Book by Samuel Issacharoff: “The end of the 20th century marked a triumphant moment for liberal democracies, which sold their vision of governance on the basis of their strong markets, economic redistribution to their citizens, and a robust constitutional order. But today democracies young and old, fragile and resilient alike are under threat—not from military conflict, nor from autocracies beyond their borders, but primarily from within. New tactics employed by would-be autocrats, whether in Hungary, India, Brazil, or the United States, exploit cracks that have emerged in democratic institutions since the 2008 financial crisis. Why have democracies weakened, how has populism emerged in its place, and what are its implications for the long-term future of democratic governance around the world? Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty examines these questions in three parts. The first addresses the recent ascendancy of populism around the world, arguing that populism has emerged as democracies have grown less able to deliver on their promises and the economic, social, and cultural narratives underpinning democracy unraveled amidst economic dislocation, migration, and demographic change. The second explores how populists govern when they take power and the intralegal ways that populists wield democratic institutions against democratic governance. The third and final part offers suggestions to better insulate democracies against the populist tide, including the application of ordinary tools of criminal and administrative law; improving state capacity, checks on the executive and citizen participation; and exploring novel electoral frameworks…(More)”.
Rethinking democracy for the age of AI
Keynote speech by Bruce Schneier: “There is a lot written about technology’s threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st century. They don’t align incentives well. And they are being hacked too effectively.
At the same time, the cost of these hacked systems has never been greater, across all human history. We have become too powerful as a species. And our systems cannot keep up with fast-changing disruptive technologies.
We need to create new systems of governance that align incentives and are resilient against hacking … at every scale. From the individual all the way up to the whole of society.
For this, I need you to drop your 20th century either/or thinking. This is not about capitalism versus communism. It’s not about democracy versus autocracy. It’s not even about humans versus AI. It’s something new, something we don’t have a name for yet. And it’s “blue sky” thinking, not even remotely considering what’s feasible today.
Throughout this talk, I want you to think of both democracy and capitalism as information systems. Socio-technical information systems. Protocols for making group decisions. Ones where different players have different incentives. These systems are vulnerable to hacking and need to be secured against those hacks.
We security technologists have a lot of expertise in both secure system design and hacking. That’s why we have something to add to this discussion…(More)”
Democracy and the Life of Cities
Report by the Chicago Council of Global Affairs: “In a world facing what some call a “democratic recession,” cities are getting a reputation as a supposed exception. On the geopolitical level, they have stood up against rising authoritarian and populist leadership in North America and Europe. At times, they have skirted around democratic gridlock and polarization at the national level to confront problems such as climate change, coordinating through city-to-city networks.
This role for cities—as global defenders of democracy—has also garnered interest from national governments wary of the rise of China and Russia, including the United States. But what is it about cities that makes them unique democratic actors? Do they, can they, and should they fit the role projected onto them as global democratic bulwarks? What does local urban action really mean for democracy globally?
This essay collection, published with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, approaches these questions with perspectives from leading urbanists, policymakers, academics, and political leaders in North America, Europe, and Africa. The essays consider cities not merely as places in which democratic action took place, but as the “independent variable,” whose unique spatial, social, and political features make it a powerful and creative generator of democratic practices—and, alternatively, a variable which can also make democracy difficult to realize.
If cities live up to their billing as global democratic bulwarks, it likely won’t be at the behest of powerful national governments seeking a geopolitical edge. Instead, they can do so on the basis of the potholes filled, the garbage collected, and the injustices rectified. And, ultimately, by remaking democracy in their image…(More)”.
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
Book by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson” A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.
The wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture during the European Middle Ages was captured by the nobility and used to build grand cathedrals while peasants remained on the edge of starvation. The first hundred years of industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for working people. And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence undermine jobs and democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Power and Progress demonstrates that the path of technology was once—and may again be—brought under control. The tremendous computing advances of the last half century can become empowering and democratizing tools, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few hubristic tech leaders.With their breakthrough economic theory and manifesto for a better society, Acemoglu and Johnson provide the vision needed to reshape how we innovate and who really gains from technological advances…(More)”.
Judging Nudging: Understanding the Welfare Effects of Nudges Versus Taxes
Paper by John A. List, Matthias Rodemeier, Sutanuka Roy & Gregory K. Sun: “While behavioral non-price interventions (“nudges”) have grown from academic curiosity to a bona fide policy tool, their relative economic efficiency remains under-researched. We develop a unified framework to estimate welfare effects of both nudges and taxes. We showcase our approach by creating a database of more than 300 carefully hand-coded point estimates of non-price and price interventions in the markets for cigarettes, influenza vaccinations, and household energy. While nudges are effective in changing behavior in all three markets, they are not necessarily the most efficient policy. We find that nudges are more efficient in the market for cigarettes, while taxes are more efficient in the energy market. For influenza vaccinations, optimal subsidies likely outperform nudges. Importantly, two key factors govern the difference in results across markets: i) an elasticity-weighted standard deviation of the behavioral bias, and ii) the magnitude of the average externality. Nudges dominate taxes whenever i) exceeds ii). Combining nudges and taxes does not always provide quantitatively significant improvements to implementing one policy tool alone…(More)”.
Global Trends in Government Innovation 2023
OECD Report: “In the face of what has increasingly been referred to as an ongoing “permacrisis”, governments must cope with and respond to emerging threats while already grappling with longstanding issues such as climate change, digital disruption and low levels of trust. Despite compounding challenges, governments have been able to adapt and innovate to transform their societies and economies, and to transform themselves and how they design and deliver policies and services. Indeed, recent crises have served to catalyse innovation, and innovation has emerged as a much-needed driver of stability that can generate public value in difficult times.
In this context, understanding new approaches and spreading successful ideas has never been more important. In seeking to do our part to promote this, OPSI and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) have worked in partnership for nearly seven years to surface leading edge public sector innovation trends and to tell the stories of innovators around the world who are working to challenge existing norms and embed new ways of doing things.
Today, we are excited to jointly launch our report Global Trends in Government Innovation 2023, the preliminary report of which was launched at the World Government Summit (WGS), which brings together over 4 000 participants from more than 190 countries to discuss innovative ways to solve the challenges facing humanity…(More)”.
Digital Anthropology Meets Data Science
Article by Katie Hillier: “Analyzing online ecosystems in real time, teams of anthropologists and data scientists can begin to understand rapid social changes as they happen.
Ask not what data science can do for anthropology, but what anthropology can do for data science. —Anders Kristian Munk, Why the World Needs Anthropologists Symposium 2022
In the last decade, emerging technologies, such as AI, immersive realities, and new and more addictive social networks, have permeated almost every aspect of our lives. These innovations are influencing how we form identities and belief systems. Social media influences the rise of subcultures on TikTok, the communications of extremist communities on Telegram, and the rapid spread of conspiracy theories that bounce around various online echo chambers.
People with shared values or experiences can connect and form online cultures at unprecedented scales and speeds. But these new cultures are evolving and shifting faster than our current ability to understand them.
To keep up with the depth and speed of online transformations, digital anthropologists are teaming up with data scientists to develop interdisciplinary methods and tools to bring the deep cultural context of anthropology to scales available only through data science—producing a surge in innovative methodologies for more effectively decoding online cultures in real time…(More)”.
Five Enablers for a New Phase of Behavioral Science
Article by Michael Hallsworth: “Over recent weeks I’ve been sharing parts of a “manifesto” that tries to give a coherent vision for the future of applied behavioral science. Stepping back, if I had to identify a theme that comes through the various proposals, it would be the need for self-reflective practice.
Behavioral science has seen a tremendous amount of growth and interest over the last decade, largely focused on expanding its uses and methods. My sense is it’s ready for a new phase of maturity. That maturity involves behavioral scientists reflecting on the various ways that their actions are shaped by structural, institutional, environmental, economic, and historical factors.
I’m definitely not exempt from this need for self-reflection. There are times when I’ve focused on a cognitive bias when I should have been spending more time exploring the context and motivations for a decision instead. Sometimes I’ve homed in on a narrow slice of a problem that we can measure, even if that means dispensing with wider systemic effects and challenges. Once I spent a long time trying to apply the language of heuristics and biases to explain why people were failing to use the urgent care alternatives to hospital emergency departments, before realizing that their behavior was completely reasonable.
The manifesto critiques things like this, but it doesn’t have all the answers. Because it tries to both cover a lot of ground and go into detail, many of the hard knots of implementation go unpicked. The truth is that writing reports and setting goals is the easy part. Turning those goals into practice is much tougher; as behavioral scientists know, there is often a gap between intention and action.
Right now, I and others don’t always realize the ambitions set out in the manifesto. Changing that is going to take time and effort, and it will involve the discomfort of disrupting familiar practices. Some have made public commitments in this direction; my organization is working on upgrading its practices in line with proposals around making predictions prior to implementation, strengthening RCTs to cope with complexity, and enabling people to use behavioral science, among others.
The truth is that writing reports and setting goals is the easy part. Turning those goals into practice is much tougher; as behavioral scientists know, there is often a gap between intention and action.
But changes by individual actors will not be enough. The big issue is that several of the proposals require coordination. For example, one of the key ideas is the need for more multisite studies that are well coordinated and have clear goals. Another prioritizes developing international professional networks to support projects in low- and middle-income countries…(More)”.
Civic Information Handbook
Handbook by Adrienne Goldstein: “Policymakers should update and enforce civil and human rights laws for the online environment, compel radical transparency, update consumer protection rules, insist that industry make a high-level commitment to democratic design, and create civic information infrastructure through a new PBS of the Internet. In the absence of such policy reform, amplifiers of civic information may never be able to beat out the well-resourced, well-networked groups that intentionally spread falsehoods. Nonetheless, there are strategies for helping civic information compete.
This handbook aims to:
- Educate civic information providers about coordinated deceptive campaigns
…including how they build their audiences, seed compelling narratives, amplify their messages, and activate their followers, as well as why false narratives take hold, and who the primary actors and targeted audiences are.
- Serve as a resource on how to flood the zone with trustworthy civic information
…namely, how civic information providers can repurpose the tactics used by coordinated deceptive campaigns in transparent, empowering ways and protect themselves and their message online.
This handbook will function as a media literacy tool, giving readers the skills and opportunity to consider who is behind networked information campaigns and how they spread their messages…(More)”.
Evidence Gap Maps as Critical Information Communication Devices for Evidence-based Public Policy
Paper by Esteban Villa-Turek et al: “The public policy cycle requires increasingly the use of evidence by policy makers. Evidence Gap Maps (EGMs) are a relatively new methodology that helps identify, process, and visualize the vast amounts of studies representing a rich source of evidence for better policy making. This document performs a methodological review of EGMs and presents the development of a working integrated system that automates several critical steps of EGM creation by means of applied computational and statistical methods. Above all, the proposed system encompasses all major steps of EGM creation in one place, namely inclusion criteria determination, processing of information, analysis, and user-friendly communication of synthesized relevant evidence. This tool represents a critical milestone in the efforts of implementing cutting-edge computational methods in usable systems. The contribution of the document is two-fold. First, it presents the critical importance of EGMs in the public policy cycle; second, it justifies and explains the development of a usable tool that encompasses the methodological phases of creation of EGMs, while automating most time-consuming stages of the process. The overarching goal is the better and faster information communication to relevant actors like policy makers, thus promoting well-being through better and more efficient interventions based on more evidence-driven policy making…(More)”.