Paper by Armin Falk: “We document individual willingness to fight climate change and its behavioral determinants in a large representative sample of US adults. Willingness to fight climate change – as measured through an incentivized donation decision – is highly heterogeneous across the population. Individual beliefs about social norms, economic preferences such as patience and altruism, as well as universal moral values positively predict climate preferences. Moreover, we document systematic misperceptions of prevalent social norms. Respondents vastly underestimate the prevalence of climate- friendly behaviors and norms among their fellow citizens. Providing respondents with correct information causally raises individual willingness to fight climate change as well as individual support for climate policies. The effects are strongest for individuals who are skeptical about the existence and threat of global warming…(More)”.
Political Science Has Its Own Lab Leaks
Paul Musgrave at Foreign Policy: “The idea of a lab leak has gone, well, viral. As a political scientist, I cannot assess whether the evidence shows that COVID-19 emerged naturally or from laboratory procedures (although many experts strenuously disagree). Yet as a political scientist, I do think that my discipline can learn something from thinking seriously about our own “lab leaks” and the damage they could cause.
A political science lab leak might seem as much of a punchline as the concept of a mad social scientist. Nevertheless, the notion that scholarly ideas and findings can escape the nuanced, cautious world of the academic seminar and transform into new forms, even becoming threats, becomes more of a compelling metaphor if you think of academics as professional crafters of ideas intended to survive in a hostile environment. Given the importance of what we study, from nuclear war to international economics to democratization and genocide, the escape of a faulty idea could have—and has had—dangerous consequences for the world.
Academic settings provide an evolutionarily challenging environment in which ideas adapt to survive. The process of developing and testing academic theories provides metaphorical gain-of-function accelerations of these dynamics. To survive peer review, an idea has to be extremely lucky or, more likely, crafted to evade the antibodies of academia (reviewers’ objections). By that point, an idea is either so clunky it cannot survive on its own—or it is optimized to thrive in a less hostile environment.
Think tanks and magazines like the Atlantic (or Foreign Policy) serve as metaphorical wet markets where wild ideas are introduced into new and vulnerable populations. Although some authors lament a putative decline of social science’s influence, the spread of formerly academic ideas like intersectionality and the use of quantitative social science to reshape electioneering suggest that ideas not only move from the academy but can flourish once transplanted. This is hardly new: Terms from disciplines including psychoanalysis (“ego”), evolution (“survival of the fittest”), and economics (the “free market” and Marxism both) have escaped from the confines of academic work before…(More)”.
Why You Should Care About Your Right to Repair Gadgets
Brian X. Chen at The New York Times: “When your car has problems, your instinct is probably to take it to a mechanic. But when something goes wrong with your smartphone — say a shattered screen or a depleted battery — you may wonder: “Is it time to buy a new one?”
That’s because even as our consumer electronics have become as vital as our cars, the idea of tech repair still hasn’t been sown into our collective consciousness. Studies have shown that when tech products begin to fail, most people are inclined to buy new things rather than fix their old ones.
“Repair is inconvenient and difficult, so people don’t seek it,” said Nathan Proctor, a director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocacy organization, who is working on legislation to make tech repair more accessible. “Because people don’t expect to repair things, they replace things when by far the most logical thing to do is to repair it.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. More of us could maintain our tech products, as we do with cars, if it were more practical to do so. If we all had more access to the parts, instructions and tools to revive products, repairs would become simpler and less expensive.
This premise is at the heart of the “right to repair” act, a proposed piece of legislation that activists and tech companies have fought over for nearly a decade. Recently, right-to-repair supporters scored two major wins. In May, the Federal Trade Commission published a report explaining how tech companies were harming competition by restricting repairs. And last Friday, President Biden issued an executive order that included a directive for the F.T.C. to place limits on how tech manufacturers could restrict repairs.
The F.T.C. is set to meet next week to discuss new policies about electronics repair. Here’s what you need to know about the fight over your right to fix gadgets…(More)”.
Repository of Behavioral Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB): “How do you keep people from gathering with friends and family during a pandemic? How do you improve school attendance among preschoolers? How do you make sure taxpayers pay their fair share? These are some of the questions researchers seek to solve so countries can continue to grow and prosper. Many issues come down to human behavior and how the right policy tools can nudge people into doing things that will benefit themselves and society. A new repository collects these tools and the lessons learned from behavioral interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, making them available for policymakers across the region and beyond.
For nearly a decade, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has been working with local and national governments in the region to advance knowledge and expertise on individual and collective decision-making. The goal is to address biases that guide people’s behavior in detrimental ways. By designing strategies to correct them, we can help people make wiser choices in areas that range from education and savings to health, tax compliance, and labor markets….
To collect our findings and make the lessons we learned over the years available to policymakers and researchers, we recently created the largest online repository of quantitative behavioral economics field experiments conducted in Latin America and the Caribbean. The repository is aimed specifically at policymakers and is available in Spanish and English….(More)”.
How laws affect the perception of norms: empirical evidence from the lockdown
Paper by Roberto Galbiati, Emeric Henry, Nicolas Jacquemet, and Max Lobeck: “Laws not only affect behavior due to changes in material payoffs, but they may also change the perception individuals have of societal norms, either by shifting them directly or by providing information on these norms. Using detailed daily survey data and exploiting the introduction of lockdown measures in the UK in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis, we provide causal evidence that the law drastically changed the perception of the norms regarding social distancing behaviors. We show this effect of laws on perceived norms is mostly driven by an informational channel….(More)”.
Disrupting the Welfare State? Digitalisation and the Retrenchment of Public Sector Capacity
Paper by Rosie Collington: “Welfare state bureaucracies the world over have adopted far-reaching digitalisation reforms in recent years. From the deployment of AI in service management, to the ‘opening up’ of administrative datasets, digitalisation initiatives have uprooted established modes of public sector organisation and administration. And, as this paper suggests, they have also fundamentally transformed the political economy of the welfare state. Through a case study of Danish reforms between 2002 and 2019, the analysis finds that public sector digitalisation has entailed the transfer of responsibility for key infrastructure to private actors. Reforms in Denmark have not only been pursued in the name of public sector improvement and efficiency. A principal objective of public sector digitalisation has rather been the growth of Denmark’s nascent digital technology industries as part of the state’s wider export-led growth strategy, adopted in response to functional pressures on the welfare state model. The attempt to deliver fiscal stability in this way has, paradoxically, produced retrenchment of critical assets and capabilities. The paper’s findings hold important implications for states embarking on public sector digitalisation reforms, as well as possibilities for future research on how states can harness technological progress in the interests of citizens – without hollowing out in the process….(More)”.
Could Trade Agreements Help Address the Wicked Problem of Cross-Border Disinformation?
Essay by Susan Ariel Aaronson: “Whether produced domestically or internationally, disinformation is a “wicked” problem that has global impacts. Although trade agreements contain measures that address cross-border disinformation, domestically created disinformation remains out of their reach. This paper looks at how policy makers can use trade agreements to mitigate disinformation and spam while implementing financial and trade sanctions against entities and countries that engage in disseminating cross-border disinformation. Developed and developing countries will need to work together to solve this global problem….(More)”.
A New Tool Shows How Google Results Vary Around the World
Article by Tom Simonite: “Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has earned it an aura of objectivity. Its dominance in search, and the disappearance of most competitors, make its lists of links appear still more canonical. An experimental new interface for Google Search aims to remove that mantle of neutrality.
Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. The research project reveals how Google’s service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences—such as whether Beijing’s Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters.
Divergent results like that show how the idea of search engines as neutral is a myth, says Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student in science, technology, and society at MIT and cocreator of Search Atlas. “Any attempt to quantify relevance necessarily encodes moral and political priorities,” Ochigame says.
Ochigame built Search Atlas with Katherine Ye, a computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research.
Just like Google’s homepage, the main feature of Search Atlas is a blank box. But instead of returning a single column of results, the site displays three lists of links, from different geographic versions of Google Search selected from the more than 100 the company offers. Search Atlas automatically translates a query to the default languages of each localized edition using Google Translate.
Ochigame and Ye say the design reveals “information borders” created by the way Google’s search technology ranks web pages, presenting different slices of reality to people in different locations or using different languages.
When they used their tool to do an image search on “Tiananmen Square,” the UK and Singaporean versions of Google returned images of tanks and soldiers quashing the 1989 student protests. When the same query was sent to a version of Google tuned for searches from China, which can be accessed by circumventing the country’s Great Firewall, the results showed recent, sunny images of the square, smattered with tourists.
Google’s search engine has been blocked in China since 2010, when the company said it would stop censoring topics the government deemed sensitive, such as the Tiananmen massacre. Search Atlas suggests that the China edition of the company’s search engine can reflect the Chinese government’s preferences all the same. That pattern could result in part from how the corpus of web pages from any language or region would reflect cultural priorities and pressures….(More)”
How to be a good ancestor
Article by Sigal Samuel: “In 2015, 20 residents of Yahaba, a small town in northeastern Japan, went to their town hall to take part in a unique experiment.
Their goal was to design policies that would shape the future of Yahaba. They would debate questions typically reserved for politicians: Would it be better to invest in infrastructure or child care? Should we promote renewable energy or industrial farming?
But there was a twist. While half the citizens were invited to be themselves and express their own opinions, the remaining participants were asked to put on special ceremonial robes and play the part of people from the future. Specifically, they were told to imagine they were from the year 2060, meaning they’d be representing the interests of a future generation during group deliberations.
What unfolded was striking. The citizens who were just being themselves advocated for policies that would boost their lifestyle in the short term. But the people in robes advocated for much more radical policies — from massive health care investments to climate change action — that would be better for the town in the long term. They managed to convince their fellow citizens that taking that approach would benefit their grandkids. In the end, the entire group reached a consensus that they should, in some ways, act against their own immediate self-interest in order to help the future.
This experiment marked the beginning of Japan’s Future Design movement. What started in Yahaba has since been replicated in city halls around the country, feeding directly into real policymaking. It’s one example of a burgeoning global attempt to answer big moral questions: Do we owe it to future generations to take their interests into account? What does it look like to incorporate the preferences of people who don’t even exist yet? How can we be good ancestors?…(More)”.
The Diffusion of Disruptive Technologies
Paper by Nicholas Bloom, Tarek Alexander Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Josh Lerner & Ahmed Tahoun: “We identify novel technologies using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls. Our approach enables us to identify and document the diffusion of 29 disruptive technologies across firms and labor markets in the U.S. Five stylized facts emerge from our data. First, the locations where technologies are developed that later disrupt businesses are geographically highly concentrated, even more so than overall patenting. Second, as the technologies mature and the number of new jobs related to them grows, they gradually spread across space. While initial hiring is concentrated in high-skilled jobs, over time the mean skill level in new positions associated with the technologies declines, broadening the types of jobs that adopt a given technology. At the same time, the geographic diffusion of low-skilled positions is significantly faster than higher-skilled ones, so that the locations where initial discoveries were made retain their leading positions among high-paying positions for decades. Finally, these technology hubs are more likely to arise in areas with universities and high skilled labor pools….(More)”