Trust and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

2020 Edelman Trust Barometer Spring Update: “… a stunning rise in the public’s trust in government and business. Since January, trust in government has risen nine points and trust in business has risen six points, underscoring the fact that now more than ever, U.S. business must take the lead. This is particularly important because while trust in government has risen sharply in a few short months, the government in the U.S. is still distrusted overall, with approval of only 48%. Overall, business trust has surged to 56% over the same period.

This significant shift in sentiment marks a once-in-a-century moment for business to step forward. This is especially important given the fact that historically our research shows that considerable increases in trust scores are often be followed by losses in trust.

This opportunity for business is particularly important because half of respondents maintain that business needs to take a lead in providing economic relief and support, and 60 percent say that CEOs should take the lead on pandemic response as opposed to waiting for the government to impose it. That said, only 27% say CEOs are doing an outstanding job meeting the demands placed on them by the pandemic.

For corporate leaders, this is a moment of reckoning—and a time for radical transparency. It is imperative for corporate leaders to be open, direct and frequent about the measures they’re taking to balance public health and the economy and protect employee and customer safety. Our survey shows that CEOs have an amazing opportunity to lead their own organizations on this front right now, with a 10 point increase among U.S. respondents since March to tell the truth about the pandemic.

And to understand just how high the stakes are for business leaders to get things right, 54% of U.S. respondents are very concerned about job loss due to the pandemic and not being able to find a new job for a very long time. This occurs at a time when only 37% of U.S. respondents believe business is doing well or very well at protecting their employees’ financial wellbeing and safeguarding their jobs.

Our data also shows that only 41% of Americans think business is doing “well or very well” at ensuring the products and services that people need most are readily available and easily accessible. But the data also shows there is more opportunity for business to offer ingenuity—in the form of new market entrants and strategic pivots. Now is a time for clients to sharpen their strategic planning, in line with the ways Covid-19 is changing their audiences.

Our survey also uncovers a sense of underlying optimism that business leaders must tap into in order to positively transition out of the current situation. As horrible as the pandemic is, 64% of U.S. respondents believe this will lead to valuable innovations and changes for the better in how we live, work and treat each other as people…(More)”

Trust and Compliance to Public Health Policies in Times of Covid-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Olivier Bargain and Ulugbek Aminjonov: “While degraded trust and cohesion within a country are often shown to have large socioeconomic impacts, they can also have dramatic consequences when compliance is required for collective survival. We illustrate this point in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Policy responses all over the world aim to reduce social interaction and limit contagion.

Using data on human mobility and political trust at regional level in Europe, we examine whether the compliance to these containment policies depends on the level of trust in policy makers prior to the crisis. Using a double difference approach around the time of lockdown announcements, we find that high-trust regions decrease their mobility related to non-necessary activities significantly more than low-trust regions. We also exploit country and time variation in treatment using the daily strictness of national policies. The efficiency of policy stringency in terms of mobility reduction significantly increases with trust. The trust effect is nonlinear and increases with the degree of stringency. We assess how the impact of trust on mobility potentially translates in terms of mortality growth rate..(More)”.

Stay alert, infodemic, Black Death: the fascinating origins of pandemic terms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Simon Horobin at The Conversation: “Language always tells a story. As COVID-19 shakes the world, many of the words we’re using to describe it originated during earlier calamities – and have colourful tales behind them.

In the Middle Ages, for example, fast-spreading infectious diseases were known as plagues – as in the Bubonic plague, named for the characteristic swellings (or buboes) that appear in the groin or armpit. With its origins in the Latin word plaga meaning “stroke” or “wound”, plague came to refer to a wider scourge through its use to describe the ten plagues suffered by the Egyptians in the biblical book of Exodus.

An alternative term, pestilence, derives from Latin pestis (“plague”), which is also the origin of French peste, the title of the 1947 novel by Albert Camus (La Peste, or The Plague) which has soared up the bestseller charts in recent weeks. Latin pestis also gives us pest, now used to describe animals that destroy crops, or any general nuisance or irritant. Indeed, the bacterium that causes Bubonic plague is called Yersinia pestis….

The later plagues of the 17th century led to the coining of the word epidemic. This came from a Greek word meaning “prevalent”, from epi “upon” and demos “people”. The more severe pandemic is so called because it affects everyone (from Greek pan “all”).

A more recent coinage, infodemic, a blend of info and epidemic, was introduced in 2003 to refer to the deluge of misinformation and fake news that accompanied the outbreak of SARS (an acronym formed from the initial letters of “severe acute respiratory syndrome”).

The 17th-century equivalent of social distancing was “avoiding someone like the plague”. According to Samuel Pepys’s account of the outbreak that ravaged London in 1665, infected houses were marked with a red cross and had the words “Lord have mercy upon us” inscribed on the doors. Best to avoid properties so marked….(More)”.

The Big Failure of Small Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mariana Mazzucato and Giulio Quaggiotto at Project Syndicate: “Decades of privatization, outsourcing, and budget cuts in the name of “efficiency” have significantly hampered many governments’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis. At the same time, successful responses by other governments have shown that investments in core public-sector capabilities make all the difference in times of emergency. The countries that have handled the crisis well are those where the state maintains a productive relationship with value creators in society, by investing in critical capacities and designing private-sector contracts to serve the public interest.

From the United States and the United Kingdom to Europe, Japan, and South Africa, governments are investing billions – and, in some cases, trillions – of dollars to shore up national economies. Yet, if there is one thing we learned from the 2008 financial crisis, it is that quality matters at least as much as quantity. If the money falls on empty, weak, or poorly managed structures, it will have little effect, and may simply be sucked into the financial sector. Too many lives are at stake to repeat past errors.

Unfortunately, for the last half-century, the prevailing political message in many countries has been that governments cannot – and therefore should not – actually govern. Politicians, business leaders, and pundits have long relied on a management creed that focuses obsessively on static measures of efficiency to justify spending cuts, privatization, and outsourcing.

As a result, governments now have fewer options for responding to the crisis, which may be why some are now desperately clinging to the unrealistic hope of technological panaceas such as artificial intelligence or contact-tracing apps. With less investment in public capacity has come a loss of institutional memory (as the UK’s government has discovered) and increased dependence on private consulting firms, which have raked in billions. Not surprisingly, morale among public-sector employees has plunged in recent years.

Consider two core government responsibilities during the COVID-19 crisis: public health and the digital realm. In 2018 alone, the UK government outsourced health contracts worth £9.2 billion ($11.2 billion), putting 84% of beds in care homes in the hands of private-sector operators (including private equity firms). Making matters worse, since 2015, the UK’s National Health Service has endured £1 billion in budget cuts.

Outsourcing by itself is not the problem. But the outsourcing of critical state capacities clearly is, especially when the resulting public-private “partnerships” are not designed to serve the public interest. Ironically, some governments have outsourced so eagerly that they have undermined their own ability to structure outsourcing contracts. After a 12-year effort to spur the private sector to develop low-cost ventilators, the US government is now learning that outsourcing is not a reliable way to ensure emergency access to medical equipment….(More)”.

Covid-19 means systems thinking is no longer optional

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Seth Reynolds at NPC: “Never has the interdependence of our world been experienced by so many, so directly, so rapidly and so simultaneously. Our response to one threat, Covid-19, has unleashed a deluge of secondary and tertiary consequences that have swept across the globe faster than the virus itself. The butterfly effect has taken on new dimensions, as the reality of system interdependence at multiple levels has been brought directly into our homes and news feeds:

  • Individually, an innocuous bus journey sends a stranger to intensive care in a fortnight
  • Societally, health charities are warning that actions taken in response to one health crisis – Covid-19 – could lead to up to 11,000 deaths of women in childbirth around the world because of another – namely, 9.5m women not getting access to family planning intervention.
  • Governmentally, some systemic consequences of decision-making are there for all to see, while others are less immediately apparent – for example, Trump’s false proclamation of testing availability “for anyone that wants one”  ended up actually reducing the availability of tests by immediately increasing demand.  It even reduced the already scarce supply of protective masks, which must be disposed of after testing.

Students will be studying coronavirus for years. A systems lens can help us learn essential lessons. Covid-19 has provided many clear examples of effective systemic action, and stark lessons in the consequences of non-systemic thinking. Leaders and decision-makers everywhere are being compelled to think broader and deeper about causation and consequence. Decisions taken, even words spoken, without systemic awareness can have – indeed have had – profoundly damaging effects.

Systemic thinking, planning, action and leadership must now be mainstreamed – individually, organisationally, societally, across public, private and charity sectors. As one American diplomat recently reflected: “from climate change to the coronavirus, complex adaptive systems thinking is key to handling crises”. In fact, some epidemiologists, suddenly the world’s most valuable profession, have been calling for more systemic ways of working for years. However, we currently do not think and act in accordance with how our complex systems function and this has been part of the Covid-19 problem…(More)”.

Considering the Source: Varieties of COVID-19 Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Congressional Research Service: “In common parlance, the terms propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation are often used interchangeably, often with connotations of deliberate untruths of nefarious origin. In a national security context, however, these terms refer to categories of information that are created and disseminated with different intent and serve different strategic purposes. This primer examines these categories to create a framework for understanding the national security implications of information related to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic….(More)”.

Sovereigns, Viruses, and the Law: The Normative Challenges of Pandemic in Today’s Information Societies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ugo Pagallo: “The paper examines the legal and political impact of the Covid-19 crisis, drawing the attention to fundamental questions on authority and political legitimacy, coercion and obligation, power and cooperation. National states and sovereign governments have had and still will have a crucial role in re-establishing the public health sector and addressing the colossal challenges of economic re-construction. Scholars have accordingly discussed the set of legal means displayed during this crisis: emergency decrees, lockdowns, travel bans, and generally speaking, powers of the state of exception.

The aim of this paper is to stress the limits of such perspectives on powers of national governments and sovereigns, in order to illustrate what goes beyond such powers. Focus should be on the ontological, epistemic and normative constraints that affect today’s rights and duties of national states. Such constraints correspond to a class of problems that is complex, often transnational, and increasingly data-driven. In addition, we should not overlook the lessons learnt from such fields, as environmental law and internet governance, anti-terrorism and transnational business law, up to the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Such fields show that legal co-regulation and mechanisms of coordination and cooperation complement the traditional powers of national governments even in the times of the mother of all pandemics. The Covid-19 crisis has been often interpreted as if this were the last chapter of an on-going history about the Leviathan and its bio-powers. It is not. The crisis regards the end of the first chapter on the history of today’s information societies….(More)”.

Testing Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brigham Daniels, Mark Buntaine and Tanner Bangerter: “In modern democracies, governmental transparency is thought to have great value. When it comes to addressing administrative corruption and mismanagement, many would agree with Justice Brandeis’s observation that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Beyond this, many credit transparency with enabling meaningful citizen participation.

But even though transparency appears highly correlated with successful governance in developed democracies, assumptions about administrative transparency have remained empirically untested. Testing effects of transparency would prove particularly helpful in developing democracies where transparency norms have not taken hold or only have done so slowly. In these contexts, does administrative transparency really create the sorts of benefits attributed to it? Transparency might grease the gears of developed democracies, but what good is grease when many of the gears seem to be broken or missing entirely?

This Article presents empirical results from a first-of-its-kind field study that tested two major promises of administrative transparency in a developing democracy: that transparency increases public participation in government affairs and that it increases government accountability. To test these hypotheses, we used two randomized controlled trials.

Surprisingly, we found transparency had no significant effect in almost any of our quantitative measurements, although our qualitative results suggested that when transparency interventions exposed corruption, some limited oversight could result. Our findings are particularly significant for developing democracies and show, at least in this context, that Justice Brandeis may have oversold the cleansing effects of transparency. A few rays of transparency shining light on government action do not disinfect the system and cure government corruption and mismanagement. Once corruption and mismanagement are identified, it takes effective government institutions and action from civil society to successfully act as a disinfectant….(More)”.

Dark Patterns: Regulating Digital Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung: “How easy it is to order a book on an online shop’s website, how intuitive maps or navigation services are to use in everyday life, or how laborious it is to set up a customer account for a car-sharing service, these features and ‘user flows’ have become incredibly important to the every customer. Today, the “user friendliness” of a digital platform or service can therefore have a significant influence on how well a product sells or what market share it gains. Therefore, not only operators of large online platforms, but also companies in more traditional sectors of the economy are increasing investments into designing websites, apps or software in such a way that they can be used easily, intuitively and as time-saving as possible. 

This approach to product design is called user-centered design (UX design) and is based on the observations of how people interact with digital products, developing prototypes and testing them in experiments. These methods are not only used to improve the user-friendliness of digital interfaces but also to improve certain performance indicators which are relevant to the business – whether it is raising the number of users who register as new customers, increasing the sales volume per user or encouraging as many users as possible to share personal data.

UX design as well as intensive testing and optimization of user interfaces has become a standard in today’s digital product development as well as an important growth-driver for many companies. However, this development also has a side effect: Since companies and users can have conflicting interests and needs with regard to the design of digital products or services, digital design practices which cause problems or even harm for users are spreading.

Examples of problematic design choices include warnings and countdowns that create time pressure in online shops, the design of settings-windows that make it difficult for users to activate data protection settings, or website architectures that make it extremely time-consuming to delete an account. These examples are called “dark patterns”, “Deceptive Design” or “Unethical Design” and are defined as design practices which, intentionally or intentionally, influence people to their disadvantage and potentially manipulate users in their behaviour or decisions….(More)”.

Social sciences and social imagination

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Geoff Mulgan: “Crises – whether wars or pandemics – can sometimes, though not always, fuel social imagination.  New arrangements have to be created at breakneck speed and old norms have to be discarded.  The deeper the crisis the more likely it is that people ask not for a return to normal but for a jump to something different and better.

So it is now.  Across the world countries are beginning to think about how life after COVID-19 might be different: could we use the crisis to solve the problems of carbon, low status for care-workers, or welfare states ill-suited to new forms of precariousness?  As this debate gathers speed, it’s opening up questions about the role of the social sciences. They’re playing a vital role in helping countries to manage the crisis, and to plan for recovery.  But how much are they there to understand the past and present – and how much should they help us to shape the future?

A century ago the answers were perhaps more obvious than today.  HG Wells early in the last century described sociology as ‘the description of the Ideal Society and its relation to existing societies’.  The founders of UCL in the mid-19th century and of LSE at the end of the 19th century, saw them as vehicles to change the world not just to interpret it.  It was taken for granted that social science should help map out possible futures – new rights, new forms of social policy, new ways of running economies.

Unfortunately, these traditions have largely atrophied.  Within academia you are far more likely to make a successful career analysing past patterns, or critiquing the present, than offering designs for the future.  That is partly the result of very healthy trends – in particular, more attention being paid to evidence and data.  But it’s left a gap since, by definition, there isn’t any hard evidence about a future that hasn’t yet happened.  There are a few small pockets of more speculative, future-oriented work in universities.  But they’re seen as quite marginal, and a fair proportion of this work is inward looking – feeding into academic journals and very small audiences – rather than feeding into political programmes and public imagination as happened in the past.  Meanwhile one of the less attractive legacies of several decades of post-structuralism and post-modernism is that many academics believe they have much more of a duty to critique than to propose or create.

Outside the academy the traditions of social imagination have also atrophied.  Political parties have largely closed down the research departments that once helped them think.  Thinktanks have become ever more locked into news cycles rather than long range thinking.

In the late 20th century the progressive movements of the left lost confidence in a forward march of history, and the green movements that have partly replaced them have proven more effective at persuading people of the likelihood of future ecological disaster than promoting positive alternatives (though the green visions of future arrangements for food, circular economies are a partial exception to the picture I’m describing here).  As a result much of the role of future imagination has been left to fiction.

One symptom is that many fewer people today can articulate a plausible and desirable better society than was the case 50 or 100 years ago.  Majorities in countries like the UK now expect their children to be worse off than they are….(More)”.