Paper by Daniela Shuman, et al: “Studies in the literature have found significant differences in travel behavior by gender on public transit that are largely attributable to household and care responsibilities falling disproportionately on women. While the majority of studies have relied on survey and qualitative data to assess “mobility of care”, we propose a novel data-driven workflow utilizing transit fare card transactions, name-based gender inference, and geospatial analysis to identify mobility of care trip making. We find that the share of women travelers trip-chaining in the direct vicinity of mobility of care places of interest is 10% – 15% higher than men….(More)”.
How a small news site built an innovative data project to visualise the impact of climate change on Uruguay’s capital
Interview by Marina Adami: “La ciudad sumergida (The submerged city), an investigation produced by Uruguayan science and technology news site Amenaza Roboto, is one of the winners of this year’s Sigma Awards for data journalism. The project uses maps of the country’s capital, Montevideo, to create impressive visualisations of the impact sea level rises are predicted to have on the city and its infrastructure. The project is a first of its kind for Uruguay, a small South American country in which data journalism is still a novelty. It is also a good example of a way news outlets can investigate and communicate the disastrous effects of climate change in local communities.
I spoke to Miguel Dobrich, a journalist, educator and digital entrepreneur who worked on the project together with colleagues Gabriel Farías, Natalie Aubet and Nahuel Lamas, to find out what lessons other outlets can take from this project and from Amenaza Roboto’s experiments with analysing public data, collaborating with scientists, and keeping the focus on their communities….(More)”
Big data proves mobility is not gender-neutral
Blog by Ellin Ivarsson, Aiga Stokenberg and Juan Ignacio Fulponi: “All over the world, there is growing evidence showing that women and men travel differently. While there are many reasons behind this, one key factor is the persistence of traditional gender norms and roles that translate into different household responsibilities, different work schedules, and, ultimately, different mobility needs. Greater overall risk aversion and sensitivity to safety issues also play an important role in how women get around. Yet gender often remains an afterthought in the transport sector, meaning most policies or infrastructure investment plans are not designed to take into account the specific mobility needs of women.
The good news is that big data can help change that. In a recent study, the World Bank Transport team combined several data sources to analyze how women travel around the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA), including mobile phone signal data, congestion data from Waze, public transport smart card data, and data from a survey implemented by the team in early 2022 with over 20,300 car and motorcycle users.
Our research revealed that, on average, women in AMBA travel less often than men, travel shorter distances, and tend to engage in more complex trips with multiple stops and purposes. On average, 65 percent of the trips made by women are shorter than 5 kilometers, compared to 60 percent among men. Also, women’s hourly travel patterns are different, with 10 percent more trips than men during the mid-day off-peak hour, mostly originating in central AMBA. This reflects the larger burden of household responsibilities faced by women – such as picking children up from school – and the fact that women tend to work more irregular hours…(More)” See also Gender gaps in urban mobility.
Judging Nudging: Understanding the Welfare Effects of Nudges Versus Taxes
Paper by John A. List, Matthias Rodemeier, Sutanuka Roy & Gregory K. Sun: “While behavioral non-price interventions (“nudges”) have grown from academic curiosity to a bona fide policy tool, their relative economic efficiency remains under-researched. We develop a unified framework to estimate welfare effects of both nudges and taxes. We showcase our approach by creating a database of more than 300 carefully hand-coded point estimates of non-price and price interventions in the markets for cigarettes, influenza vaccinations, and household energy. While nudges are effective in changing behavior in all three markets, they are not necessarily the most efficient policy. We find that nudges are more efficient in the market for cigarettes, while taxes are more efficient in the energy market. For influenza vaccinations, optimal subsidies likely outperform nudges. Importantly, two key factors govern the difference in results across markets: i) an elasticity-weighted standard deviation of the behavioral bias, and ii) the magnitude of the average externality. Nudges dominate taxes whenever i) exceeds ii). Combining nudges and taxes does not always provide quantitatively significant improvements to implementing one policy tool alone…(More)”.
As the Quantity of Data Explodes, Quality Matters
Article by Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene: “With advances in technology, governments across the world are increasingly using data to help inform their decision making. This has been one of the most important byproducts of the use of open data, which is “a philosophy- and increasingly a set of policies – that promotes transparency, accountability and value creation by making government data available to all,” according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
But as data has become ever more important to governments, the quality of that data has become an increasingly serious issue. A number of nations, including the United States, are taking steps to deal with it. For example, according to a study from Deloitte, “The Dutch government is raising the bar to enable better data quality and governance across the public sector.” In the same report, a case study about Finland states that “data needs to be shared at the right time and in the right way. It is also important to improve the quality and usability of government data to achieve the right goals.” And the United Kingdom has developed its Government Data Quality Hub to help public sector organizations “better identify their data challenges and opportunities and effectively plan targeted improvements.”
Our personal experience is with U.S. states and local governments, and in that arena the road toward higher quality data is a long and difficult one, particularly as the sheer quantity of data has grown exponentially. As things stand, based on our ongoing research into performance audits, it is clear that issues with data are impediments to the smooth process of state and local governments…(More)”.
Digital Equity 2.0: How to Close the Data Divide
Report by Gillian Diebold: “For the last decade, closing the digital divide, or the gap between those subscribing to broadband and those not subscribing, has been a top priority for policymakers. But high-speed Internet and computing device access are no longer the only barriers to fully participating and benefiting from the digital economy. Data is also increasingly essential, including in health care, financial services, and education. Like the digital divide, a gap has emerged between the data haves and the data have-nots, and this gap has introduced a new set of inequities: the data divide.
Policymakers have put a great deal of effort into closing the digital divide, and there is now near-universal acceptance of the notion that obtaining widespread Internet access generates social and economic benefits. But closing the data divide has received little attention. Moreover, efforts to improve data collection are typically overshadowed by privacy advocates’ warnings against collecting any data. In fact, unlike the digital divide, many ignore the data divide or argue that the way to close it is to collect vastly less data.1 But without substantial efforts to increase data representation and access, certain individuals and communities will be left behind in an increasingly data-driven world.
This report describes the multipronged efforts needed to address digital inequity. For the digital divide, policymakers have expanded digital connectivity, increased digital literacy, and improved access to digital devices. For the data divide, policymakers should similarly take a holistic approach, including by balancing privacy and data innovation, increasing data collection efforts across a wide array of fronts, enhancing access to data, improving data quality, and improving data analytics efforts. Applying lessons from the digital divide to this new challenge will help policymakers design effective and efficient policy and create a more equitable and effective data economy for all Americans…(More)”.
Civic Information Handbook
Handbook by Adrienne Goldstein: “Policymakers should update and enforce civil and human rights laws for the online environment, compel radical transparency, update consumer protection rules, insist that industry make a high-level commitment to democratic design, and create civic information infrastructure through a new PBS of the Internet. In the absence of such policy reform, amplifiers of civic information may never be able to beat out the well-resourced, well-networked groups that intentionally spread falsehoods. Nonetheless, there are strategies for helping civic information compete.
This handbook aims to:
- Educate civic information providers about coordinated deceptive campaigns
…including how they build their audiences, seed compelling narratives, amplify their messages, and activate their followers, as well as why false narratives take hold, and who the primary actors and targeted audiences are.
- Serve as a resource on how to flood the zone with trustworthy civic information
…namely, how civic information providers can repurpose the tactics used by coordinated deceptive campaigns in transparent, empowering ways and protect themselves and their message online.
This handbook will function as a media literacy tool, giving readers the skills and opportunity to consider who is behind networked information campaigns and how they spread their messages…(More)”.
Let’s Randomize America!
Article by Dalton Conley: “…As our society has become less random, it has become more unequal. Many people know that inequality has been rising steadily over time, but a less-remarked-on development is that there’s been a parallel geographic shift, with high- and low-income people moving into separate, ever more distinct communities…As a sociologist, I study inequality and what can be done about it. It is, to say the least, a difficult problem to solve…I’ve come to believe that lotteries could help to crack this nut and make our society fairer and more equal. We can’t randomly assign where people live, of course. And we can’t integrate neighborhoods by fiat, either. We learned that lesson in the nineteen-seventies, when counties tried busing schoolchildren across town. Those programs aimed to create more racially and economically integrated schools; they resulted in the withdrawal of affluent students from urban public-school systems, and set off a political backlash that can still be felt today…
As a political tool, lotteries have come and gone throughout history. Sortition—the selection of political officials by lot—was first practiced in Athens in the sixth century B.C.E., and later reappeared in Renaissance city-states such as Florence, Venice, and Lombardy, and in Switzerland and elsewhere. In recent years, citizens’ councils—randomly chosen groups of individuals who meet to hammer out a particular issue, such as climate policy—have been tried in Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, and the U.K. Some political theorists, such as Hélène Landemore, Jane Mansbridge, and the Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck, have argued that randomly selected decision-makers who don’t have to campaign are less likely to be corrupt or self-interested than those who must run for office; people chosen at random are also unlikely to be typically privileged, power-hungry politicians. The wisdom of the crowd improves when the crowd is more diverse…(More)”.
Machines of mind: The case for an AI-powered productivity boom
Report by Martin Neil Baily, Erik Brynjolfsson, Anton Korinek: “ Large language models such as ChatGPT are emerging as powerful tools that not only make workers more productive but also increase the rate of innovation, laying the foundation for a significant acceleration in economic growth. As a general purpose technology, AI will impact a wide array of industries, prompting investments in new skills, transforming business processes, and altering the nature of work. However, official statistics will only partially capture the boost in productivity because the output of knowledge workers is difficult to measure. The rapid advances can have great benefits but may also lead to significant risks, so it is crucial to ensure that we steer progress in a direction that benefits all of society…(More)”.
Data portability and interoperability: A primer on two policy tools for regulation of digitized industries
Article by Sukhi Gulati-Gilbert and Robert Seamans: “…In this article we describe two other tools, data portability and interoperability, that may be particularly useful in technology-enabled sectors. Data portability allows users to move data from one company to another, helping to reduce switching costs and providing rival firms with access to valuable customer data. Interoperability allows two or more technical systems to exchange data interactively. Due to its interactive nature, interoperability can help prevent lock-in to a specific platform by allowing users to connect across platforms. Data portability and interoperability share some similarities; in addition to potential pro-competitive benefits, the tools promote values of openness, transparency, and consumer choice.
After providing an overview of these topics, we describe the tradeoffs involved with implementing data portability and interoperability. While these policy tools offer lots of promise, in practice there can be many challenges involved when determining how to fund and design an implementation that is secure and intuitive and accomplishes the intended result. These challenges require that policymakers think carefully about the initial implementation of data portability and interoperability. Finally, to better show how data portability and interoperability can increase competition in an industry, we discuss how they could be applied in the banking and social media sectors. These are just two examples of how data portability and interoperability policy could be applied to many different industries facing increased digitization. Our definitions and examples should be helpful to those interested in understanding the tradeoffs involved in using these tools to promote competition and innovation in the U.S. economy…(More)” See also: Data to Go: The Value of Data Portability as a Means to Data Liquidity.