networks and Transnational Security Governance

Curated on May 10, 2016November 14, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Deborah Avant and Oliver Westerwinter: “Traditional analyses of global security cannot explain the degree to which there is “governance” of important security issues — from combatting piracy to curtailing nuclear proliferation to reducing the contributions of extractive industries to violence and conflict. They are even less able to explain why contemporary governance schemes involve the various actors and take the many forms they do.

Juxtaposing the insights of scholars writing about new modes of governance with the logic of network theory, The New Power Politics offers a framework for understanding contemporary security governance and its variation. The framework rests on a fresh view of power and how it works in global politics. Though power is integral to governance, it is something that emerges from, and depends on, relationships. Thus, power is dynamic; it is something that governors must continually cultivate with a wide range of consequential global players, and how a governor uses power in one situation can have consequences for her future relationships, and thus, future power.

Understanding this new power politics is crucial for explaining and shaping the future of global security politics. This stellar group of scholars analyzes both the networking strategies of would-be governors and their impacts on the effectiveness of governance and whether it reflects broad or narrow concerns on a wide range of contemporary governance issues….(More)”

Offshore Leaks Database

Curated on May 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“This ICIJ database contains information on almost 320,000 offshore entities that are part of the Panama Papers and the Offshore Leaks investigations. The data covers nearly 40 years up to the end of 2015 and links to people and companies in more than 200 countries and territories.

DISCLAIMER

There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly. Many people and entities have the same or similar names. We suggest you confirm the identities of any individuals or entities located in the database based on addresses or other identifiable information. If you find an error in the database please get in touch with us….(More)”

The promises and pitfalls of open urban data

Curated on May 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Keynote by Robert M. Goerge at the 2016 Third International Conference on eDemocracy & eGovernment (ICEDEG) Open data portals are springing up around the world. Municipalities, states and countries have made available data that has never been as accessible to the general public. These data have led to many applications that have informed the public of new urban conditions or provided information to make urban life easier. However, it should be clear that these data have limitations in the effort to solve many urban problems because in may cases they do not provide all of the information that is needed by government and NGOs to get at the cause or at least correlations of the problem at hand. It is still necessary to have access to data that cannot be made public to address some of most serious urban problems. While this seems just to apply to public access, it is also the case that government employees or those with legitimate access to the necessary non-open data lack access because of legal, organizational, privacy, or bureaucratic issues. This limits the promise of increasing data-driven efforts to address the most critical urban issues. Solutions to these problems in the context of ethical behavior will be discussed….(More)”

Yelp, Google Hold Pointers to Fix Governments

Curated on May 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal: “When Kaspar Korjus was born, he was given a number before he was given a name, as are all babies in Estonia. “My name is 38712012796, which I got before my name of Kaspar,”says Mr. Korjus.

In Estonia, much of life—voting, digital signatures, prescriptions, taxes, banktransactions—is conducted with this number. The resulting services aren’t just more convenient, they are demonstrably better. It takes an Estonian three minutes to file his or her taxes.

Americans are unlikely to accept a unified national ID system. But Estonia offers an example of the kind of innovation possible around government services, a competitive factor for modern nations.

The former Soviet republic—with a population of 1.3 million, roughly the size of SanDiego—is regularly cited as a world leader in e-governance. At base, e-governance is about making government function as well as private enterprise, mostly by adopting the same information-technology infrastructure and management techniques as the world’s most technologically savvy corporations.

It isn’t that Estonia devotes more people to the problem—it took only 60 to build the identity system. It is that the country’s leaders are willing to empower those engineers.“There is a need for politicians to not only show leadership but also there is a need to take risks,” says Estonia’s prime minister, Taavi Rõivas.

In the U.S., Matt Lira, senior adviser for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, says the gap between the government’s information technology and the private sector’s has grown larger than ever. Americans want to access government services—paying property taxes or renewing a driver’s license—as easily as they look up a restaurant on Yelp or a business on Alphabet’s Google, says Neil Kleiman, a professor of policy at New York University who collaborates with cities in this subject area.

The government is unlikely to catch up soon. The Government Accountability Office last year estimated that about 25% of the federal government’s 738 major IT investments—projected to cost a total of $42 billion—were in danger of significant delays or cost overruns.

One reason for such overruns is the government’s reliance on big, monolithic projects based on proposal documents that can run to hundreds of pages. It is an approach to software development that is at least 20 years out of date. Modern development emphasizes small chunks of code accomplished in sprints and delivered to end users quickly so that problems can be identified and corrected.

Two years ago, the Obama administration devised a novel way to address these issues:assembling a crack team of coders and project managers from the likes of Google,Amazon.com and Microsoft and assigning them to big government boondoggles to help existing IT staff run more like the private sector. Known as 18F, this organization and its sister group, the U.S. Digital Service, are set to hit 500 staffers by the end of 2016….(More)”

‘Big data’ was supposed to fix education. It didn’t. It’s time for ‘small data’

Curated on May 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Pasi Sahlberg and Jonathan Hasak in the Washington Post: “One thing that distinguishes schools in the United States from schools around the world is how data walls, which typically reflect standardized test results, decorate hallways and teacher lounges. Green, yellow, and red colors indicate levels of performance of students and classrooms. For serious reformers, this is the type of transparency that reveals more data about schools and is seen as part of the solution to how to conduct effective school improvement. These data sets, however, often don’t spark insight about teaching and learning in classrooms; they are based on analytics and statistics, not on emotions and relationships that drive learning in schools. They also report outputs and outcomes, not the impacts of learning on the lives and minds of learners….

If you are a leader of any modern education system, you probably care a lot about collecting, analyzing, storing, and communicating massive amounts of information about your schools, teachers, and students based on these data sets. This information is “big data,” a term that first appeared around 2000, which refers to data sets that are so large and complex that processing them by conventional data processing applications isn’t possible. Two decades ago, the type of data education management systems processed were input factors of education system, such as student enrollments, teacher characteristics, or education expenditures handled by education department’s statistical officer. Today, however, big data covers a range of indicators about teaching and learning processes, and increasingly reports on student achievement trends over time.

With the outpouring of data, international organizations continue to build regional and global data banks. Whether it’s the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Commission, or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, today’s international reformers are collecting and handling more data about human development than before. Beyond government agencies, there are global education and consulting enterprises like Pearson and McKinsey that see business opportunities in big data markets.

Among the best known today is the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy of 15-year-olds around the world. OECD now also administers an Education GPS, or a global positioning system, that aims to tell policymakers where their education systems place in a global grid and how to move to desired destinations. OECD has clearly become a world leader in the big data movement in education.

Despite all this new information and benefits that come with it, there are clear handicaps in how big data has been used in education reforms. In fact, pundits and policymakers often forget that Big data, at best, only reveals correlations between variables in education, not causality. As any introduction to statistics course will tell you, correlation does not imply causation….
We believe that it is becoming evident that big data alone won’t be able to fix education systems. Decision-makers need to gain a better understanding of what good teaching is and how it leads to better learning in schools. This is where information about details, relationships and narratives in schools become important. These are what Martin Lindstrom calls “small data”: small clues that uncover huge trends. In education, these small clues are often hidden in the invisible fabric of schools. Understanding this fabric must become a priority for improving education.

To be sure, there is not one right way to gather small data in education. Perhaps the most important next step is to realize the limitations of current big data-driven policies and practices. Too strong reliance on externally collected data may be misleading in policy-making. This is an example of what small data look like in practice:

It reduces census-based national student assessments to the necessary minimum and transfer saved resources to enhance the quality of formative assessments in schools and teacher education on other alternative assessment methods. Evidence shows that formative and other school-based assessments are much more likely to improve quality of education than conventional standardized tests.
It strengthens collective autonomy of schools by giving teachers more independence from bureaucracy and investing in teamwork in schools. This would enhance social capital that is proved to be critical aspects of building trust within education and enhancing student learning.
It empowers students by involving them in assessing and reflecting their own learning and then incorporating that information into collective human judgment about teaching and learning (supported by national big data). Because there are different ways students can be smart in schools, no one way of measuring student achievement will reveal success. Students’ voices about their own growth may be those tiny clues that can uncover important trends of improving learning.

Edwards Deming once said that “without data you are another person with an opinion.” But Deming couldn’t have imagined the size and speed of data systems we have today….(More)”

Can Crowdsourcing Help Make Life Easier For People With Disabilities?

Curated on May 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sean Captain at FastCompany: “These days GPS technology can get you as close as about 10 feet from your destination, close enough to see it—assuming you can see.

But those last few feet are a chasm for the blind (and GPS accuracy sometimes falls only within about 30 feet).

“Actually finding the bus stop, not the right street, but standing in the right place when the bus comes, is pretty hard,” says Dave Power, president and CEO of the Perkins School for the Blind near Boston. Helen Keller’s alma mater is developing a mobile app that will provide audio directions—contributed by volunteers—so that blind people can get close enough to the stop for the bus driver to notice them.

Perkins’s app is one of 29 projects that recently received a total of $20 million in funding from Google.org’s Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities awards. Several of the winning initiatives rely on crowdsourced information to help the disabled—be they blind, in a wheelchair, or cognitively impaired. It’s a commonsense approach to tackling big logistical projects in a world full of people who have snippets of downtime during which they might perform bite-size acts of kindness online. But moving these projects from being just clever concepts to extensive services, based on the goodwill of volunteers, is going to be quite a hurdle.

People with limited mobility may have trouble traversing the last few feet between them and a wheelchair ramp, automatic doors, or other accommodations that aren’t easy to find (or may not even exist in some places).Wheelmap, based in Berlin, is trying to help by building online maps of accessible locations. Its website incorporates crowdsourced data. The site lets users type in a city and search for accessible amenities such as restaurants, hotels, and public transit.

Paris-based J’accede (which received 500,000 euros from Google, which is the equivalent of about $565,000) provides similar capabilities in both a website and an app, with a slicker design somewhat resembling TripAdvisor.

Both services have a long way to go. J’accede lists 374 accessible bars/restaurants in its hometown and a modest selection in other French cities like Marseille. “We still have a lot of work to do to cover France,” says J’accede’s president Damien Birambeau in an email. The goal is to go global though, and the site is available in English, German, and Spanish, in addition to French. Likewise, Wheelmap (which got 825,000 euros, or $933,000) performs best in the German capital of Berlin and cities like Hamburg, but is less useful in other places.

These sites face the same challenge as many other volunteer-based, crowdsourced projects: getting a big enough crowd to contribute information to the service. J’accede hopes to make the process easier. In June, it will connect itself with Google Places, so contributors will only need to supply details about accommodations at a site; information like the location’s address and phone number will be pulled in automatically. But both J’accede and Wheelmap recognize that crowdsourcing has its limits. They are now going beyond voluntary contributions, setting up automated systems to scrape information from other databases of accessible locations, such as those maintained by governments.

Wheelmap and J’accede are dwarfed by general-interest crowdsourced sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, which offer some information about accessibility, too. For instance, among the many filters they offer users searching for restaurants—such as price range and cuisine type—TripAdvisor and Yelp both offer a Wheelchair Accessible checkbox. Applying that filter to Parisian establishments brings up about 1,000 restaurants on TripAdvisor and 2,800 in Yelp.

So what can Wheelmap and J’accede provide that the big players can’t? Details. “A person in a wheelchair, for example, will face different obstacles than a partially blind person or a person with cognitive disabilities,” says Birambeau. “These different needs and profiles means that we need highly detailed information about the accessibility of public places.”…(More)”

Critics allege big data can be discriminatory, but is it really bias?

Curated on May 9, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Pradip Sigdyal at CNBC: “…The often cited case of big data discrimination points to a research conducted few years ago by Latanya Sweeny, who heads the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University.

The case involves Google ad results when searching for certain kinds of names on the internet. In her research, Sweeney found that distinct sounding names often associated with blacks showed up with a disproportionately higher number of arrest record ads compared to white sounding names by roughly 18 percent of the time. Google has since fixed the issue, although they never publicly stated what they did to correct the problem.

The proliferation of big data in the last few years has seen other allegations of improper use and bias. These allegations run the gamut, from online price discrimination and consequences of geographic targeting to the controversial use of crime predicting technology by law enforcement, and lack of sufficient representative[data] sampleused in some public works decisions.

The benefits of big data need to be balanced with the risks associated with applying modern technologies to address societal issues. Yet data advocates believe that democratization of data has in essence givenpower to the people to affect change by transferring ‘tribal knowledge’ from experts to data-savvy practitioners.

Big data is here to stay

According to some advocates, the problem is not so much that ‘big data discriminates’, but that failures by data professionals risk misinterpreting the findings at the heart of data mining and statistical learning. They add that the benefits far outweigh the concerns.

“In my academic research and industry consulting, I have seen tremendous benefits accruing to firms, organizations and consumers alike from the use of data-driven decision-making, data science, and business analytics,” Anindya Ghose, the director of Center for Business Analytics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said.

“To be perfectly honest, I do not at all understand these big-data cynics who engage in fear mongering about the implications of data analytics,” Ghose said.

“Here is my message to the cynics and those who keep cautioning us: ‘Deal with it, big data analytics is here to stay forever’.”…(More)”

What’s Wrong with Open-Data Sites–and How We Can Fix Them

Curated on May 6, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

César A. Hidalgo at Scientific American: “Imagine shopping in a supermarket where every item is stored in boxes that look exactly the same. Some are filled with cereal, others with apples, and others with shampoo. Shopping would be an absolute nightmare! The design of most open data sites—the (usually government) sites that distribute census, economic and other data to be used and redistributed freely—is not exactly equivalent to this nightmarish supermarket. But it’s pretty close.

During the last decade, such sites—data.gov, data.gov.uk, data.gob.cl,data.gouv.fr, and many others—have been created throughout the world. Most of them, however, still deliver data as sets of links to tables, or links to other sites that are also hard to comprehend. In the best cases, data is delivered through APIs, or application program interfaces, which are simple data query languages that require a user to have a basic knowledge of programming. So understanding what is inside each dataset requires downloading, opening, and exploring the set in ways that are extremely taxing for users. The analogy of the nightmarish supermarket is not that far off.

The consensus among those who have participated in the creation of open data sites is that current efforts have failed and we need new options. Pointing your browser to these sites should show you why. Most open data sites are badly designed, and here I am not talking about their aesthetics—which are also subpar—but about the conceptual model used to organize and deliver data to users. The design of most open data sites follows a throwing-spaghetti-against-the-wall strategy, where opening more data, instead of opening data better, has been the driving force.

Some of the design flaws of current open data sites are pretty obvious. The datasets that are more important, or could potentially be more useful, are not brought into the surface of these sites or are properly organized. In our supermarket analogy, not only all boxes look the same, but also they are sorted in the order they came. This cannot be the best we can do.

There are other design problems that are important, even though they are less obvious. The first one is that most sites deliver data in the way in which it is collected, instead of used. People are often looking for data about a particular place, occupation, industry, or about an indicator (such as income, or population). If the data they need comes from the national survey of X, or the bureau of Y, it is secondary and often—although not always—irrelevant to the user. Yet, even though this is not the way we should be giving data back to users, this is often what open data sites do.

The second non-obvious design problem, which is probably the most important, is that most open data sites bury data in what is known as the deep web. The deep web is the fraction of the Internet that is not accessible to search engines, or that cannot be indexed properly. The surface of the web is made of text, pictures, and video, which search engines know how to index. But search engines are not good at knowing that the number that you are searching for is hidden in row 17,354 of a comma separated file that is inside a zip file linked in a poorly described page of an open data site. In some cases, pressing a radio button and selecting options from a number of dropdown menus can get you the desired number, but this does not help search engines either, because crawlers cannot explore dropdown menus. To make open data really open, we need to make it searchable, and for that we need to bring data to the surface of the web.

So how do we that? The solution may not be simple, but it starts by taking design seriously. This is something that I’ve been doing for more than half a decade when creating data visualization engines at MIT. The latest iteration of our design principles are now embodied in DataUSA, a site we created in a collaboration between Deloitte, Datawheel, and my group at MIT.

So what is design, and how do we use it to improve open data sites? My definition of design is simple. Design is discovering the forms that best fulfill a function….(More)”