Missing Numbers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Anna Powell-Smith of a new “blog on the data the government should collect, but doesn’t”: “…Over time, I started to notice a pattern. Across lots of different policy areas, it was impossible for governments to make good decisions because of a basic lack of data. There was always critical data that the state either didn’t collect at all, or collected so badly that it made change impossible.

Eventually, I decided that the power to not collect data is one of the most important and little-understood sources of power that governments have. This is why I’m writing Missing Numbers: to encourage others to ask “is this lack of data a deliberate ploy to get away with something”?

By refusing to amass knowledge in the first place, decision-makers exert power over over the rest of us. It’s time that this power was revealed, so we can have better conversations about what we need to know to run this country successfully.

A typical example

The government records and publishes data on how often each NHS hospital receives formal complaints. This is very helpful, because it means patients and the people who care for them can spot hospitals whose performance is worrying.

But the government simply doesn’t record data, even internally, on how often formal complaints are made about each Jobcentre. (That FOI response is from 2015, but I’ve confirmed it’s still true in 2019.) So it is impossible for it to know if some Jobcentres are being seriously mismanaged….(More)”.

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Cyrus Farivar: “Habeas Data shows how the explosive growth of surveillance technology has outpaced our understanding of the ethics, mores, and laws of privacy.

Award-winning tech reporter Cyrus Farivar makes the case by taking ten historic court decisions that defined our privacy rights and matching them against the capabilities of modern technology. It’s an approach that combines the charge of a legal thriller with the shock of the daily headlines.

Chapters include: the 1960s prosecution of a bookie that established the “reasonable expectation of privacy” in nonpublic places beyond your home (but how does that ruling apply now, when police can chart your every move and hear your every conversation within your own home — without even having to enter it?); the 1970s case where the police monitored a lewd caller — the decision of which is now the linchpin of the NSA’s controversial metadata tracking program revealed by Edward Snowden; and a 2010 low-level burglary trial that revealed police had tracked a defendant’s past 12,898 locations before arrest — an invasion of privacy grossly out of proportion to the alleged crime, which showed how authorities are all too willing to take advantage of the ludicrous gap between the slow pace of legal reform and the rapid transformation of technology.

A dazzling exposé that journeys from Oakland, California to the halls of the Supreme Court to the back of a squad car, Habeas Data combines deft reportage, deep research, and original interviews to offer an X-ray diagnostic of our current surveillance state….(More)”.

Digital inequalities in the age of artificial intelligence and big data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christoph Lutz: “In this literature review, I summarize key concepts and findings from the rich academic literature on digital inequalities. I propose that digital inequalities research should look more into labor‐ and big data‐related questions such as inequalities in online labor markets and the negative effects of algorithmic decision‐making for vulnerable population groups.

The article engages with the sociological literature on digital inequalities and explains the general approach to digital inequalities, based on the distinction of first‐, second‐, and third‐level digital divides. First, inequalities in access to digital technologies are discussed. This discussion is extended to emerging technologies, including the Internet‐of‐things and artificial intelligence‐powered systems such as smart speakers. Second, inequalities in digital skills and technology use are reviewed and connected to the discourse on new forms of work such as the sharing economy or gig economy. Third and finally, the discourse on the outcomes, in the form of benefits or harms, from digital technology use is taken up.

Here, I propose to integrate the digital inequalities literature more strongly with critical algorithm studies and recent discussions about datafication, digital footprints, and information privacy….(More)”.

Revisiting the causal effect of democracy on long-run development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Markus Eberhardt: “In a recent paper, Acemoglu et al. (2019), henceforth “ANRR”, demonstrated a significant and large causal effect of democracy on long-run growth. By adopting a simple binary indicator for democracy, and accounting for the dynamics of development, these authors found that a shift to democracy leads to a 20% higher level of development in the long run.1

The findings are remarkable in three ways: 

  1. Previous research often emphasised that a simple binary measure for democracy was perhaps “too blunt a concept” (Persson and Tabellini 2006) to provide robust empirical evidence.
  2.  Positive effects of democracy on growth were typically only a “short-run boost” (Rodrik and Wacziarg 2005). 
  3. The empirical findings are robust across a host of empirical estimators with different assumptions about the data generating process, including one adopting a novel instrumentation strategy (regional waves of democratisation).

ANRR’s findings are important because, as they highlight in a column on Vox, there is “a belief that democracy is bad for economic growth is common in both academic political economy as well as the popular press.” For example, Posner (2010) wrote that “[d]ictatorship will often be optimal for very poor countries”. 

The simplicity of ANRR’s empirical setup, the large sample of countries, the long time horizon (1960 to 2010), and the robust positive – and remarkably stable – results across the many empirical methods they employ send a very powerful message against such doubts that democracy does cause growth.

I agree with their conclusion, but with qualifications. …(More)”.

Nowcasting the Local Economy: Using Yelp Data to Measure Economic Activity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca: “Can new data sources from online platforms help to measure local economic activity? Government datasets from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau provide the standard measures of local economic activity at the local level. However, these statistics typically appear only after multi-year lags, and the public-facing versions are aggregated to the county or ZIP code level. In contrast, crowdsourced data from online platforms such as Yelp are often contemporaneous and geographically finer than official government statistics. Glaeser, Kim, and Luca present evidence that Yelp data can complement government surveys by measuring economic activity in close to real time, at a granular level, and at almost any geographic scale. Changes in the number of businesses and restaurants reviewed on Yelp can predict changes in the number of overall establishments and restaurants in County Business Patterns. An algorithm using contemporaneous and lagged Yelp data can explain 29.2 percent of the residual variance after accounting for lagged CBP data, in a testing sample not used to generate the algorithm. The algorithm is more accurate for denser, wealthier, and more educated ZIP codes….(More)”.

See all papers presented at the NBER Conference on Big Data for 21st Century Economic Statistics here.

The Blockchain Game: A great new tool for your classroom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IBM Blockchain Blog: “Blockchain technology can be a game-changer for accounting, supply chain, banking, contract law, and many other fields. But it will only be useful if lots and lots of non-technical managers and leaders trust and adopt it. And right now, just understanding what blockchain is, can be difficult to understand even for the brightest in these fields. Enter The Blockchain Game, a hands-on exercise that explains blockchain’s core principals, and serves as a launching pad for discussion of blockchain’s real-world applications.

In The Blockchain Game students act as nodes and miners on a blockchain network for storing student grades at a university. Participants record the grade and course information, and then “build the block” by calculating a unique identifier (a hash) to secure the grade ledger, and miners get rewarded for their work. As the game is played, the audience learns about hashes, private keys, and what uses are appropriate for a blockchain ledger.

Basics of the Game

  • A hands-on simulation centering around a blockchain for academic scores, including a discussion at the end of the simulation regarding if storing grades would be a good application for blockchain.
  • No computers. Participants are the computors and calculate blocks.
  • The game seeks to teach core concepts about a distributed ledger but can be modified to whichever use case the educator wishes to use — smart contracts, supply chain, applications and others.
  • Additional elements can be added if instructors want to facilitate the game on a computer….(More)”.

Policies as information carriers: How environmental policies may change beliefs and consequent behavior

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ann-Kathrin Koessler and Stefanie Engel: “This paper discusses how policy interventions not only alter the legal and financial framework in which an individual is operating, but can also lead to changes in relevant beliefs. We argue that such belief changes in how an individual perceives herself, relevant others, the regulator and/or the activity in question can lead to behavioral changes that were neither intended nor expected when the policy was designed.

In the environmental economics literature, these secondary impacts of conventional policy interventions have not been systematically reviewed. Hence, we intend to raise awareness of these effects. In this paper, we review relevant research from behavioral economics and psychology, and identify and discuss the domains for which beliefs can change. Lastly, we discuss design options with which an undesired change in beliefs can be avoided when a new policy is put into practice….(More)”

How Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly helped climate action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Frances Foley: “..In July 2016, the new government – led by Fine Gael, backed by independents – put forward a bill to establish a national-level Citizens’ Assembly to look at the biggest issues of the day. These included the challenges of an ageing population; the role fixed-term parliaments; referendums; the 8th Amendment on abortion; and climate change.

Citizens from every region, every socio-economic background, each ethnicity and age group and from right across the spectrum of political opinion convened over the course of two weekends between September and November 2017. The issue seemed daunting in scale and complexity, but the participants had been well-briefed and had at their disposal a line up of experts, scientists, advocates and other witnesses who would help them make sense of the material. By the end, citizens had produced a radical series of recommendations which went far beyond what any major Irish party was promising, surprising even the initiators of the process….

As expected, the passage for some of the proposals through the Irish party gauntlet has not been smooth. The 8-hour long debate on increasing the carbon tax, for example, suggests that mixing deliberative and representative democracy still produces conflict and confusion. It is certainly clear that parliaments have to adapt and develop if citizens’ assemblies are ever to find their place in our modern democracies.

But the most encouraging move has been the simple acknowledgement that many of the barriers to implementation lie at the level of governance. The new Climate Action Commission, with a mandate to monitor climate action across government, should act as the governmental guarantor of the vision from the Citizens’ Assembly. Citizens’ proposals have themselves stimulated a review of internal government processes to stop their demands getting mired in party wrangling and government bureaucracy. By their very nature, the success of citizens’ assemblies can also provide an alternative vision of how decisions can be made – and in so doing shame political parties and parliaments into improving their decision-making practices.

Does the Irish Citizens’ Assembly constitute a case of rapid transition? In terms of its breadth, scale and vision, the experiment is impressive. But in terms of speed, deliberative processes are often criticised for being slow, unwieldly and costly. The response to this should be to ask what we’re getting: whilst an Assembly is not the most rapid vehicle for change – most serious processes take several months, if not a couple of years – the results, both in specific outcomes and in cultural or political shifts – can be astounding….

In respect to climate change, this harmony between ends and means is particularly significant. The climate crisis is the most severe collective decision-making challenge of our times, one that demands courage, but also careful thought….(More)”.

Trust, Control, and the Economics of Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Philipp Herold: “In today’s world, we cooperate across legal and cultural systems in order to create value. However, this increases volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity as challenges for societies, politics, and business. This has made governance a scarce resource. It thus is inevitable that we understand the means of governance available to us and are able to economize on them. Trends like the increasing role of product labels and a certification industry as well as political movements towards nationalism and conservatism may be seen as reaction to disappointments from excessive cooperation. To avoid failures of cooperation, governance is important – control through e.g. contracts is limited and in governance economics trust is widely advertised without much guidance on its preconditions or limits.

This book draws on the rich insight from research on trust and control, and accommodates the key results for governance considerations in an institutional economics framework. It provides a view on the limits of cooperation from the required degree of governance, which can be achieved through extrinsic motivation or building on intrinsic motivation. Trust Control Economics thus inform a more realistic expectation about the net value added from cooperation by providing a balanced view including the cost of governance. It then becomes clear how complex cooperation is about ‘governance accretion’ where limited trustworthiness is substituted by control and these control instances need to be governed in turn.

Trust, Control, and the Economics of Governance is a highly necessary development of institutional economics to reflect progress made in trust research and is a relevant addition for practitioners to better understand the role of trust in the governance of contemporary cooperation-structures. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of economics and business management, institutional economics, and business ethics….(More)”.

Report on Algorithmic Risk Assessment Tools in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press release: “The Partnership on AI (PAI) has today published a report gathering the views of the multidisciplinary artificial intelligence and machine learning research and ethics community which documents the serious shortcomings of algorithmic risk assessment tools in the U.S. criminal justice system. These kinds of AI tools for deciding on whether to detain or release defendants are in widespread use around the United States, and some legislatures have begun to mandate their use. Lessons drawn from the U.S. context have widespread applicability in other jurisdictions, too, as the international policymaking community considers the deployment of similar tools.

While criminal justice risk assessment tools are often simpler than the deep neural networks used in many modern artificial intelligence systems, they are basic forms of AI. As such, they present a paradigmatic example of the high-stakes social and ethical consequences of automated AI decision-making….

Across the report, challenges to using these tools fell broadly into three primary categories:

  1. Concerns about the accuracy, bias, and validity in the tools themselves
    • Although the use of these tools is in part motivated by the desire to mitigate existing human fallibility in the criminal justice system, this report suggests that it is a serious misunderstanding to view tools as objective or neutral simply because they are based on data.
  2. Issues with the interface between the tools and the humans who interact with them
    • In addition to technical concerns, these tools must be held to high standards of interpretability and explainability to ensure that users (including judges, lawyers, and clerks, among others) can understand how the tools’ predictions are reached and make reasonable decisions based on these predictions.
  3. Questions of governance, transparency, and accountability
    • To the extent that such systems are adapted to make life-changing decisions, tools and decision-makers who specify, mandate, and deploy them must meet high standards of transparency and accountability.

This report highlights some of the key challenges with the use of risk assessment tools for criminal justice applications. It also raises some deep philosophical and procedural issues which may not be easy to resolve. Surfacing and addressing those concerns will require ongoing research and collaboration between policymakers, the AI research community, civil society groups, and affected communities, as well as new types of data collection and transparency. It is PAI’s mission to spur and facilitate these conversations and to produce research to bridge such gaps….(More)”