Brookings: “Policymakers under President Obama implemented behaviorally-informed policies to improve college access, completion, and affordability. Given the complexity of the college application process, many of these policies aimed to simplify college and financial aid application processes and reduce informational barriers that students face when evaluating college options. Katharine Meyer and Kelly Ochs Rosinger summarize empirical evidence on these policies and conclude that behaviorally-informed policies play an important role, especially as supplements to (rather than replacements for) broader structural changes. For example, recent changes in the FAFSA filing timeline provided students with more time to complete the form. But this large shift may be more effective in changing behavior when accompanied by informational campaigns and nudges that improve students’ understanding of the new system. Governments and colleges can leverage behavioral science to increase awareness of student support services if more structural policy changes occur to provide the services in the first place….(More)”.
From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future
Book by Tom Wheeler: “Network revolutions of the past have shaped the present and set the stage for the revolution we are experiencing today
In an era of seemingly instant change, it’s easy to think that today’s revolutions—in communications, business, and many areas of daily life—are unprecedented. Today’s changes may be new and may be happening faster than ever before. But our ancestors at times were just as bewildered by rapid upheavals in what we now call “networks”—the physical links that bind any society together.
In this fascinating book, former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler brings to life the two great network revolutions of the past and uses them to help put in perspective the confusion, uncertainty, and even excitement most people face today. The first big network revolution was the invention of movable-type printing in the fifteenth century. This book, its millions of predecessors, and even such broad trends as the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the multiple scientific revolutions of the past 500 years would not have been possible without that one invention. The second revolution came with the invention of the telegraph early in the nineteenth century. Never before had people been able to communicate over long distances faster than a horse could travel. Along with the development of the world’s first high-speed network—the railroad—the telegraph upended centuries of stability and literally redrew the map of the world.
Wheeler puts these past revolutions into the perspective of
Opening the Government of Canada The Federal Bureaucracy in the Digital Age
Book by Amanda Clarke: “In the digital age, governments face growing calls to become more open, collaborative, and networked. But can bureaucracies abandon their closed-by-design mindsets and operations and, more importantly, should they?
Opening the Government of Canada presents a compelling case for the importance of a more open model of governance in the digital age – but a model that continues to uphold traditional democratic principles at the heart of the Westminster system. Drawing on interviews with public officials and extensive analysis of government documents and social media accounts, Clarke details the untold story of the Canadian federal bureaucracy’s efforts to adapt to new digital pressures from the mid-2000s onward. This book argues that the bureaucracy’s tradition of closed government, fuelled by today’s antagonistic political communications culture, is at odds with evolving citizen expectations and new digital policy tools, including social media, crowdsourcing, and open data. Amanda Clarke also cautions that traditional democratic principles and practices essential to resilient governance must not be abandoned in the digital age, which may justify a more restrained opening of our governing institutions than is currently proposed by many academics and governments alike.
Striking a balance between reform and tradition, Opening the Government of Canada concludes with a series of pragmatic recommendations that lay out a roadmap for building a democratically robust, digital-era federal government
State Capability, Policymaking and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Demos Helsinki: “The world as we know it is built on the structures of the industrial era – and these structures are falling apart. Yet the vision of a new, sustainable and fair post-industrial society remains unclear. This discussion paper is the result of a collaboration between a group of
In the discussion paper, we set out to explore what the main opportunities and concerns that accompany the Fourth Industrial Revolution for policymaking and knowledge systems are particularly in middle-income countries. Overall, middle-income countries are home to five billion of the world’s seven billion people and 73 per cent of the world’s poor people; they represent about one-third of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and are major engines of global growth (World Bank 2018).
The paper is co-produced with Capability (Finland), Demos Helsinki (Finland), HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation (Switzerland), Politics & Ideas (global), Southern Voice (global), UNESCO Montevideo (Uruguay) and Using Evidence (Canada).
The guiding questions for this paper are:
– What are the critical elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
– What does the literature say about the impact of this revolution on societies and economies, and in particular on middle-income countries?
– What are the implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in middle-income countries?
– What does the literature say about the challenges for governance and the ways knowledge can inform policy during the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Full discussion paper: “State Capability, Policymaking and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Do Knowledge Systems Matter?”
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Using digital technologies to improve the design and enforcement of public policies
OECD Digital Economy Paper: “Digitalisation is having a profound impact on social and economic activity. While often benefiting from a very long history of public investment in R&D,
Legitimate Change & The Critical Role of Cities
Blog by Indy Johar: “We are living in the midst of rapid change and mounting evidence of the fragility of public trust in societal institutions. Increasingly our means of change are restricted not by capital or capacity (though we often like to point at these shortfalls), but rather by our means to create legitimacy, or shared coherence as to the proposed direction of travel, even as the climate threats to our
How do we address the growing fragility of legitimacy in our increasingly complex contexts? There are multiple forces, trends and drivers in play — including major demographic shifts, climate destabilisation, nutrient system hazards, and industrial revolution 4.0 consequences — which are creating feedback loops with second and third order spillovers and unintended or unimagined effects.
Cities are the sites where these complex systems knot together — including property rights, food systems, logistics, financial systems, water systems, human development institutions, schools, universities, etc. Transforming these underlying systems in an integrated manner is required in order to address the challenges we face and open up opportunities to create the full decarbonisation of our society, unlock inclusive innovation capacity of our economy, and build climate stabilisation resilience . This requires system innovation at the city scale.
It is this complexity, knot of systems of systems and the need for socially legitimate solutions, which is forcing a new architecture of legitimacy and the growing global calls for the strategic devolution of nation states — and the rise of the city. But this transition is about more than just nation states handing over power to cities (which to date has been much of the call — understandably). If cities are to be genuine “engines” of Human Development 2.0, where we can address and transcend our societal challenges to create a regenerative industrial revolution 4.0, they will need to transform the lock-in of systems and unleash the economies of scope, context and systems change to create a legitimate landscape for solutions in a complex the world. It is this latter work that needs to be developed and reimagined.
Remaking legitimacy involves remaking the deliberative and participatory infrastructure of civic debate and civic policy making. This needs to go beyond just new tools of opinion harvesting (whilst they do have
Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach
Book by Hurst Hannum: “The development of human rights norms is one of the most significant achievements in international relations and law since 1945, but the continuing influence of human rights is increasingly being questioned by authoritarian governments, nationalists, and pundits. Unfortunately, the proliferation of new rights, linking rights to other issues such as international crimes or the activities of business, and attempting to address every social problem from a human rights perspective risk undermining their credibility.
Rescuing Human Rights calls for understanding ‘human rights’ as international human rights law and maintaining the distinctions between binding legal obligations on governments and broader issues of ethics, politics, and social change. Resolving complex social problems requires more than simplistic appeals to rights, and adopting a ‘radically moderate’ approach that recognizes both the potential and the limits of international human rights law, offers the best hope of preserving the principle that we all have rights, simply because we are human….(More)”.
How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences
Paper by C. Jara-Figueroa, Amy Z. Yu, and César A. Hidalgo: “Communication technologies, from printing to social media, affect our historical records by changing the way ideas are spread and recorded. Yet, finding statistical evidence of this fact has been challenging. Here we combine a common causal inference technique (instrumental variable estimation) with a dataset on nearly forty thousand biographies from Wikipedia (Pantheon 2.0), to study the effect of the introduction of printing in European cities on Wikipedia’s digital biographical records.
By using a city’s distance to Mainz as an instrument for the adoption of the movable type press, we show that European cities that adopted printing earlier were more likely to become the birthplace of a famous scientist or artist during the years following the invention of printing. We bring these findings to recent communication technologies by showing that the number of radios and televisions in a country correlates with the number of globally famous performing artists and sports players born in that country, even after controlling for GDP, population, and including country and year fixed effects. These findings support the hypothesis that the introduction of communication technologies can bias historical records in the direction of the content that is best suited for each technology….(More)”.
Shutting down the internet doesn’t work – but governments keep doing it
George Ogola in The Conversation: “As the internet continues to gain considerable power and agency around the world, many governments have moved to regulate it. And where regulation fails, some states resort to internet shutdowns or deliberate disruptions.
The statistics are staggering. In India alone, there were 154 internet shutdowns between January 2016 and May 2018. This is the most of any country in the world.
But similar shutdowns are becoming common on the African continent. Already in 2019 there have been shutdowns in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Chad, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Last year there were 21 such shutdowns on the continent. This was the case in Togo, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Ethiopia, among others.
The justifications for such shutdowns are usually relatively predictable. Governments often claim that internet access is blocked in the interest of public security and order. In some instances, however, their reasoning borders on the curious if not downright absurd, like the case of Ethiopia in 2017 and Algeria in 2018 when the internet was shut down apparently to curb cheating in national examinations.
Whatever their reasons, governments have three general approaches to controlling citzens’ access to the web.
How they do it
Internet shutdowns or disruptions usually take three forms. The first and probably the most serious is where the state completely blocks access to the internet on all platforms. It’s arguably the most punitive, with significant social, economic and political costs.
The financial costs can run into millions of dollars for each day the internet is blocked. A Deloitte report on the issue estimates that a country with average connectivity could lose at least 1.9% of its daily GDP for each day all internet services are shut down.
For countries with average to medium level connectivity the loss is 1% of daily GDP, and for countries with average to low connectivity it’s 0.4%. It’s estimated that Ethiopia, for example, could lose up to US$500,000 a day whenever there is a shutdown. These shutdowns, then, damage businesses, discourage investments, and hinder economic growth.
The second way that governments restrict internet access is by applying content blocking techniques. They restrict access to particular sites or applications. This is the most common strategy and it’s usually targeted at social media platforms. The idea is to stop or limit conversations on these platforms.
Online spaces have become the platform for various forms of political expression that many states especially those with authoritarian leanings consider subversive. Governments argue, for example, that social media platforms encourage the spread of rumours which can trigger public unrest.
This was the case in 2016 in Uganda during the country’s presidential elections. The government restricted access to social media, describing the shutdown as a “security measure to avert lies … intended to incite violence and illegal declaration of election results”.
In Zimbabwe, the government blocked social media following demonstrations over an increase in fuel prices. It argued that the January 2019 ban was because the platforms were being “used to coordinate the violence”.
The third strategy, done almost by stealth, is the use of what is generally known as “bandwidth throttling”. In this case telecom operators or internet service providers are forced to lower the quality of their cell signals or internet speed. This makes the internet too slow to use. “Throttling” can also target particular online destinations such as social media sites
Nudging Citizens through Technology in Smart Cities
Sofia Ranchordas in the International Review of Law, Computers & Technology: “In the last decade, several smart cities throughout the world have started employing Internet of Things, big data, and algorithms to nudge citizens to save more water and energy, live healthily, use public transportation, and participate more actively in local affairs. Thus far, the potential and implications of data-driven nudges and behavioral insights in smart cities have remained an overlooked subject in the legal literature. Nevertheless, combining technology with behavioral insights may allow smart cities to nudge citizens more systematically and help these urban centers achieve their sustainability goals and promote civic engagement. For example, in Boston, real-time feedback on driving has increased road safety and in Eindhoven, light sensors have been used to successfully reduce nightlife crime and disturbance. While nudging tends to be well-intended, data-driven nudges raise a number of legal and ethical issues. This article offers a novel and interdisciplinary perspective on nudging which delves into the legal, ethical, and trust implications of collecting and processing large amounts of personal and impersonal data to influence citizens’ behavior in smart cities….(More)”.