Ranking Nations. The Value of Indicators and Indices?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Morse: “This engaging book assesses the statistical need for using particular ranking systems to compare the status of nations. With an overarching focus on human development, environmental performance and corruption, it carefully maps out some of the main processes associated with the ranking of countries.

Centrally, Stephen Morse explores challenges associated with using index-based rankings for countries. Examining international ranking systems such as the Human Development Index and Corruption Perception Index, the book considers what they tell us about the world and whether there may be alternatives to these ranking techniques. It provides an important contemporary view on ranking systems by analysing not only how they are reported by traditional sources of media, but also by social media.

Ranking Nations will be a significant read for economics, development studies and human geography researchers and academics. Its accessible written style will also benefit policy actors and decision makers that make use of index-based rankings…(More)”.

Technology Foresight for Public Funding of Innovation: Methods and Best Practices

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

JRC Paper: “In times of growing uncertainties and complexities, anticipatory thinking is essential for policymakers. Technology foresight explores the longer-term futures of Science, Technology and Innovation. It can be used as a tool to create effective policy responses, including in technology and innovation policies, and to shape technological change. In this report we present six anticipatory and technology foresight methods that can contribute to anticipatory intelligence in terms of public funding of innovation: the Delphi survey, genius forecasting, technology roadmapping, large language models used in foresight, horizon scanning and scenario planning. Each chapter provides a brief overview of the method with case studies and recommendations. The insights from this report show that only by combining different anticipatory viewpoints and approaches to spotting, understanding and shaping emergent technologies, can public funders such as the European Innovation Council improve their proactive approaches to supporting ground-breaking technologies. In this way, they will help innovation ecosystems to develop…(More)”.

Public Net Worth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jacob Soll, Willem Buiter, John Crompton, Ian Ball, and Dag Detter: “As individuals, we depend on the services that governments provide. Collectively, we look to them to tackle the big problems – from long-term climate and demographic change to short-term crises like pandemics or war.  This is very expensive, and is getting more so.

But governments don’t provide – or use – basic financial information that every business is required to maintain. They ignore the value of public assets and most liabilities. This leads to inefficiency and bad decision-making, and piles up problems for the future.

Governments need to create balance sheets that properly reflect assets and liabilities, and to understand their future obligations and revenue prospects. Net Worth – both today and for the future – should be the measure of financial strength and success.

Only if this information is put at the centre of government financial decision-making can the present challenges to public finances around the world be addressed effectively, and in a way that is fair to future generations.

The good news is that there are ways to deal with these problems and make government finances more resilient and fairer to future generations.

The facts, and the solutions, are non-partisan, and so is this book. Responsible leaders of any political persuasion need to understand the issues and the tools that can enable them to deliver policy within these constraints…(More)”.

Seven routes to experimentation in policymaking: a guide to applied behavioural science methods

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Resource: “…offers guidelines and a visual roadmap to help policymakers choose the most fit-for-purpose evidence collection method for their specific policy challenge.

Source: Elaboration of the authors: Varazzani, C., Emmerling. T., Brusoni, S., Fontanesi, L., and Tuomaila, H., (2023), “Seven routes to experimentation: A guide to applied behavioural science methods,” OECD Working Papers on Public Governance, OECD Publishing, Paris. Note: The authors elaborated the map based on a previous map ideated, researched, and designed by Laura Castro Soto, Judith Wagner, and Torben Emmerling (sevenroutes.com).

The seven applied behavioural science methods:

  • Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) are experiments that can demonstrate a causal relationship between an intervention and an outcome, by randomly assigning individuals to an intervention group and a control group.
  • A/B testing tests two or more manipulations (such as variants of a webpage) to assess which performs better in terms of a specific goal or metric.
  • Difference-in-Difference is an experimental method that estimates the causal effect of an intervention by comparing changes in outcomes between an intervention group and a control group before and after the intervention.
  • Before-After studies assess the impact of an intervention or event by comparing outcomes or measurements before and after its occurrence, without a control group.
  • Longitudinal studies collect data from the same individuals or groups over an extended period to assess trends over time.
  • Correlational studies help to investigate the relationship between two or more variables to determine if they vary together (without implying causation).
  • Qualitative studies explore the underlying meanings and nuances of a phenomenon through interviews, focus group sessions, or other exploratory methods based on conversations and observations…(More)”.

Disaster preparedness: Will a “norm nudge” sink or swim?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jantsje Mol: “In these times of unprecedented climate change, one critical question persists: how do we motivate homeowners to protect their homes and loved ones from the ever-looming threat of flooding? This question led to a captivating behavioral science study, born from a research visit to the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center in 2019 (currently the Wharton Climate Center). Co-founded and co-directed by the late Howard Kunreuther, the Center has been at the forefront of understanding and mitigating the impact of natural disasters. In this study, we explored the potential of social norms to boost flood preparedness among homeowners. While the results may not align with initial expectations, they shed light on the complexities of human behavior, the significance of meticulous testing, and the enduring legacy of a visionary scholar.

The Power of Social Norms

Before we delve into the results, let’s take a moment to understand what social norms are and why they matter. Social norms dictate what is considered acceptable or expected in a given community. A popular behavioral intervention based on social norms is a norm-nudge: reading information about what others do (say, energy saving behavior of neighbors or tax compliance rates of fellow citizens) may adjust one’s own behavior closer. Norm-nudges are cheap, easy to implement and less prone to political resistance than traditional interventions such as taxes, but they might be ineffective or even backfire. Norm-nudges have been applied to health, finance and the environment, but not yet to the context of natural disaster risk-reduction…(More)”.

When it comes to AI and democracy, we cannot be careful enough

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Marietje Schaake: “Next year is being labelled the “Year of Democracy”: a series of key elections are scheduled to take place, including in places with significant power and populations, such as the US, EU, India, Indonesia and Mexico. In many of these jurisdictions, democracy is under threat or in decline. It is certain that our volatile world will look different after 2024. The question is how — and why.

Artificial intelligence is one of the wild cards that may well play a decisive role in the upcoming elections. The technology already features in varied ways in the electoral process — yet many of these products have barely been tested before their release into society.

Generative AI, which makes synthetic texts, videos and voice messages easy to produce and difficult to distinguish from human-generated content, has been embraced by some political campaign teams. A controversial video showing a crumbling world should Joe Biden be re-elected was not created by a foreign intelligence service seeking to manipulate US elections, but by the Republican National Committee. 

Foreign intelligence services are also using generative AI to boost their influence operations. My colleague at Stanford, Alex Stamos, warns that: “What once took a team of 20 to 40 people working out of [Russia or Iran] to produce 100,000 pieces can now be done by one person using open-source gen AI”.

AI also makes it easier to target messages so they reach specific audiences. This individualised experience will increase the complexity of investigating whether internet users and voters are being fed disinformation.

While much of generative AI’s impact on elections is still being studied, what is known does not reassure. We know people find it hard to distinguish between synthetic media and authentic voices, making it easy to deceive them. We also know that AI repeats and entrenches bias against minorities. Plus, we’re aware that AI companies seeking profits do not also seek to promote democratic values.  

Many members of the teams hired to deal with foreign manipulation and disinformation by social media companies, particularly since 2016, have been laid off. YouTube has explicitly said it will no longer remove “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections”. It is, of course, highly likely that lies about past elections will play a role in 2024 campaigns.

Similarly, after Elon Musk took over X, formerly known as Twitter, he gutted trust and safety teams. Right when defence barriers are needed the most, they are being taken down…(More)”.

Governing the Digital Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the New America Foundation: “…The first part of this analysis was focused on five issue areas in digital technology that are driving conflict, human rights violations, and socioeconomic displacement: (1) AI and algorithmic decision-making, (2) digital access and divides, (3) data protection and data sovereignty, (4) digital identity and surveillance, and (5) transnational cybercrime...

From our dialogues, consultations, and analysis, a fundamental conclusion emerged: An over-concentration of power and severe power asymmetries are causing conflict, harm, and governance dysfunction in the digital domain. Whereas the internet began as a distributed enterprise that connected and empowered individuals worldwide, extreme concentrations of political, economic, and social power now characterize the digital domain. Power imbalances are especially acute between developing and wealthy nations, as a handful of rich-world tech companies and nation-states control the terms and trajectory of digitization…

On a more practical level, a few takeaways and first principles stood out as in need of urgent attention:

  1. We have a critical opportunity to get ahead of possible harms that will stem from AI; science and citizen-centric fora like the Pugwash Conferences on Science and Technology offer a model means of refocusing the digital governance ecosystem beyond the myopic logic of national sovereignty.
  2. Amid digital divides and increasing government control over the internet, multilateral and multi-stakeholder agencies should invest in fail-safes, alternative or redundant means of access, that can shift the stewardship of connectivity away from concentrated power centers.
  3. Regional standards that respect diverse local circumstances can help generate global cooperation on challenges such as cybercrime.
  4. To reduce global conflict in digital surveillance, democracies should practice what they preach and ban commercial spyware outright.
  5. Redistributing the value from big data can diminish corporate power and empower individuals…(More)”

India’s persistent, gendered digital divide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Caiwei Chen: “In a society where women, especially unmarried girls, still have to fight to own a smartphone, would men — and institutional patriarchy — really be willing to share political power?

In September, the Indian government passed a landmark law, under which a third of the seats in the lower house and state assemblies would be reserved for women. Amid the euphoria of celebrating this development, a somewhat cynical question I’ve been thinking about is: Why do only 31% of women own a mobile phone in India compared to over 60% of men? This in a country that is poised to have 1 billion smartphone users by 2026.

It’s not that the euphoria is without merit. Twenty-seven years after the idea was first birthed, the Narendra Modi government was able to excavate the issue out of the deep freeze and breathe it back into life. The execution of the quota will still take a few years as it has been linked to the redrawing of constituency boundaries.

But in the meantime, as women, we should brace ourselves for the pushbacks — small and big — that will come our way.

In an increasingly wired world, this digital divide has real-life consequences.  

The gender gap — between men and women, boys and girls — isn’t only about cellular phones and internet access. This inequity perfectly encapsulates all the other biases that India’s women have had to contend with — from a disparity in education opportunities to overzealous moral policing. It is about denying women power — and even bodily autonomy…(More)”.

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Taylor Lorenz: “For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online, she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet.

Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century…(More)”.

The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Brook Manville and Josiah Ober: “Is democracy in trouble, perhaps even dying? Pundits say so, and polls show that most Americans believe that their country’s system of governance is being “tested” or is “under attack.” But is the future of democracy necessarily so dire? In The Civic Bargain, Brook Manville and Josiah Ober push back against the prevailing pessimism about the fate of democracy around the world. Instead of an epitaph for democracy, they offer a guide for democratic renewal, calling on citizens to recommit to a “civic bargain” with one another to guarantee civic rights of freedom, equality, and dignity. That bargain also requires them to fulfill the duties of democratic citizenship: governing themselves with no “boss” except one another, embracing compromise, treating each other as civic friends, and investing in civic education for each rising generation.

Manville and Ober trace the long progression toward self-government through four key moments in democracy’s history: Classical Athens, Republican Rome, Great Britain’s constitutional monarchy, and America’s founding. Comparing what worked and what failed in each case, they draw out lessons for how modern democracies can survive and thrive. Manville and Ober show that democracy isn’t about getting everything we want; it’s about agreeing on a shared framework for pursuing our often conflicting aims. Crucially, citizens need to be able to compromise, and must not treat one another as political enemies. And we must accept imperfection; democracy is never finished but evolves and renews itself continually. As long as the civic bargain is maintained—through deliberation, bargaining, and compromise—democracy will live…(More)”