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)”.
Global Trends in Government Innovation 2023
OECD Report: “In the face of what has increasingly been referred to as an ongoing “permacrisis”, governments must cope with and respond to emerging threats while already grappling with longstanding issues such as climate change, digital disruption and low levels of trust. Despite compounding challenges, governments have been able to adapt and innovate to transform their societies and economies, and to transform themselves and how they design and deliver policies and services. Indeed, recent crises have served to catalyse innovation, and innovation has emerged as a much-needed driver of stability that can generate public value in difficult times.
In this context, understanding new approaches and spreading successful ideas has never been more important. In seeking to do our part to promote this, OPSI and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) have worked in partnership for nearly seven years to surface leading edge public sector innovation trends and to tell the stories of innovators around the world who are working to challenge existing norms and embed new ways of doing things.
Today, we are excited to jointly launch our report Global Trends in Government Innovation 2023, the preliminary report of which was launched at the World Government Summit (WGS), which brings together over 4 000 participants from more than 190 countries to discuss innovative ways to solve the challenges facing humanity…(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)”.
Evidence Gap Maps as Critical Information Communication Devices for Evidence-based Public Policy
Paper by Esteban Villa-Turek et al: “The public policy cycle requires increasingly the use of evidence by policy makers. Evidence Gap Maps (EGMs) are a relatively new methodology that helps identify, process, and visualize the vast amounts of studies representing a rich source of evidence for better policy making. This document performs a methodological review of EGMs and presents the development of a working integrated system that automates several critical steps of EGM creation by means of applied computational and statistical methods. Above all, the proposed system encompasses all major steps of EGM creation in one place, namely inclusion criteria determination, processing of information, analysis, and user-friendly communication of synthesized relevant evidence. This tool represents a critical milestone in the efforts of implementing cutting-edge computational methods in usable systems. The contribution of the document is two-fold. First, it presents the critical importance of EGMs in the public policy cycle; second, it justifies and explains the development of a usable tool that encompasses the methodological phases of creation of EGMs, while automating most time-consuming stages of the process. The overarching goal is the better and faster information communication to relevant actors like policy makers, thus promoting well-being through better and more efficient interventions based on more evidence-driven policy making…(More)”.
Randomized Regulation: The Impact of Minimum Quality Standards on Health Markets
Paper by Guadalupe Bedoya, Jishnu Das & Amy Dolinger: “We report results from the first randomization of a regulatory reform in the health sector. The reform established minimum quality standards for patient safety, an issue that has become increasingly salient following the Ebola and COVID-19 epidemics. In our experiment, all 1348 health facilities in three Kenyan counties were classified into 273 markets, and the markets were then randomly allocated to treatment and control groups. Government inspectors visited health facilities and, depending on the results of their inspection, recommended closure or a timeline for improvements. The intervention increased compliance with patient safety measures in both public and private facilities (more so in the latter) and reallocated patients from private to public facilities without increasing out-of-pocket payments or decreasing facility use. In treated markets, improvements were equally marked throughout the quality distribution, consistent with a simple model of vertical differentiation in oligopolies. Our paper thus establishes the use of experimental techniques to study regulatory reforms and, in doing so, shows that minimum standards can improve quality across the board without adversely affecting utilization…(More)”.
German lawmakers mull creating first citizen assembly
APNews: “German lawmakers considered Wednesday whether to create the country’s first “citizen assembly’” to advise parliament on the issue of food and nutrition.
Germany’s three governing parties back the idea of appointing consultative bodies made up of members of the public selected through a lottery system who would discuss specific topics and provide nonbinding feedback to legislators. But opposition parties have rejected the idea, warning that such citizen assemblies risk undermining the primacy of parliament in Germany’s political system.
Baerbel Bas, the speaker of the lower house, or Bundestag, said that she views such bodies as a “bridge between citizens and politicians that can provide a fresh perspective and create new confidence in established institutions.”
“Everyone should be able to have a say,” Bas told daily Passauer Neue Presse. “We want to better reflect the diversity in our society.”
Environmental activists from the group Last Generation have campaigned for the creation of a citizen assembly to address issues surrounding climate change. However, the group argues that proposals drawn up by such a body should at the very least result in bills that lawmakers would then vote on.
Similar efforts to create citizen assemblies have taken place in other European countries such as Spain, Finland, Austria, Britain and Ireland…(More)”.
Misunderstanding Misinformation
Article by Claire Wardle: “In the fall of 2017, Collins Dictionary named fake news word of the year. It was hard to argue with the decision. Journalists were using the phrase to raise awareness of false and misleading information online. Academics had started publishing copiously on the subject and even named conferences after it. And of course, US president Donald Trump regularly used the epithet from the podium to discredit nearly anything he disliked.
By spring of that year, I had already become exasperated by how this term was being used to attack the news media. Worse, it had never captured the problem: most content wasn’t actually fake, but genuine content used out of context—and only rarely did it look like news. I made a rallying cry to stop using fake news and instead use misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation under the umbrella term information disorder. These terms, especially the first two, have caught on, but they represent an overly simple, tidy framework I no longer find useful.
Both disinformation and misinformation describe false or misleading claims, but disinformation is distributed with the intent to cause harm, whereas misinformation is the mistaken sharing of the same content. Analyses of both generally focus on whether a post is accurate and whether it is intended to mislead. The result? We researchers become so obsessed with labeling the dots that we can’t see the larger pattern they show.
By focusing narrowly on problematic content, researchers are failing to understand the increasingly sizable number of people who create and share this content, and also overlooking the larger context of what information people actually need. Academics are not going to effectively strengthen the information ecosystem until we shift our perspective from classifying every post to understanding the social contexts of this information, how it fits into narratives and identities, and its short-term impacts and long-term harms…(More)”.
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?
Essay by Ted Chiang: “When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray. For example, it’s become very common to compare powerful A.I.s to genies in fairy tales. The metaphor is meant to highlight the difficulty of making powerful entities obey your commands; the computer scientist Stuart Russell has cited the parable of King Midas, who demanded that everything he touched turn into gold, to illustrate the dangers of an A.I. doing what you tell it to do instead of what you want it to do. There are multiple problems with this metaphor, but one of them is that it derives the wrong lessons from the tale to which it refers. The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important. If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point.
So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America…(More)”.
Spamming democracy
Article by Natalie Alms: “The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is considering AI’s effect in the regulatory process, including the potential for generative chatbots to fuel mass campaigns or inject spam comments into the federal agency rulemaking process.
A recent executive order directed the office to consider using guidance or tools to address mass comments, computer-generated comments and falsely attributed comments, something an administration official told FCW that OIRA is “moving forward” on.
Mark Febrezio, a senior policy analyst at George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, has experimented with Open AI’s generative AI system ChatGPT to create what he called a “convincing” public comment submission to a Labor Department proposal.
“Generative AI also takes the possibility of mass and malattributed comments to the next level,” wrote Fabrizio and co-author Bridget Dooling, research professor at the center, in a paper published in April by the Brookings Institution.
The executive order comes years after astroturfing during the rollback of net neutrality policies by the Federal Communications Commission in 2017 garnered public attention. That rulemaking docket received a record-breaking 22 million-plus comments, but over 8.5 million came from a campaign against net neutrality led by broadband companies, according to an investigation by the New York Attorney General released in 2021.
The investigation found that lead generators paid by these companies submitted many comments with real names and addresses attached without the knowledge or consent of those individuals. In the same docket were over 7 million comments supporting net neutrality submitted by a computer science student, who used software to submit comments attached to computer-generated names and addresses.
While the numbers are staggering, experts told FCW that agencies aren’t just counting comments when reading through submissions from the public…(More)”