The internet is rotting – let’s embrace it


Viktor Mayer-Schönberger in The Conversation: “Every year, some thousands of sites – including ones with unique information – go offline. Countless further webpages become inaccessible; instead of information, users encounter error messages.

Where some commentators may lament yet another black hole in the slowly rotting Internet, I actually feel okay. Of course, I, too, dread broken links and dead servers. But I also know: Forgetting is important.

In fact, as I argued in my book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” all through human history, humans reserved remembering for the things that really mattered to them and forgot the rest. Now the internet is making forgetting a lot harder.

Built to forget

Humans are accustomed to a world in which forgetting is the norm, and remembering is the exception.

This isn’t necessarily a bug in human evolution. The mind forgets what is no longer relevant to our present. Human memory is constantly reconstructed – it isn’t preserved in pristine condition, but becomes altered over time, helping people overcome cognitive dissonances. For example, people may see an awful past as rosier than it was, or devalue memories of past conflict with a person with whom they are close in the present.

Forgetting also helps humans to focus on current issues and to plan for the future. Research shows that those who are too tethered to their past find it difficult to live and act in the present. Forgetting creates space for something new, enabling people to go beyond what they already know.

Organizations that remember too much ossify in their processes and behavior. Learning something new requires forgetting something old – and that is hard for organizations that remember too much. There’s a growing literature on the importance of “unlearning,” or deliberately purging deeply rooted processes or practices from an organization – a fancy way to say that forgetting fulfills a valuable purpose….(More)”.

E-Nudging Justice: The Role of Digital Choice Architecture in Online Courts


Paper by Ayelet Sela: “Justice systems around the world are launching online courts and tribunals in order to improve access to justice, especially for self-represented litigants (SRLs). Online courts are designed to handhold SRLs throughout the process and empower them to make procedural and substantive decisions. To that end, they present SRLs with streamlined and simplified procedures and employ a host of user interface design and user experience strategies (UI/UX). Focusing on these features, the article analyzes online courts as digital choice environments that shape SRLs’ decisions, inputs and actions, and considers their implications on access to justice, due process and the impartiality of courts. Accordingly, the article begins to close the knowledge gap regarding choice architecture in online legal proceedings. 

Using examples from current online courts, the article considers how mechanisms such as choice overload, display, colorfulness, visual complexity, and personalization influence SRLs’ choices and actions. The analysis builds on research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics that shows that subtle changes in the context in which decisions are made steer (nudge) people to choose a particular option or course of action. It is also informed by recent studies that capture the effect of digital choice architecture on users’ choices and behaviors in online settings. The discussion clarifies that seemingly naïve UI/UX features can strongly influence users of online courts, in a manner that may be at odds with their institutional commitment to impartiality and due process. Moreover, the article challenges the view that online court interfaces (and those of other online legal services, for that matter) should be designed to maximize navigability, intuitiveness and user-friendliness. It argues that these design attributes involve the risk of nudging SRLs to make uninformed, non-deliberate, and biased decisions, possibly infringing their autonomy and self-determination. Accordingly, the article suggests that choice architecture in online courts should aim to encourage reflective participation and informed decision-making. Specifically, its goal should be to improve SRLs’ ability to identify and consider options, and advance their own — inherently diverse — interests. In order to mitigate the abovementioned risks, the article proposes an initial evaluation framework, measures, and methodologies to support evidence-based and ethical choice architecture in online courts….(More)”.

How mobile text reminders earned Madagascar a 32,900% ROI in collecting unpaid taxes


Paper by Tiago Peixoto et al : “Benjamin Franklin famously once said that “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” In developing countries, however, tax revenues are anything but certain. Madagascar is a prime example, with tax collection as a share of GDP at just under 11 percent. This is low even compared with countries of similar levels of economic development, and well below what the government could reasonably collect to fund much-needed public services, such as education, health and infrastructure. 

Poor compliance by citizens who owe taxes remains a major reason for Madagascar’s low tax collection. Madagascar’s government has therefore made increasing tax revenue collection a high priority in its strategy for promoting sustainable economic growth and addressing poverty.

Reforming a tax system can take decades. But small measures, implemented with the help of technology, can help tax authorities improve compliance.  Our team at the World Bank jointly conducted a field experiment with the Madagascar’s Directorate General for Taxation, to test whether simple text message reminders via mobile phones could increase compliance among late-tax filers.

We took a group of 15,885 late-income-tax filers and randomly assigned some of them to receive a series of messages reminding them to file a tax declaration and emphasizing various reasons to pay taxes. Late tax filers were told that they could avoid a late penalty by meeting an extended deadline and were given the link to the tax filing website. 

The results of the experiment were significant. In the control group, only 7.2% of late filers filed a tax return by the extended deadline cited in the SMS messages. This increased to 9.8% in the treatment groups who received SMS reminders. This might not sound like much, but for every dollar spent sending text messages, the tax authority collected an additional 329 dollars in revenues, making the intervention highly cost-effective.

In fact, the return on this particular investment was 32,900 percent! Although this increase in revenue is relatively small in absolute terms—around $375,000—it could be automatically integrated into the tax system. It also suggests that messaging may hold a lot of promise for cost-effectively increasing tax receipts even in developing country contexts….(More)”.

The Psychology of Prediction


Blog post by Morgan Housel: “During the Vietnam War Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tracked every combat statistic he could, creating a mountain of analytics and predictions to guide the war’s strategy.

Edward Lansdale, head of special operations at the Pentagon, once looked at McNamara’s statistics and told him something was missing.

“What?” McNamara asked.

“The feelings of the Vietnamese people,” Landsdale said.

That’s not the kind of thing a statistician pays attention to. But, boy, did it matter.

I believe in prediction. I think you have to in order to get out of bed in the morning.

But prediction is hard. Either you know that or you’re in denial about it.

A lot of the reason it’s hard is because the visible stuff that happens in the world is a small fraction of the hidden stuff that goes on inside people’s heads. The former is easy to overanalyze; the latter is easy to ignore.

This report describes 12 common flaws, errors, and misadventures that occur in people’s heads when predictions are made….(More)”.

Applying design science in public policy and administration research


Paper by Sjoerd Romme and Albert Meijer: “There is increasing debate about the role that public policy research can play in identifying solutions to complex policy challenges. Most studies focus on describing and explaining how governance systems operate. However, some scholars argue that because current institutions are often not up to the task, researchers need to rethink this ‘bystander’ approach and engage in experimentation and interventions that can help to change and improve governance systems.

This paper contributes to this discourse by developing a design science framework that integrates retrospective research (scientific validation) and prospective research (creative design). It illustrates the merits and challenges of doing this through two case studies in the Netherlands and concludes that a design science framework provides a way of integrating traditional validation-oriented research with intervention-oriented design approaches. We argue that working at the interface between them will create new opportunities for these complementary modes of public policy research to achieve impact….(More)”

The Power of Global Performance Indicators


Introduction to Special Issue of International Organization by
Judith G. Kelley and Beth A. Simmons: “In recent decades, IGOs, NGOs, private firms and even states have begun to regularly package and distribute information on the relative performance of states. From the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index to the Financial Action Task Force blacklist, global performance indicators (GPIs) are increasingly deployed to influence governance globally. We argue that GPIs derive influence from their ability to frame issues, extend the authority of the creator, and — most importantly — to invoke recurrent comparison that stimulates governments’ concerns for their own and their country’s reputation. Their public and ongoing ratings and rankings of states are particularly adept at capturing attention not only at elite policy levels but also among other domestic and transnational actors. GPIs thus raise new questions for research on politics and governance globally. What are the social and political effects of this form of information on discourse, policies and behavior? What types of actors can effectively wield GPIs and on what types of issues? In this symposium introduction, we define GPIs, describe their rise, and theorize and discuss these questions in light of the findings of the symposium contributions…(More)”.

The Remarkable Unresponsiveness of College Students to Nudging And What We Can Learn from It


Paper by Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic: “We present results from a five-year effort to design promising online and text-message interventions to improve college achievement through several distinct channels. From a sample of nearly 25,000 students across three different campuses, we find some improvement from coaching-based interventions on mental health and study time, but none of the interventions we evaluate significantly influences academic outcomes (even for those students more at risk of dropping out). We interpret the results with our survey data and a model of student effort. Students study about five to eight hours fewer each week than they plan to, though our interventions do not alter this tendency. The coaching interventions make some students realize that more effort is needed to attain good grades but, rather than working harder, they settle by adjusting grade expectations downwards. Our study time impacts are not large enough for translating into significant academic benefits. More comprehensive but expensive programs appear more promising for helping college students outside the classroom….(More)”

In the Mood for Democracy? Democratic Support as Thermostatic Opinion


Paper by Christopher Claassen: “Public support has long been thought crucial for the survival of democracy. Existing research has argued that democracy moreover appears to create its own demand: the presence of a democratic system coupled with the passage of time produces a public who supports democracy. Using new panel measures of democratic mood varying over 135 countries and up to 30 years, this paper finds little evidence for such a positive feedback effect of democracy on support. Instead, it demonstrates a thermostatic effect: increases in democracy depress democratic mood, while decreases cheer it. Moreover, it is increases in the liberal, counter-majoritarian aspects of democracy, not the majoritarian, electoral aspects that provoke this backlash from citizens. These novel results challenge existing research on support for democracy, but also reconcile this research with the literature on macro-opinion….(More)”.

Truth and Consequences


Sophia Rosenfeld at The Hedgehog Review: “Conventional wisdom has it that for democracy to work, it is essential that we—the citizens—agree in some minimal way about what reality looks like. We are not, of course, all required to think the same way about big questions, or believe the same things, or hold the same values; in fact, it is expected that we won’t. But somehow or other, we need to have acquired some very basic, shared understanding about what causes what, what’s broadly desirable, what’s dangerous, and how to characterize what’s already happened.

Some social scientists call this “public knowledge.” Some, more cynically, call it “serviceable truth” to emphasize its contingent, socially constructed quality. Either way, it is the foundation on which democratic politics—in which no one person or institution has sole authority to determine what’s what and all claims are ultimately revisable—is supposed to rest. It is also imagined to be one of the most exalted products of the democratic process. And to a certain degree, this peculiar, messy version of truth has held its own in modern liberal democracies, including the United States, for most of their history.

Lately, though, even this low-level kind of consensus has come to seem elusive. The issue is not just professional spinners talking about “alternative facts” or the current US president bending the truth and spreading conspiracy theories at every turn, from mass rallies to Twitter rants. The deeper problem stems from the growing sense we all have that, today, even hard evidence of the kind that used to settle arguments about factual questions won’t persuade people whose political commitments have already led them to the opposite conclusion. Rather, citizens now belong to “epistemic tribes”: One person’s truth is another’s hoax or lie. Just look at how differently those of different political leanings interpret the evidence of global warming or the conclusions of the Mueller Report on Russian involvement in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Moreover, many of those same people are also now convinced that the boundaries between truth and untruth are, in the end, as subjective as everything else. It is all a matter of perception and spin; nothing is immune, and it doesn’t really matter.

Headed for a Cliff

So what’s happened? Why has assent on even basic factual claims (beyond logically demonstrable ones, like 2 + 2 = 4) become so hard to achieve? Or, to put it slightly differently, why are we—meaning people of varied political persuasions—having so much trouble lately arriving at any broadly shared sense of the world beyond ourselves, and, even more, any consensus on which institutions, methods, or people to trust to get us there? And why, ultimately, do so many of us seem simply to have given up on the possibility of finding some truths in common?

These are questions that seem especially loaded precisely because of the traditionally close conceptual and historical relationship between truth and democracy as social values….(More)”.

From City to Nation: Digital government in Argentina, 2015–2018


Paper by Tanya Filer, Antonio Weiss and Juan Cacace: “In 2015, voters in Argentina elected Mauricio Macri of the centre-right Propuesta Republicana (PRO) as their new President, following a tightly contested race. Macri inherited an office wrought with tensions: an unstable economy; a highly polarised population; and an increasing weariness towards the institutions of governance overall. In this context, his administration hoped to harness the possibilities of digital transformation to make citizens’ interactions with the State more efficient, more accountable, and ‘friendlier’.

Following a successful tenure in the City of Buenos Aires, where Macri had been Mayor, Minister Andrés Ibarra and a digital government team were charged with the project of national digital transformation, taking on projects from a single ‘whole-of-government’ portal to a mobile phone application designed to reduce the incidence of gender-based violence against women. Scaling up digitisation from the city to the national level was, by all accounts, a challenge. By 2018, Argentina had won global acclaim for its progress on key aspects of digital government, but also increasingly recognised the difficulties of digitisation at the national scale. It identified the need, as observed by the OECD, for an overarching strategic plan to manage the scale, diversity and politics of federal-level digital transformation. Based on interviews with key stakeholders, this case discusses the country’s digital modernisation agenda from 2015 to 2018, with a primary focus on service provision projects. It examines the challenges faced in terms of politics and technology, and the lessons that Argentina’s experience offers….(More)”