Can behavioral interventions be too salient? Evidence from traffic safety messages

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Article by Jonathan D. Hall and Joshua M. Madsen: “Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioral interventions such as nudges and informational campaigns to address a variety of issues. Guidebooks say that these interventions should “seize people’s attention” at a time when they can take the desired action, but little consideration has been given to the costs of seizing one’s attention and to the possibility that these interventions may crowd out other, more important, considerations. We estimated these costs in the context of a widespread, seemingly innocuous behavioral campaign with the stated objective of reducing traffic crashes. This campaign displays the year-to-date number of statewide roadside fatalities (fatality messages) on previously installed highway dynamic message signs (DMSs) and has been implemented in 28 US states.

We estimated the impact of displaying fatality messages using data from Texas. Texas provides an ideal setting because the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) decided to show fatality messages starting in August 2012 for 1 week each month: the week before TxDOT’s monthly board meeting (campaign weeks). This allows us to measure the impact of the intervention, holding fixed the road segment, year, month, day of week, and time of day. We used data on 880 DMSs and all crashes occurring in Texas between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2017 to investigate the effects of this safety campaign. We estimated how the intervention affects crashes near DMSs as well as statewide. As placebo tests, we estimated whether the chosen weeks inherently differ using data from before TxDOT started displaying fatality messages and data from upstream of DMSs.

Contrary to policy-makers’ expectations, we found that displaying fatality messages increases the number of traffic crashes. Campaign weeks realize a 1.52% increase in crashes within 5 km of DMSs, slightly diminishing to a 1.35% increase over the 10 km after DMSs. We used instrumental variables to recover the effect of displaying a fatality message and document a significant 4.5% increase in the number of crashes over 10 km. The effect of displaying fatality messages is comparable to raising the speed limit by 3 to 5 miles per hour or reducing the number of highway troopers by 6 to 14%. We also found that the total number of statewide on-highway crashes is higher during campaign weeks. The social costs of these fatality messages are large: Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this campaign causes an additional 2600 crashes and 16 fatalities per year in Texas alone, with a social cost of $377 million per year…(More)”.

Modernizing Agriculture Data Infrastructure to Improve Economic and Ecological Outcomes.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the AGree Initiative and the Data Foundation: “The paper highlights the necessity of data innovation to address a growing number of critical short and long-term food and agricultural issues, including agricultural production, environmental sustainability, nutrition assistance, food waste, and food and farm labor. It concludes by offering four practical options that are effective case studies for data acquisition, management, and use in other sectors.

Given the increasingly dynamic conditions in which the sector operates, the modernization of agricultural data collection, storage, and analysis will equip farmers, ranchers, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) with tools to adapt, innovate, and ensure a food-secure future.

While USDA has made strides over the years, to truly unlock the potential of data to improve farm productivity and the resilience of rural communities, the department must establish a more effective data infrastructure, which will require addressing gaps in USDA’s mandate and authorities across its agencies and programs.

The white paper explores four options that are effective case studies for data acquisition, management, and use in other sectors:

  1. Centralized Data Infrastructure Operated by USDA
  2. Centralized Data Infrastructure Operated by a Non-Governmental Intermediary
  3. Data Linkage Hub Operated by a Non-USDA Agency in the Federal Government
  4. Contractual Model with Relevant Partners

Each of the models considered offers opportunities for collaboration with farmers and other stakeholders to ensure there are clear benefits and to address shortfalls in the current system. Careful consideration of the trade-offs of each option is critical given the dynamic weather and economic challenges the agriculture sector faces and the potential new economic opportunities that may be unlocked by harnessing the power of data…(More)”.

Technology of the Oppressed

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by David Nemer: “Brazilian favelas are impoverished settlements usually located on hillsides or the outskirts of a city. In Technology of the Oppressed, David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish.

Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom…(More)”.

Between Utopia and Disaster

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Malloy Owen: “The metaverse is, as they say, happening. Mark Zuckerberg announced last October that Facebook’s parent company, now called Meta, will take the lead in building out an immersive, interactive, and ubiquitous network of virtual environments that he envisions as the next phase of the Internet. Once the relevant technology has been developed, Zuckerberg promised, users will be able to enter the metaverse in avatar form and interact in three simulated dimensions with a glorious new world of people, places, and things.

It is not surprising that something like the metaverse is coming into being in these uneasy early days of the Biden era: All the master logics of our moment seem to demand it. First, to the extent that it can simulate physical presence, virtual reality promises to enable community across geographic distance. That power has special allure at a time when worries about the pandemic and the environment cast a pall over long-distance travel even as markets continue to disperse friends, family, and business associates far and wide. Second, the metaverse offers further liberation from the material, the given, and the bodily. (In the introduction to Zuckerberg’s metaverse announcement video, a drag queen invites us to “imagine a world where we are represented the way we want to be.”) Third, the metaverse offers sweet escape from a reality that inhabitants of rich countries, especially the young, find increasingly bleak. Rising seas, rusting factories, and a pervasive sense of powerlessness have driven some to bizarre political fantasies, some to opioids, and some to video games. Zuckerberg promises a cheap, safe, convincing simulation where everything is clean, bright, and hopeful and there are always new ideas and pleasures to discover.

Of course, we jaded children of the Information Age have learned to beware of tech lords bearing gifts. “If the product is free, you are the product” is the usual way of expressing this suspicion, and the metaverse will undoubtedly be an attractive platform for the now well-known techniques of targeted advertising. But the familiar saying does not quite capture the new forms of power a constructed virtual world will make available to its builders and managers. “If the product is free, you are a subject” might be a better way to frame our dilemma in the dawning age of the metaverse, which must be understood not only as an economic and political project, but as a theological one.

The modern state was founded on a dream—the dream of perfect knowledge that secures perfect power. A substantial part of the apparatus of state, then, has consisted of mechanisms for collecting and interpreting information. Sovereign governments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries devoted enormous resources to recording and categorizing facts about people, places, and things within their nations’ borders; today’s systems of computer-enabled mass surveillance, like the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program, simply carry this project forward.

But trying to skim data from a lumpy, rough-edged, and unpredictable world is a frustrating and often fruitless task. As theorists like James C. Scott and Michel Foucault have argued, states have addressed this difficulty by trying to flatten, order, and rationalize the social and natural landscapes under their control. In Scott’s narrative, land, once subject to obscure and variable patterns of customary use, is assigned definite owners; names are standardized into first and last; cities are laid out in grids; illegible dialects are suppressed. In Foucault’s telling, institutions like schools and professions like health care fashion the inward self into a smooth, predictable object of analysis. The easiest way for the state to understand the world is to remake it into something that can be understood. Still, the state has always had the physical world to contend with: Material nature resists and sometimes outright refuses manipulation…(More)”.

A Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should undertake a new strategy to modernize the Consumer Price Index by accelerating its use of new data sources and developing price indexes based on different income levels, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The Consumer Price Index is the most widely used measure of inflation in the U.S. It is used to determine cost-of-living allowances and, importantly, influences monetary policy, among many other private- and public-sector applications. The new report, Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century, says the index has traditionally relied on field-generated data, such as prices observed in person at grocery stores or major retailers. These data have become more challenging and expensive to collect, and the availability of vast digital sources of consumer price data presents an opportunity. BLS has begun tapping into these data and has said its objective is to switch a significant portion of its measurement to nontraditional and digital data sources by 2024.

“The enormous economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic presents a perfect case study for the need to rapidly employ new data sources for the Consumer Price Index,” said Daniel E. Sichel, professor of economics at Wellesley College, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “Modernizing the Consumer Price Index can help our measurement of household costs and inflation be more accurate, timelier, and ultimately more useful for policymakers responding to rapidly changing economic conditions.”..
The report says BLS should embark on a strategy of accelerating and enhancing the use of scanner, web-scraped, and digital data directly from retailers in compiling the Consumer Price Index. Scanner data — recorded at the point of sale or by consumers in their homes — can expand the variety of products represented in the Consumer Price Index, and better detect shifts in buying patterns. Web-scraped data can more nimbly track the prices of online goods, and goods where one company dominates the market. Permanently automating web-scraping of price data should be a high priority for the Consumer Price Index program, especially for food, electronics, and apparel, the report says.

Embracing these alternative data sources now will ensure that the accuracy and timeliness of the Consumer Price Index will not be compromised in the future, the report adds. Moreover, accelerating this process will give BLS time to carefully assess new data sources and methodologies before taking the decision to incorporate them in the official index….(More)”

Roe draft raises concerns data could be used to identify abortion seekers, providers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chris Mills Rodrigo: “Concerns that data gathered from peoples’ interactions with their digital devices could potentially be used to identify individuals seeking or performing abortions have come into the spotlight with the news that pregnancy termination services could soon be severely restricted or banned in much of the United States.

Following the leak of a draft majority opinion indicating that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established the federal right to abortion, privacy advocates are raising alarms about the ways law enforcement officials or anti-abortion activists could make such identifications using data available on the open market, obtained from companies or extracted from devices.

“The dangers of unfettered access to Americans’ personal information have never been more obvious. Researching birth control online, updating a period-tracking app or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement to The Hill. 

Data from web searches, smartphone location pings and online purchases can all be easily obtained with little to no safeguards.

“Almost everything that you do … data can be captured about it and can be fed into a larger model that can help somebody or some entity infer whether or not you may be pregnant and whether or not you may be someone who’s planning to have an abortion or has had one,” Nathalie Maréchal, senior policy manager at Ranking Digital Rights, explained. 

There are three primary ways that data could travel from individuals’ devices to law enforcement or other groups, according to experts who spoke with The Hill.

The first is via third party data brokers, which make up a shadowy multibillion dollar industry dedicated to collecting, aggregating and selling location data harvested from individuals’ mobile phones that has provided unprecedented access to the daily movements of Americans for advertisers, or virtually anyone willing to pay…(More)”.

Taking Transparency to the Next Level

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by USAID: “In order for us all to work better together, foreign assistance data — how and where the U.S. government invests our foreign assistance dollars — must be easily, readily, and freely available to the public, media, and our international partners.

To uphold these core values of transparency and openness, USAID and the U.S. Department of State jointly re-launched ForeignAssistance.gov.

This one-stop-shop helps the American taxpayer and other stakeholders understand the depth and breadth of the U.S. Government’s work in international development and humanitarian assistance, so that how much we invest and where and when we invest it is easier to access, use, and understand.

The new ForeignAssistance.gov provides a wealth of global information (above) as well as specific details for countries (below).

The new, consolidated ForeignAssistance.gov is a visual, interactive website that advances transparency by publishing U.S. foreign assistance budget and financial data that is usable, accurate, and timely. The site empowers users to explore U.S. foreign assistance data through visualizations, while also providing the flexibility for users to create custom queries, download data, and conduct analyses by country, sector, or agency…(More)”.

Trust but Verify: Validating New Measures for Mapping Social Infrastructure in Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Timothy Fraser et al: “Scholars and policymakers increasingly recognize the value of social capital – the connections that generate and enable trust among people – in responding to and recovering from shocks and disasters. However, some communities have more social infrastructure, that is, sites that produce and maintain social capital, than others. Community centers, libraries, public pools, and parks serve as locations where people can gather, interact, and build social ties. Much research on urban spaces relies on Google maps because of its ubiquity and this article tests the degree to which it can accurately, reliably, and effectively capture social infrastructure. In this study, we map the social infrastructure of Boston using Google Maps Places API and then ground truth our measures, mapping social infrastructure on street corners with in-person site observations to evaluate the accuracy of available data. We find that though we may need to use multi-vectored measurement when trying to capture social infrastructure, Google maps serve as reliable measurements with a predictable, acceptable margin of error…(More)”.

Unmet Desire

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by I vividly remember March 2020, the month the United States shut down as COVID-19 spread uncontrollably and upended daily life. At the time, I worked at Cornell University in upstate New York. As we adjusted to a new normal, my Cornell colleague Elizabeth Day and I suspected that local leaders were facing unprecedented policy challenges that were not making the major headlines.

We decided to reach out to county policymakers throughout upstate New York, inviting them to share challenges they were facing. We offered to discuss research that might prove helpful. Responses soon poured in.

One county executive was trying to figure out how to provide childcare for first responders. Childcare centers were ordered closed, but first responders could not stay home to watch their kids. The executive needed systematic research on other options. A second local policymaker watched as her county’s offices shuttered and work moved online; she needed research on how other local leaders had used mobile vans to provide necessary services to rural residents without internet. Another county official sought to design a high-quality survey to elicit frank responses from municipal leaders about COVID-related challenges. In this case, she needed to discuss the fundamentals of survey design and implementation with an expert.

These responses led us to engage in an informal collaboration with each of these policymakers. By informal collaboration, I mean a collaborative exchange in which people with diverse forms of knowledge, expertise, and lived experience share what they know with the goal of developing an expanded understanding of a problem—yet still remain autonomous decisionmakers. In these cases, we as researchers brought knowledge about policy analysis and survey fundamentals, and the policymakers brought detailed knowledge about their present needs, local context, and historical challenges. All this diverse information was crucial to chart a way forward that was informed by evidence.

Yet it turns out our interactions were highly unusual. During our conversations, all the policymakers revealed that researchers from colleges and universities in their immediate area had never reached out in this way, and that they had no regular communication with local researchers.

This disconnect is a problem. Local policymakers are responsible for almost $2 trillion of spending annually, and they oversee many areas in which technical knowledge is essential, such as promoting economic development, building and maintaining roads, educating children, policing, fighting fires, determining acceptable land use, and providing public transportation…(More)”.

The Accountable Bureaucrat

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anya Bernstein and Cristina Rodriguez: “Common wisdom has it that, without close supervision by an elected official, administrative agencies are left unaccountable to the people they regulate. For both proponents and detractors of the administrative state, agency accountability thus hangs on the concentrated power of the President. This Article presents a different vision. Drawing on in-depth interviews with officials from numerous agencies, we argue that everyday administrative practices themselves support accountability—an accountability of a kind that elections alone cannot achieve. The electoral story focuses on the aspect of accountability that kicks in as a sanction after decisions have already been made. We propose instead that the ongoing justification of policy positions to multiple audiences empowered to evaluate and challenge them forms the heart of accountability in a republican democracy. The continual process of reason-giving, testing, and adaptation instantiates the values that make accountability normatively attractive: deliberation, inclusivity, and responsiveness.

Our interviews reveal three primary features of the administrative state that support such accountability. First, political appointees and career civil servants, often presented as conflictual, actually enact complementary decisionmaking modalities. Appointees do not impose direct presidential control but imbue agencies with a diffuse, differentiated sense of abstract political values. Civil servants use expertise and experience to set the parameters within which decisions can be made. The process of moving these differing but interdependent approaches toward a decision promotes deliberation. Second, agencies work through a networked spiderweb of decisionmaking that involves continual justification and negotiation among numerous groups. This claim stands in stark contrast to the strict hierarchy often attributed to government bureaucracy: we show how the principal-agent model, frequently used to analyze agencies, obscures more than it reveals. The dispersion of decisionmaking power, we claim, promotes pluralistic inclusivity and provides more support for ongoing accountability than a concentration in presidential hands would. Finally, many two-way avenues connect agencies to the people and situations they regulate. Those required by law, like notice-and-comment rulemaking, supplement numerous other interaction formats that agencies create. These multiple avenues support agency responsiveness to the views of affected publics and the realities of the regulated world….(More)”.