Book edited by Betina Hollstein, Wenzel Matiaske and Kai-Uwe Schnapp: “This edited volume seeks to explore established as well as emergent forms of governance by combining social network analysis and governance research. In doing so, contributions take into account the increasingly complex forms which governance faces, consisting of different types of actors (e.g. individuals, states, economic entities, NGOs, IGOs), instruments (e.g. law, suggestions, flexible norms) and arenas from the local up to the global level, and which more and more questions theoretical models that have focused primarily on markets and hierarchies. The topics addressed in this volume are processes of coordination, arriving at and implementing decisions taking place in network(ed) (social) structures; such as governance of work relations, of financial markets, of innovation and politics. These processes are investigated and discussed from sociologists’, political scientists’ and economists’ viewpoints….(More)”.
A How-to Book for Wielding Civic Power
Interview by David Bornstein at the New York Times: “Last year, the RAND Survey Research Group asked 3,037 Americans about their political preferences and found that the factor that best predicted support for Donald Trump wasn’t age, race, gender, income, educational attainment or attitudes toward Muslims or undocumented immigrants. It was whether respondents agreed with the statement “People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.”
A feeling of disenfranchisement, or powerlessness, runs deep in the country — and it’s understandable. For most Americans, wages have been flat for 40 years, while incomes have soared for the superrich. Researchers have found, unsurprisingly, that the preferences of wealthy people have a much bigger influence on policy than those of poor or middle-income people.
“I don’t think people are wrong to feel that the game has been rigged,” says Eric Liu, the author of “You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen,” an engaging and extremely timely book published last week. “But we’re in a period where across the political spectrum — from the libertarian Tea Party right to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter left — people are pushing back and recognizing that the only remedy is to convert this feeling of ‘not having a say’ into ‘demanding a say.’ ”
Liu, who founded Citizen University, a nonprofit citizen participation organization in Seattle, teaches citizens to do just that. He has also traveled the country, searching across the partisan divide for places where citizens are making democracy work better. In his new book, he has assembled stories of citizen action and distilled them into powerful insights and strategies….
Can you explain the three “core laws of power” you outline in the book?
L. No. 1: Power compounds, as does powerlessness. The rich get richer, and people with clout get more clout.
No. 2: Power justifies itself. In a hundred different ways — propaganda, conventional wisdom, just-so stories — people at the top of the hierarchy tell narratives about why it should be so.
If the world stopped with laws No. 1 and 2, we would be stuck in this doom loop that would tip us toward monopoly and tyranny.
What saves us is law No. 3: Power is infinite. I don’t mean we are all equally powerful. I mean simply and quite literally that we can generate power out of thin air. We do that by organizing….(More)”
Governing through Goals
Book edited by Norichika Kanie and Frank Biermann: “In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Sustainable Development Goals built on and broadened the earlier Millennium Development Goals, but they also signaled a larger shift in governance strategies. The seventeen goals add detailed content to the concept of sustainable development, identify specific targets for each goal, and help frame a broader, more coherent, and transformative 2030 agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals aim to build a universal, integrated framework for action that reflects the economic, social, and planetary complexities of the twenty-first century.
This book examines in detail the core characteristics of goal setting, asking when it is an appropriate governance strategy and how it differs from other approaches; analyzes the conditions under which a goal-oriented agenda can enable progress toward desired ends; and considers the practical challenges in implementation….(More)”
What Algorithms Want
Book by Ed Finn: “We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It’s as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman’s curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.
Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost’s satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google’s goal of anticipating our questions, Uber’s cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.
If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities….(More)”
For Whose Benefit? The Biological and Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation
Book by Patrik Lindenfors: “… takes the reader on a journey, navigating the enigmatic aspects of cooperation; a journey that starts inside the body and continues via our thoughts to the human super-organism.
Cooperation is one of life’s fundamental principles. We are all made of parts – genes, cells, organs, neurons, but also of ideas, or ‘memes’. Our societies too are made of parts – us humans. Is all this cooperation fundamentally the same process?
From the smallest component parts of our bodies and minds to our complicated societies, everywhere cooperation is the organizing principle. Often this cooperation has emerged because the constituting parts have benefited from the interactions, but not seldom the cooperating units appear to lose on the interaction. How then to explain cooperation? How can we understand our intricate societies where we regularly provide small and large favors for people we are unrelated to, know, or even never expect to meet again? Where does the idea come from that it is right to risk one’s life for country, religion or freedom? The answers seem to reside in the two processes that have shaped humanity: biological and cultural evolution….(More)”
The Routledge Handbook of Global Public Policy and Administration
The handbook is organized into three thematic sections – Contemporary Challenges, Policy and Administration Responses and Forging a Resilient Public Administration – to allow readers to quickly access knowledge and improve their understanding of topics. The opening chapter, introductions to sections and extensive glossary aid readers to most effectively learn from the book. Each chapter provides a balanced overview of current knowledge, identifying issues and discussing relevant debates. The book is written by authors from Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia….(More)’
Prediction and Inference from Social Networks and Social Media
Book edited by Kawash, Jalal, Agarwal, Nitin, Özyer, Tansel: “This book addresses the challenges of social network and social media analysis in terms of prediction and inference. The chapters collected here tackle these issues by proposing new analysis methods and by examining mining methods for the vast amount of social content produced. Social Networks (SNs) have become an integral part of our lives; they are used for leisure, business, government, medical, educational purposes and have attracted billions of users. The challenges that stem from this wide adoption of SNs are vast. These include generating realistic social network topologies, awareness of user activities, topic and trend generation, estimation of user attributes from their social content, and behavior detection. This text has applications to widely used platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and appeals to students, researchers, and professionals in the field….(More)”
Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law
Paper by Karen E. C. Levy: “…critiques blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which aim to automatically and securely execute obligations without reliance on a centralized enforcement authority. Though smart contracts do have some features that might serve the goals of social justice and fairness, I suggest that they are based on a thin conception of what law does, and how it does it. Smart contracts focus on the technical form of contract to the exclusion of the social contexts within which contracts operate, and the complex ways in which people use them. In the real world, contractual obligations are enforced through all kinds of social mechanisms other than formal adjudication—and contracts serve many functions that are not explicitly legal in nature, or even designed to be formally enforced. I describe three categories of contracting practices in which people engage (the inclusion of facially unenforceable terms, the inclusion of purposefully underspecified terms, and willful nonenforcement of enforceable terms) to illustrate how contracts actually “work.” The technology of smart contracts neglects the fact that people use contracts as social resources to manage their relations. The inflexibility that they introduce, by design, might short-circuit a number of social uses to which law is routinely put. Therefore, I suggest that attention to the social and relational contexts of contracting are essential considerations for the discussion, development, and deployment of smart contracts….(More)”
Nudging people to make good choices can backfire
Bruce Bower in ScienceNews: “Nudges are a growth industry. Inspired by a popular line of psychological research and introduced in a best-selling book a decade ago, these inexpensive behavior changers are currently on a roll.
Policy makers throughout the world, guided by behavioral scientists, are devising ways to steer people toward decisions deemed to be in their best interests. These simple interventions don’t force, teach or openly encourage anyone to do anything. Instead, they nudge, exploiting for good — at least from the policy makers’ perspective — mental tendencies that can sometimes lead us astray.
But new research suggests that low-cost nudges aimed at helping the masses have drawbacks. Even simple interventions that work at first can lead to unintended complications, creating headaches for nudgers and nudgees alike…
Promising results of dozens of nudge initiatives appear in two government reports issued last September. One came from the White House, which released the second annual report of its Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. The other came from the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team. Created by the British government in 2010, the U.K. group is often referred to as the Nudge Unit.
In a September 20, 2016, Bloomberg View column, Sunstein said the new reports show that nudges work, but often increase by only a few percentage points the number of people who, say, receive government benefits or comply with tax laws. He called on choice architects to tackle bigger challenges, such as finding ways to nudge people out of poverty or into higher education.
Missing from Sunstein’s comments and from the government reports, however, was any mention of a growing conviction among some researchers that well-intentioned nudges can have negative as well as positive effects. Accepting automatic enrollment in a company’s savings plan, for example, can later lead to regret among people who change jobs frequently or who realize too late that a default savings rate was set too low for their retirement needs. E-mail reminders to donate to a charity may work at first, but annoy recipients into unsubscribing from the donor list.
“I don’t want to get rid of nudges, but we’ve been a bit too optimistic in applying them to public policy,” says behavioral economist Mette Trier Damgaard of Aarhus University in Denmark.
Nudges, like medications for physical ailments, require careful evaluation of intended and unintended effects before being approved, she says. Policy makers need to know when and with whom an intervention works well enough to justify its side effects.
Default downer
That warning rings especially true for what is considered a shining star in the nudge universe — automatic enrollment of employees in retirement savings plans. The plans, called defaults, take effect unless workers decline to participate….
But little is known about whether automatic enrollees are better or worse off as time passes and their personal situations change, says Harvard behavioral economist Brigitte Madrian. She coauthored the 2001 paper on the power of default savings plans.
Although automatic plans increase savings for those who otherwise would have squirreled away little or nothing, others may lose money because they would have contributed more to a self-directed retirement account, Madrian says. In some cases, having an automatic savings account may encourage irresponsible spending or early withdrawals of retirement money (with penalties) to cover debts. Such possibilities are plausible but have gone unstudied.
In line with Madrian’s concerns, mathematical models developed by finance professor Bruce Carlin of the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues suggest that people who default into retirement plans learn less about money matters, and share less financial information with family and friends, than those who join plans that require active investment choices.
Opt-out savings programs “have been oversimplified to the public and are being sold as a great way to change behavior without addressing their complexities,” Madrian says. Research needs to address how well these plans mesh with individuals’ personalities and decision-making styles, she recommends….
Researchers need to determine how defaults and other nudges instigate behavior changes before unleashing them on the public, says philosopher of science Till Grüne-Yanoff of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm….
Sometimes well-intentioned, up-front attempts to get people to do what seems right come back to bite nudgers on the bottom line.
Consider e-mail prompts and reminders. ….A case in point is a study submitted for publication by Damgaard and behavioral economist Christina Gravert of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. E-mailed donation reminders sent to people who had contributed to a Danish anti-poverty charity increased the number of donations in the short term, but also triggered an upturn in the number of people unsubscribing from the list.
People’s annoyance at receiving reminders perceived as too frequent or pushy cost the charity money over the long haul, Damgaard holds. Losses of list subscribers more than offset the financial gains from the temporary uptick in donations, she and Gravert conclude.
“Researchers have tended to overlook the hidden costs of nudging,” Damgaard says….(More)”
iGod
Novel by Willemijn Dicke and Dirk Helbing: “iGod is a science fiction novel with heroes, love, defeat and hope. But it is much more than that. This book aims to explore how societies may develop, given the technologies that we see at present. As Dirk Helbing describes it in his introduction:
We have come to the conclusion that neither a scientific study nor an investigative report would allow one to talk about certain things that, we believe, need to be thought and talked about. So, a science fiction story appeared to be the right approach. It seems the perfect way to think “what if scenarios” through. It is not the first time that this avenue has been taken. George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” come to mind, or Dave Eggers “The Circle”. The film ‘The Matrix’ and the Netflix series ‘Black Mirror are good examples too.
“iGod” outlines how life could be in a couple of years from now, certainly in our lifetime. At some places, this story about our future society seems far-fetched. For example, in “iGod”, all citizens have a Social Citizen Score. This score is established based on their buying habits, their communication in social media and social contacts they maintain. It is obtained by mass-surveillance and has a major impact on everyone’s life. It determines whether you are entitled to get a loan, what jobs you are offered, and even how long you will receive medical care.
The book is set in the near future in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Lex is an unemployed biologist. One day he is contacted by a computer which, gradually reveals the machinery behind the reality we see. It is a bleak world. Together with his girlfriend Diana and Seldon, a Professor at Amsterdam Tech, he starts the quest to regain freedom….(More) (Individual chapters)”