BIT Report: “…This report is focused on four countries: the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Canada and provides a series of practical ideas for investments to improve the quality and use of evidence in policy design, implementation, and evaluation. It highlights the opportunities and challenges ahead, as the demand for and supply of evidence continue to grow in a world with complex policy challenges. It is a call to action for governments to collaborate more closely on evidence generation and utilisation. By pooling resources and expertise, countries can bridge the existing gaps in their evidence ecosystems, ultimately leading to... (More >)
UN E-Government Survey 2024
Report by United Nations (DESA): “…provides a comprehensive assessment of the digital government landscape across all 193 Member States. The 2024 Survey highlights a significant upward trend in the development of digital government worldwide, with increased investment in resilient infrastructure and cutting-edge technologies. The global average value of the E-Government Development Index (EGDI) shows substantial improvement, with the proportion of the population lagging in digital government development decreasing from 45.0 per cent in 2022 to 22.4 per cent in 2024. Despite significant progress in digital government development, the EGDI averages for the African region, least developed countries, and small... (More >)
Use GenAI to Improve Scenario Planning
Article by Daniel J. Finkenstadt et al: “Businesses are increasingly leveraging strategic foresight and scenario planning to navigate uncertainties stemming from climate change, global conflicts, and technological advancements. Traditional methods, however, struggle with identifying key trends, exploring multiple scenarios, and providing actionable guidance. Generative AI offers a robust alternative, enabling rapid, cost-effective, and comprehensive contingency planning. This AI-driven approach enhances scenario creation, narrative exploration, and strategy generation, providing detailed, adaptable strategies rather than conclusive solutions. This approach demands accurate, relevant data and encourages iterative refinement, transforming how organizations forecast and strategize for the future... (More >)
It’s time we put agency into Behavioural Public Policy
Article by Sanchayan Banerjee et al: “Promoting agency – people’s ability to form intentions and to act on them freely – must become a primary objective for Behavioural Public Policy (BPP). Contemporary BPPs do not directly pursue this objective, which is problematic for many reasons. From an ethical perspective, goals like personal autonomy and individual freedom cannot be realised without nurturing citizens’ agency. From an efficacy standpoint, BPPs that override agency – for example, by activating automatic psychological processes – leave citizens ‘in the dark’, incapable of internalising and owning the process of behaviour change. This may contribute to... (More >)
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI
Book by Yuval Noah Harari: “For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age,... (More >)
Policies must be justified by their wellbeing-to-cost ratio
Article by Richard Layard: “…What is its value for money — that is, how much wellbeing does it deliver per (net) pound it costs the government? This benefit/cost ratio (or BCR) should be central to every discussion. The science exists to produce these numbers and, if the British government were to require them of the spending departments, it would be setting an example of rational government to the whole world. Such a move would, of course, lead to major changes in priorities. At the London School of Economics we have been calculating the benefits and costs of policies across... (More >)
Even laypeople use legalese
Paper by Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson: “Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis (n = 59) million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English. Next, two preregistered text generation experiments (n = 286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In... (More >)
Policy Fit for the Future
Primer by the Australian Government: “The Futures Primer is part of the “Policy Fit for the Future” project, building Australian Public Service capability to use futures techniques in policymaking through horizon scanning, visioning and scenario planning. These tools help anticipate and navigate future risks and opportunities. The tools and advice can be adapted to any policy challenge, and reflect the views of global experts in futures and strategic foresight, both within and outside the APS…The Futures Primer offers a range of flexible tools and advice that can be adapted to any policy challenge. It reflects the views of global... (More >)
Regulating the Direction of Innovation
Paper by Joshua S. Gans: “This paper examines the regulation of technological innovation direction under uncertainty about potential harms. We develop a model with two competing technological paths and analyze various regulatory interventions. Our findings show that market forces tend to inefficiently concentrate research on leading paths. We demonstrate that ex post regulatory instruments, particularly liability regimes, outperform ex ante restrictions in most scenarios. The optimal regulatory approach depends critically on the magnitude of potential harm relative to technological benefits. Our analysis reveals subtle insurance motives in resource allocation across research paths, challenging common intuitions about diversification. These insights... (More >)
Governments Empower Citizens by Promoting Digital Rights
Article by Julia Edinger: “The rapid rise of digital services and smart city technology has elevated concerns about privacy in the digital age and government’s role, even as cities from California to Texas take steps to make constituents aware of their digital rights. Earlier this month, Long Beach, Calif., launched an improved version of its Digital Rights Platform, which shows constituents their data privacy and digital rights and information about how the city uses technologies while protecting digital rights. “People’s digital rights are no different from their human or civil rights, except that they’re applied to how they interact... (More >)
