OECD Paper by James Mohun and Alex Roberts: “Rules as Code (RaC) is an exciting concept that rethinks one of the core functions of governments: rulemaking. It proposes that governments create an official version of rules (e.g. laws and regulations) in a machine-consumable form, which allows rules to be understood and actioned by computer systems in a consistent way. More than simply a technocratic solution, RaC represents a transformational shift in how governments create rules, and how third parties consume them. Across the world, public sector teams are exploring the concept and its potential as a response to an increasingly complex operating environment and growing pressures on incumbent rulemaking systems. Cracking the Code is intended to help those working both within and outside of government to understand the potential, limitations and implications of RaC, as well as how it could be applied in a public service context….(More)”.
Which Side of History?: How Technology Is Reshaping Democracy and Our Lives
Book by Common Sense: “…collection of essential essays, provocative perspectives, and calls to action that challenge the status quo, and that could—if we are willing to listen—redefine our relationship with technology….The onset of the coronavirus pandemic brought cascading crises and a deeper dependency on technology to keep us connected—but at a cost. We’re using tech for work, education, health care, essential services, and fun. That same technology is spreading misinformation and threatening free and open democracies. It’s widening the gap between rich and poor, taxing our emotional capacities and mental health, and creating social inequities by leaving behind those of us who are underserved and under-connected…(More)”.
Introducing the Institute of Impossible Ideas
Blog by Dominic Campbell: “…We have an opportunity ahead of us to set up a new model which seeds and keeps innovation firmly in the public realm. Using entrepreneurial approaches, we can work together to not only deliver better outcomes for citizens for less but ideate, create and build technology-driven, sustainable services that remain in public hands.
Rebooting public services for the 21st century
Conventional wisdom is that the private sector is best placed to drive radical change with its ecosystem of funders, appetite for risk and perceived ability to attract the best and brightest minds. In the private sector, digital companies have disrupted whole industries. Tech startups are usurping the incumbents, improving experiences and reducing costs before expanding and completely transforming the landscape around them.
We’re talking about the likes of Netflix who started a new model for movie rentals, turned streaming platform for TV and is now one of the world’s largest producers of media. Or Airbnb, which got its start renting a spare room and air mattress, turned one of the largest travel booking platforms and is now moving into building physical hotels and housing. Two organisations who saw an opportunity in a market, and have gone on to reinvent a full-stack service.
The entrepreneurial approach has driven rapid innovation in some fields, but private sector outsourcing for the public realm has rarely led to truly radical innovation. That doesn’t stop the practice, and profits remain in private hands. Old models of innovation, either internal and incremental or left to the private sector, aren’t working.
The public sector can, and does, drive innovation. And yet, we continue to see private profits take off from the runway of publicly funded innovation, the state receiving little of the financial reward for the private sector’s increased role in public service delivery….(More)…Find out more about the Institute of Impossible Ideas.
Catastrophes of the 21st Century
Paper by Roger Pielke: “There are few ways to better display our ignorance than by speculating on the long-term future. At the same time, making wise decisions depends upon both anticipating an uncertain future and the limits of what we can know. This paper takes a broad look at global trends in place today, where they may be taking us, and the implications for thinking about catastrophes of the 21st century. I suggest three types of catastrophes lie ahead. The familiar – hazards that we have come to expect based on experience and knowledge, such as earthquakes and typhoons. The emergent – hazards that are the product of a complex, interconnected world, such as financial meltdowns, supply chain disruption and epidemics.
The extraordinary – hazards that may or may not be foreseen or foreseeable, but for which we are wholly unprepared, such as an asteroid impact, massive solar storm, or even fantastic scenarios found only in fiction, such as the consequences of contact with alien life. I will argue that our collective attention and expertise is, perhaps understandably, disproportionately focused on the familiar. The consequence, however, is a sort of intellectual myopia. We know more than we think about the familiar and less than we should about the emergent and the extraordinary. Yet our ability to deal with the hazards of the future likely depends much more on our ability to prepare for the emergent and the extraordinary. The talk will conclude with recommendations for what a robust and resilient global society might look like in the face of known, unknown and unknowable risks of the 21st century….(More)”.
Regulatory Technology
Paper by the Productivity Commission (Australia): ” Regulatory technology (‘regtech’) is the use of technology to better achieve regulatory objectives. Used well, it can support the improved targeting of regulation and reduce the costs of administration and compliance.
While regtech can improve regulatory outcomes and reduce costs, it is not a substitute for regulatory reform. Indeed, as regtech is intended to make the task of regulating easier, advances in technology heighten the onus on policy makers to ensure the need for, and design of, regulation are soundly‑based….
Leading‑edge regtech involves the use of data for predictive analytics and real time monitoring, enabling better regulatory outcomes and potentially fewer compliance burdens for businesses. But advanced regtech requires specialised resources and long development times.
Even in low‑tech applications, widespread implementation of regtech can take some years. It can require substantial investment by regulators and businesses in capacity and cultural change while (as with technology solutions generally) enumeration of the scale and timing of the benefits can be difficult.
There are four key areas where regtech solutions may be particularly beneficial:
- where regulatory environments are particularly complex to navigate and monitor
- where there is scope to improve risk‑based regulatory approaches, thereby targeting the compliance burden and regulator efforts
- where technology can enable better monitoring, including by overcoming constraints related to physical presence
- where technology can safely unlock more uses of data for regulatory compliance.
Creating and maintaining a regulatory environment that supports the realisation of regtech benefits would mean:
- improving the consistency and structure of data and the interoperability of, and standards for, technology — these are precursors to wider regtech adoption
- investing in the technical skills and capabilities of regulators to enable measured steps in regtech adoption
- determining accountability for outcomes associated with regtech solutions, including with regard to privacy, data security, and responsibility for resolving disputed outcomes
- reviewing regulation to remove technology‑specific requirements that could prevent the take‑up of beneficial regtech solutions
- creating familiarity with the possibilities of regtech (for example, through liaison forums and trials), facilitating collaboration between regulators, regulated entities and regtech developers, and establishing safe environments to develop and test regtech solutions….(More)”.
Why Doubt Is Essential to Science
Liv Grjebine at Scientific American: “The confidence people place in science is frequently based not on what it really is, but on what people would like it to be. When I asked students at the beginning of the year how they would define science, many of them replied that it is an objective way of discovering certainties about the world. But science cannot provide certainties. For example, a majority of Americans trust science as long as it does not challenge their existing beliefs. To the question “When science disagrees with the teachings of your religion, which one do you believe?,” 58 percent of North Americans favor religion; 33 percent science; and 6 percent say “it depends.”
But doubt in science is a feature, not a bug. Indeed, the paradox is that science, when properly functioning, questions accepted facts and yields both new knowledge and new questions—not certainty. Doubt does not create trust, nor does it help public understanding. So why should people trust a process that seems to require a troublesome state of uncertainty without always providing solid solutions?
As a historian of science, I would argue that it’s the responsibility of scientists and historians of science to show that the real power of science lies precisely in what is often perceived as its weakness: its drive to question and challenge a hypothesis. Indeed, the scientific approach requires changing our understanding of the natural world whenever new evidence emerges from either experimentation or observation. Scientific findings are hypotheses that encompass the state of knowledge at a given moment. In the long run, many of are challenged and even overturned. Doubt might be troubling, but it impels us towards a better understanding; certainties, as reassuring as they may seem, in fact undermine the scientific process….(More)”.
Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem
Paper by Jennifer Allen, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius, David Rothschild and Duncan J. Watts: “Fake news,” broadly defined as false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news, is frequently asserted to be pervasive online with serious consequences for democracy. Using a unique multimode dataset that comprises a nationally representative sample of mobile, desktop, and television consumption, we refute this conventional wisdom on three levels. First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans’ daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans’ daily media diet. Our results suggest that the origins of public misinformedness and polarization are more likely to lie in the content of ordinary news or the avoidance of news altogether as they are in overt fakery….(More)”.
Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court
Paper by Alissa Fishbane, Aurelie Ouss and Anuj K. Shah: “Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses, and warrants are then issued for their arrest. In two field studies in New York City, we make critical information salient by redesigning the summons form and providing text message reminders. These interventions reduce failures to appear by 13-21% and lead to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period. In lab experiments, we find that while criminal justice professionals see failures to appear as relatively unintentional, laypeople believe they are more intentional. These lay beliefs reduce support for policies that make court information salient and increase support for punishment. Our findings suggest that criminal justice policies can be made more effective and humane by anticipating human error in unintentional offenses….(More)”
Public value and platform governance
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) Working Paper: “The market size and strength of the major digital platform companies has invited international concern about how such firms should best be regulated to serve the interests of wider society, with a particular emphasis on the need for new anti-trust legislation. Using a normative innovation systems approach, this paper investigates how current anti-trust models may insufficiently address the value-extracting features of existing data-intensive and platform-oriented industry behaviour and business models. To do so, we employ the concept of economic rents to investigate how digital platforms create and extract value. Two forms of rent are elaborated: ‘network monopoly rents’ and ‘algorithmic rents’. By identifying such rents more precisely, policymakers and researchers can better direct regulatory investigations, as well as broader industrial and innovation policy approaches, to shape the features of platform-driven digital markets…(More)”.
Science as Scorekeeping
Brendan Foht at New Atlantis: “If there is one thing about the coronavirus pandemic that both sides of the political spectrum seem to agree on, it’s that the science that bears on it should never be “politicized.” From the left, former CDC directors of the Obama and Clinton administrations warn of how the Trump administration has politicized the agency’s science: “The only valid reason to change released guidelines is new information and new science — not politics.” From the right, the Wall Street Journal frets about the scientific journal Nature publishing a politically charged editorial about why China shouldn’t be blamed for the coronavirus: “Political pressure has distorted scientific judgment.” What both sides assume is that political authorities should defer to scientists on important decisions about the pandemic, but only insofar as science itself is somehow kept free from politics.
But politicization, and even polarization, are not always bad for science. There is much about how we can use science to respond to the pandemic that is inescapably political, and that we cannot simply leave to scientists to decide.
There is, however, a real problem with how political institutions in the United States have engaged with science. Too much of the debate over coronavirus science has centered on how bad the disease really is, with the administration downplaying its risks and the opposition insisting on its danger. One side sees the scientists warning of peril as a political obstacle that must be overcome. The other side sees them as authorities to whom we must defer, not as servants of the public who could be directed toward solving the problem. The false choice between these two perspectives on how science relates to politics obscures a wide range of political choices the country faces about how we can make use of our scientific resources in responding to the pandemic….(More)”.