Paper by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dirk W. Bester: “Most cost-benefit analyses assume that the estimates of costs and benefits are more or less accurate and unbiased. But what if, in reality, estimates are highly inaccurate and biased? Then the assumption that cost-benefit analysis is a rational way to improve resource allocation would be a fallacy. Based on the largest dataset of its kind, we test the assumption that cost and benefit estimates of public investments are accurate and unbiased. We find this is not the case with overwhelming statistical significance. We document the extent of cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and forecasting bias in public investments. We further assess whether such inaccuracies seriously distort effective resource allocation, which is found to be the case. We explain our findings in behavioral terms and explore their policy implications. Finally, we conclude that cost-benefit analysis of public investments stands in need of reform and we outline four steps to such reform…(More)”.
From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing: A View on Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy
Paper by Elettra Bietti: “The word ‘ethics’ is overused in technology policy circles. Weaponized in support of deregulation, self-regulation or hands-off governance, “ethics” is increasingly identified with technology companies’ self-regulatory efforts and with shallow appearances of ethical behavior. So-called “ethics washing” by tech companies is on the rise, prompting criticism and scrutiny from scholars and the tech community at large. In parallel to the growth of ethics washing, its condemnation has led to a tendency to engage in “ethics bashing.” This consists in the trivialization of ethics and moral philosophy now understood as discrete tools or pre-formed social structures such as ethics boards, self-governance schemes or stakeholder groups.
The misunderstandings underlying ethics bashing are at least three-fold: (a) philosophy is understood in opposition and as alternative to law, political representation and social organizing; (b) philosophy and “ethics” are seen as a formalistic methodology, vulnerable to instrumentalization and abuse, and thus ontologically flawed; and (c) engagement in moral philosophy is downplayed and portrayed as mere “ivory tower” intellectualization of complex problems that need to be dealt with through alternative and more practical methodologies.
This essay argues that the rhetoric of ethics and morality should not be reductively instrumentalized, either by the industry in the form of “ethics washing,” or by scholars and policy-makers in the form of “ethics bashing.” Grappling with the role of philosophy and ethics requires moving beyond simplification and seeing ethics as a mode of inquiry that facilitates the evaluation of competing tech policy strategies. In other words, we must resist narrow reductivism of moral philosophy as instrumentalized performance and renew our faith in its intrinsic moral value as a mode of knowledge-seeking and inquiry. Far from mandating a self-regulatory scheme or a given governance structure, moral philosophy in fact facilitates the questioning and reconsideration of any given practice, situating it within a complex web of legal, political and economic institutions. Moral philosophy indeed can shed new light on human practices by adding needed perspective, explaining the relationship between technology and other worthy goals, situating technology within the human, the social, the political. It has become urgent to start considering technology ethics also from within and not only from outside of ethics….(More)”.
Psychology and Behavioral Economics: Applications for Public Policy
Book edited by Kai Ruggeri: “…offers an expert introduction to how psychology can be applied to a range of public policy areas. It examines the impact of psychological research for public policymaking in economic, financial, and consumer sectors; in education, healthcare, and the workplace; for energy and the environment; and in communications.
Your energy bills show you how much you use compared to the average household in your area. Your doctor sends you a text message reminder when your appointment is coming up. Your bank gives you three choices for how much to pay off on your credit card each month. Wherever you look, there has been a rapid increase in the importance we place on understanding real human behaviors in everyday decisions, and these behavioral insights are now regularly used to influence everything from how companies recruit employees through to large-scale public policy and government regulation. But what is the actual evidence behind these tactics, and how did psychology become such a major player in economics? Answering these questions and more, this team of authors, working across both academia and government, present this fully revised and updated reworking of Behavioral Insights for Public Policy.
This updatecovers everything from how policy was historically developed, to major research in human behavior and social psychology, to key moments that brought behavioral sciences to the forefront of public policy. Featuring over 100 empirical examples of how behavioral insights are being used to address some of the most critical challenges faced globally, the book covers key topics such as evidence-based policy, a brief history of behavioral and decision sciences, behavioral economics, and policy evaluation, all illustrated throughout with lively case studies.
Including end-of-chapter questions, a glossary, and key concept boxes to aid retention, as well as a new chapter revealing the work of the Canadian government’s behavioral insights unit, this is the perfect textbook for students of psychology, economics, public health, education, and organizational sciences, as well as public policy professionals looking for fresh insight into the underlying theory and practical applications in a range of public policy areas….(More)”.
The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
Book by Jonathan Rauch: “Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.
In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn’t even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: “cancel culture.” At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.
In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth.
By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do so—and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone…(More)”.
The Global Drive to Control Big Tech
Report by the Freedom House: “In the high-stakes battle between states and technology companies, the rights of internet users have become the main casualties. A growing number of governments are asserting their authority over tech firms, often forcing the businesses to comply with online censorship and surveillance. These developments have contributed to an unprecedented assault on free expression online, causing global internet freedom to decline for an 11th consecutive year.
Global norms have shifted dramatically toward greater government intervention in the digital sphere. Of the 70 states covered by this report, a total of 48 pursued legal or administrative action against technology companies. While some moves reflected legitimate attempts to mitigate online harms, rein in misuse of data, or end manipulative market practices, many new laws imposed excessively broad censorship and data-collection requirements on the private sector. Users’ online activities are now more pervasively moderated and monitored by companies through processes that lack the safeguards featured in democratic governance, such as transparency, judicial oversight, and public accountability.
The drive toward national regulation has emerged partly due to a failure to address online harms through self-regulation. The United States played a leading role in shaping early internet norms around free speech and free markets, but its laissez-faire approach to the tech industry created opportunities for authoritarian manipulation, data exploitation, and widespread malfeasance. In the absence of a shared global vision for a free and open internet, governments are adopting their own approaches to policing the digital sphere. Policymakers in many countries have cited a vague need to retake control of the internet from foreign powers, multinational corporations, and in some cases, civil society.
This shift in power from companies to states has come amid a record-breaking crackdown on freedom of expression online. In 56 countries, officials arrested or convicted people for their online speech. Governments suspended internet access in at least 20 countries, and 21 states blocked access to social media platforms, most often during times of political turmoil such as protests and elections. As digital repression intensifies and expands to more countries, users understandably lack confidence that government initiatives to regulate the internet will lead to greater protection of their rights…(More)”.
Aspiring to greater intellectual humility in science
Paper by Rink Hoekstra and Simine Vazire: “The replication crisis in the social, behavioural, and life sciences has spurred a reform movement aimed at increasing the credibility of scientific studies. Many of these credibility-enhancing reforms focus, appropriately, on specific research and publication practices. A less often mentioned aspect of credibility is the need for intellectual humility, or being transparent about and owning the limitations of our work. Although intellectual humility is presented as a widely accepted scientific norm, we argue that current research practice does not incentivize intellectual humility. We provide a set of recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles and highlight the central role peer reviewers can play in incentivizing authors to foreground the flaws and uncertainty in their work, thus enabling full and transparent evaluation of the validity of research…
A recent editorial in Nature Human Behaviour laments the fact that academia prefers clear and polished stories over honest but less clear-cut ones, with “research projects [presented] as conclusive narratives that leave no room for ambiguity or for conflicting or inconclusive results” (p. 1). Although honesty and clarity are not mutually exclusive, the pressure resulting from this probably impacts the quality and validity of our scientific work. Most journals still seem to favor clear stories, despite an arguably larger risk of these having validity issues. This presents a real dilemma for authors – especially those who do not have the luxury of a tenured position – who would like to put intellectual humility front and center: In order to increase the odds of getting a publication, they are encouraged to present their stories as better than they actually are. Being more honest or humble likely has a negative effect on their CVs. In the following, we’ll present a constructive solution for this apparent stalemate, which reverses the reward structure in such a way that authors are encouraged to write papers that “tell it like it is”….(More)”.
Nudgeability: Mapping Conditions of Susceptibility to Nudge Influence
Paper by Denise de Ridder, Floor Kroese, and Laurens van Gestel: “Nudges are behavioral interventions to subtly steer citizens’ choices toward “desirable” options. An important topic of debate concerns the legitimacy of nudging as a policy instrument, and there is a focus on issues relating to nudge transparency, the role of preexisting preferences people may have, and the premise that nudges primarily affect people when they are in “irrational” modes of thinking. Empirical insights into how these factors affect the extent to which people are susceptible to nudge influence (i.e., “nudgeable”) are lacking in the debate. This article introduces the new concept of nudgeability and makes a first attempt to synthesize the evidence on when people are responsive to nudges. We find that nudge effects do not hinge on transparency or modes of thinking but that personal preferences moderate effects such that people cannot be nudged into something they do not want. We conclude that, in view of these findings, concerns about nudging legitimacy should be softened and that future research should attend to these and other conditions of nudgeability….(More)”.
World Bank Cancels Flagship ‘Doing Business’ Report After Investigation
Article by Josh Zumbrun: “The World Bank canceled a prominent report rating the business environment of the world’s countries after an investigation concluded that senior bank management pressured staff to alter data affecting the ranking of China and other nations.
The leaders implicated include then World Bank Chief Executive Kristalina Georgieva, now managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and then World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.
The episode is a reputational hit for Ms. Georgieva, who disagreed with the investigators’ conclusions. As leader of the IMF, the lender of last resort to struggling countries around the world, she is in part responsible for managing political pressure from nations seeking to advance their own interests. It was also the latest example of the Chinese government seeking myriad ways to burnish its global standing.
The Doing Business report has been the subject of an external probe into the integrity of the report’s data. On Thursday, the bank released the results of that investigation, which concluded that senior bank leaders including Ms. Georgieva were involved in pressuring economists to improve China’s 2018 ranking. At the time, she and others were attempting to persuade China to support a boost in the bank’s funding….(More)”.
Process Science: The Interdisciplinary Study of Continuous Change
Paper by Jan vom Brocke et al: “The only constant in our world is change. Why is there not a field of science that explicitly studies continuous change? We propose the establishment of process science, a field that studies processes: coherent series of changes, both man-made and naturally occurring, that unfold over time and occur at various levels. Process science is concerned with understanding and influencing change. It entails discovering and understanding processes as well as designing interventions to shape them into desired directions. Process science is based on four key principles; it (1) puts processes at the center of attention, (2) investigates processes scientifically, (3) embraces perspectives of multiple disciplines, and (4) aims to create impact by actively shaping the unfolding of processes. The ubiquitous availability of digital trace data, combined with advanced data analytics capabilities, offer new and unprecedented opportunities to study processes through multiple data sources, which makes process science very timely….(More)”.
Public health and expert failure
Paper by Roger Koppl: “In a modern democracy, a public health system includes mechanisms for the provision of expert scientific advice to elected officials. The decisions of elected officials generally will be degraded by expert failure, that is, the provision of bad advice. The theory of expert failure suggests that competition among experts generally is the best safeguard against expert failure. Monopoly power of experts increases the chance of expert failure. The risk of expert failure also is greater when scientific advice is provided by only one or a few disciplines. A national government can simulate a competitive market for expert advice by structuring the scientific advice it receives to ensure the production of multiple perspectives from multiple disciplines. I apply these general principles to the United Kingdom’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)….(More)”.