Archive for October, 2009

What sort of enabling environment is needed to promote ICT4D and what are the barriers to that ideal environment?

To parse those extremely wide questions, it is useful to have a framework for understanding what influences the use of ICTs.

In his book Code, Larry Lessig developed a framework for the behavior of online regulation that is handy for ICT use more generally. According to Lessig, four forces influenced behavior: law, social norms, the market and architecture (be it software code or the speed of light).

He writes in version two of the book,

The constraints are distinct, yet they are plainly interdependent. Each can support or oppose the others. Technologies can undermine norms and laws; they can also support them. Some constraints make others possible; others make some impossible. Constraints work together, though they function differently and the effect of each is distinct. Norms constrain through the stigma that a community imposes; markets constrain through the price that they exact; architectures constrain through the physical burdens they impose; and law constrains through the punishment it threatens.

This interdependence between the regulatory forces means that an enabling environment for ICT4D must address all four forces. The Fair Mobile project (which I wrote about here), seeks to address at least two parts of the framework: the market and the architecture. Closed networks curtail innovations from the edge and high prices limit consumer usage, but you can also see how they are all related: cheaper SMS prices will undoubtedly change the norms around mobile phone usage, and laws may have to adapt to those.

But plenty changes could be made in other realms, as well:

• Law: Are financial regulations limiting innovative mobile banking offerings? Are there appropriate privacy regulations in place?
• Social norms: Are parents capable of raising children safely in a digital world? Will ICTs in the classroom be met with distaste or interest? Is there a gender gap?
• The market: Is the monopoly-prone telecom sector being properly regulated? Are the unique financial situations and desires of the poor being met?
• Architecture: Are devices designed for the rigors of the developing world? Can non-English speakers use the keyboards they find in an Internet cafe?

Alternatively, in The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler has proposed a framework that conceives of the networked information environment as three layers: the physical layer (e.g. fiber optic cables or computers), the logical layer (e.g. standards and software), and the content layer (human communication).

A mediated human communication must use all three layers, and each layer therefore represents a resource or a pathway that the communication must use or traverse in order to reach its intended destination. In each and every one of these layers, we have seen the emergence of technical and practical capabilities for using that layer on a nonproprietary model that would make access cheaper, less susceptible to control by any single party or class of parties, or both. In each and every layer, we have seen significant policy battles over whether these nonproprietary or open-platform practices will be facilitated or even permitted.

There are challenges to an enabling ICT4D environment on each layer:

• Physical: Are rural communities receiving access to broadband Internet deployments? Are the billions of mobile phones around the world able to be recharged?
• Logic: Are there standards that will allow technical solutions to reach economies of scale? Does software respect the freedoms of individuals?
• Content: Are there high-quality educational resources available in the required languages? Are foreign media disrupting traditional values?

Although there is a lot of overlap with Lessig’s version, Benkler’s layered framework is especially useful because it discusses content, a notoriously difficult piece of the ICT4D environment to enable.

Likely because they were developed to discuss regulation, these frameworks aren’t perfect. For example, individual capacity – be in coding acumen or basic literacy – is difficult to shoehorn into either. Are there additional pieces of the enabling environment for ICT4D that are missed by these frameworks?

Are there certain parts of each that are more important to address? Are there certain countries or regions where progress is much further?

Once again, more questions than answers…

Does engaging with societal problems in social places drive out the participants?

danah boyd has a brief post from a few years ago that argues that although teens continue to use email, “it is dead in the sense that it is no longer a site of deep emotional passion.” Email holds no special resonance because it is associated with school correspondence, spam, and other socially meaningless communication. Similarly, people don’t get excited about snail mail anymore because that’s where junk mail and bills come in – not exactly the highlight of your day.

So, if communication methods can “die” due to the introduction of necessary, but non-social, content, what does that mean for the socially conscious technologists who are attempting to leverage the popularity of mobile phones to promote goals like literacy and health? Will they risk driving out the very constituency they sought to reach?

Take South Africa’s popular MXit mobile chat application: 13 million people (mostly youth) use MXit to chat amongst themselves on the social networking service. A number of people are attempting to reach teens through MXit and promote typical development goals. Will MXit become as dead as email to these kids?

Not necessarily. In her study of South African teens’ use of MXit, Tanja Bosch noted that much of the use is “for peer support, to receive or give advice to others.” Even more to the point, when one researcher started a math tutorial program, Doctor Maths, he found success:

“Researchers found that the youth who participated (their sample was limited to one high school) were surprised to find that they could use their phones “as a tool instead of a toy or convenience”, and found that learners developed a social relationship with the anonymous Dr. Maths, often logging just to say hello, or ask for counseling, even though tutors were prohibited from asking or answering personal questions (Butgereit 2007).”

However, I think social mobile technologists need to be conscious of the risk. Two principles I think are important are

1. To remain socially aware: engaging with social media means that your project is in a social place that has nuanced norms of its own; observe, adapt and respect these.
2. To pull users desires, not push development goals: you need to attract users on their own terms. Spam killed email because it is unwanted. Electrical bills did the same to snail mail. The target audience will leave for new social areas if they are receiving unwanted content. If someone convinced MXit to send every user a public service announcement, it would be the wrong model. Users should be able to opt-in, and the personal benefits should be obvious – not long-term, amorphous goals.

The biggest story in the technology policy realm for the last few months has been the FCC’s commitment to network neutrality. Following a few transgressions from ISPs, the push to codify non-discrimination rules for the Internet intensified as consumer advocacy groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge stepped up their lobbying efforts. They faced a concerted opposition from ISPs, but with the election of Obama and the installment of FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, net neutrality advocates have finally found the official support they desired.

In a major speech last month, Genachowski outlined his vision for a open Internet by establishing two new FCC principles. The first “four freedoms” (adopted by Kevin Martin’s FCC) required that Internet users be able to (1) access and send any lawful content, (2) run or use any lawful applications, (3) connect or use and lawful devices, and (4) benefit from unrestricted competition amongst content, applications and devices.

Genachowski has added two new principles:

1. Except for reasonable network management, ISPs cannot discriminate amongst content and applications, and
2. ISPs must be transparent about their network management practices.

Importantly, the new FCC chief has also proposed extending these principles to wireless broadband as he sees it as an extension of wireline service. The big question, though, is whether or not regulation is needed to enforce this. Nearly everyone agrees that net neutrality is important, but as Tim Lee pointed out in his paper on the subject, it isn’t clear that regulation (with all its potential downsides) is needed to preserve the open Internet; perhaps strong advocacy is enough.

I think the fight for net neutrality is an important parallel for the ICT4D world where corporate interests may align to the detriment of development efforts. As mentioned below, despite the current fervor over the role that mobile phones can play in development, dependency on this specific technology has serious downsides. Just as there is a strong need for consumer advocacy on network neutrality, there is important work to be done championing socially responsible models for using mobile phones for development.

This is one of the motivations for Steve Song’s new Fair Mobile project. In the starting blog post, he explains that the uncompetitive mobile markets and the closed nature of the networks makes innovation far more difficult:

If we were able to drive down the barriers to mobile voice and SMS use through reduced cost and more Open Access style networks, individual and small-business innovation in the delivery of novel voice and data services would very likely blossom on the continent.

This is important work – telcoms are notoriously slow to innovate and given the potential to use mobiles for all sorts of development work, these barriers have real-world consequences.

In his paper that proposed a wireless network neutrality for the USA, Tim Wu listed dozens of features that carriers had “blocked, crippled, modified, or made difficult to use” – call timers, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, SMS, Internet browsers, email, and SIM card mobility. The iPhone has certainly pioneered a new way forward by allowing the development of applications for the phone (though, obviously, their specific model is filled with shortcomings). But where the typical phone is capable of nothing more than voice and SMS, innovation is still wildly constricted. Even more, as Steve points out, the high price of mobile phone use in the developing world is another barrier.

As a starting point, Steve is proposing an index of the cost of typical mobile use in the developing world. In time, he wants to expand the project to emphasize the extraordinary profits telcos receive and the opportunity cost of their walled gardens.

One of the reasons I think this is so exciting and important is that the developing world typically lacks the strong consumer advocacy groups that operate elsewhere. Similar to the net neutrality effort, Fair Mobile is seeking to advocate openness, but, as is appropriate for a development focused project, it is layering on price as a factor – think of it as the 7th FCC principle (one that African regulatory bodies are slowly waking up to, like in South Africa where the telcos are fighting hard to keep charging extraordinary amounts).

In the States, the effort to ensure an open platform for innovation has been largely successful; in the developing world, much still needs to be done.

[The following is a book review originally written for a development course.]

All too often, the public discourse about the past, present and future of African affairs is dominated by foreigners who lack the nuanced understanding that comes from a lifetime on the continent. That is why smart, eloquent and strongly pro-African voices like that of Wangari Maathai are such a welcome addition to the debates that swirl around Africa. In her new book, Maathai, a Kenyan who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her support of the environment and democracy, continues her tradition of powerful, and at times controversial, visions for the future of Africa. However, The Challenge for Africa: A New Vision suffers from a number of shortcomings, not the least of which is the microcosmic lens, weak researched support and a view of the past that is, for the most part, too rosy.

Maathai’s vision is sweeping. The book aims to establish “a set of principles for what it will take to change the life of [a typical] farmer, who represents 65 percent of Africans who continue to rely on subsistence agriculture.” The framework through which this should be accomplished is described as a three-legged stool where democratic space, sustainable and accountable management of natural resources, and cultures of peace – “fairness, respect, compassion, forgiveness, recompense and justice” – support the development of Africa. Key to this, the author believes, is a “revolution in leadership” for both politicians and citizenry. Her strong denunciations of corruption and negligence are a much-needed refrain, but as to the practicalities of ending the cycle of delinquency, Maathai comes up short. She writes,

“Even the poorest and least empowered of Africa’s citizens need to rid themselves of a culture that tolerates systemic corruption and inefficiency, as well as self-destructive tendencies and selfishness.”

But, not only are those about whom she speaks unlikely to ever read The Challenge for Africa, she ignores the systemic causes of corruption, preferring to trust in worthy leaders and groundswells of civil society to check the possibility of nefarious action.  Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be enough, and, at times, Maathai comes close to acknowledging this point: she provides an important critique of George Ayittey’s concept of a youthful “cheetah” generation rising up to replace the aging “hippo” leaders. As Maathai points out, Ayittey’s cheetahs could very well become hippos – corrupt, stagnant leaders who work not for their citizens, but for themselves. Yet, to the book’s detriment, Maathai does not seriously explore how best to align the social, political and economic context with the goals of honest, fair governance. African history is strewn with heroic leaders who become horrific with age – Robert Mugabe was a heroic leader who has done horrific things to his country. Although donor agencies have done much to make it a meaningless buzzword, there is good reason to focus on governance, as opposed to simple leadership. By discussing the work of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, Maathai demonstrates a passing acknowledgement that good governance is more than a cultural feature that can mature, but she misses the opportunity to use her important voice to explain, for example, the economic underpinnings of corruption.

The exciting and all-to-often ignored call for Africans to decide the future of their continent is one of the most important contributions of this book. “Ultimately,” Maathai writes, “the fate of the continent depends on its citizens.” She also recognizes that although her focus is on subsistence farmers, the richness of Africa’s population now extends far beyond the continental borders. Taking India’s lead, Maathai calls for a “collective effort, particularly through the embassies of African states, to provide systems and institutions to support Africans outside of the continent, so they can adjust successfully to their new environment.” Not only is this good governmental stewardship, it will allow African emigrants to become good ambassadors for a continent that suffers from a severe public relations disaster in the global North. Even further, by enabling the international success of Africans, African nations will be more likely to materially improve the country of their birth through remittances, knowledge and investment.

The grand vision of The Challenge for Africa, though, undermines some of her points. Most obvious is Maathai’s pre-occupation with the legacies of colonialism. This is not to dismiss the impact that centuries of foreign occupation and exploitation have, but the call for Africans to make their future is limited by the substantial weight that is placed on colonialism. In fact, these legacies are well known, and dedicating so much time to the past comes with considerable cost in the form of lost opportunities to move the debate in a new, productive direction. Writing about the popular image of Africa, Maathai says it,

“Only reinforces the perception that African solutions for African problems don’t exist, and that Africans are not equally equipped to propose a vision for Africa’s development or provide concrete actions to bring it about.”

This is certainly true and worth repeating, but too often Maathai’s pro-African voice approaches a likeness to autarky and isolation. For example, when she addresses the economic future of Africa, the book suffers from a severe myopia of global economic trends. “Africa has an opportunity to add value to those commodities by generating finished products…. The coltan of Congo could be added to capacitors in the same country it is mined from…” This is far too simplistic of an analysis; even were the DRC able to construct a competitive electronics factory, it likely lacks the infrastructure, business climate, and human capital to compete with the East Asian economies.

When she addresses the Washington Consensus, The Challenge for Africa is not “a new vision,” but an already tired criticism of a flawed endeavor. What’s more, her support of import-substituting industrialization totally ignores its large failures, such as in India where Nehru’s socialist policies created a legacy that still stunts the industrialization and growth of his country. While she notes that private capital flows surpassed aid for the first time in 2000, Maathai does not lend her credibility to the need for economic openness. That is, except when it comes to the new Chinese investors, who she believes are better than European or American firms due to a “common experience with Africa as victims of imperialism.” If Maathai believes that the Chinese investors, using largely Chinese labor, are motivated by historical legacy, as opposed to cold economic reality, she is sorely mistaken.

In fact, Maathai frequently approaches the quixotic when she addresses the global North. She contends that foreign “accoutrements” such as “soap” were “forceful symbols of the intruders’ self-image and power.” What might have been dismissed as the frustration of a genuinely well-intentioned author is shockingly contrasted with her assertion, a mere thirty pages later, that the governments of Africa should “make it their mission to provide a latrine in every household and teach basic hygiene…” Labeling hygienic tools as weapon of oppression is both hypocritical and callous. For example, even more sophisticated hygienic options, though Western in origin, are worthwhile. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Kristof notes,

“There’s growing evidence that a cheap way to help keep high-school girls in school is to help them manage menstruation. For fear of embarrassing leaks and stains, girls sometimes stay home during their periods, and the absenteeism puts them behind and eventually leads them to drop out. Aid workers are experimenting with giving African teenage girls sanitary pads, along with access to a toilet where they can change them.”

Surely Maathai does not contend that such “accoutrements” are tools of Western power, as soap once was?

This desire for cultural stagnancy, perhaps even revision, is one of the recurring themes of The Challenge for Africa. Maathai is a strong proponent of traditional African culture, spending considerable time addressing what she sees as a serious misunderstanding of the historic make-up of African society. Preferring the term “micro-nation,” as opposed to tribe – a word she feels has negative connotations – Maathai proposes a full embrace of the micro-nations of Africa. She sees

“The loss of traditional culture as one of the major causes of troubles such as the misuse of alcohol and drugs, behavior toward women and girl children, high secondary school dropout rates, prostitution, theft, the breakup of family relationships, and the commercialization of religion.”

This, obviously, is no small claim, but the support comes more from anecdotes than rigorous study. While I tend to agree that “the tenants of modernity – with its belief that material goods, greater technology, and innovation… – are insufficient to provide an ethical direction for our lives,” that is also insufficient reasons to avoid them. In truth, those tenants of modernity are important inputs for economic growth, a necessary component of development.

Although the author recognizes that “Africans cannot change the past; they can only manage it and determine the future,” considerable effort is spent painting a rosy picture of pre-Colonial times. In fact, Maathai proposes to enshrine cultural identity, as embodied in micro-nation membership, in formal assemblies at the nation-state level. This ignores the fluid, evolving nature of culture and identity and risks institutionalizing barriers that are just as likely to harm, as they are help.

Maathai is, as expected, at her best when she addresses her true passion: environmentalism. Her impassioned appeals for conservation and sustainability are as important today as they were when she began her work with the Green Belt Movement. She rightly points out that environmental degradation, such as the overfishing of African stocks, have very real geo-political implications. She points specifically to the forests of the Congo to demonstrate just how fragile and important ecosystems are. Yet, for all her experience, there is limited time spent addresses the specific mechanisms or steps that can be taken. For example, in the Congo, much of the deforestation is caused by the local population’s reliance on charcoal for fuel. This is a powerful economic reality that will not be overcome by long-term worries about sustainability. Instead, those organizations should create alternatives, such as has been done by Dr. Amy Smith of MIT, whose method of creating biomass charcoal creates real hope that the causes of deforestation may be addressed practically.

Secondly, The Challenge for Africa misses one of the primary trends affecting the environment and global commerce: urbanization. Although she notes that rural farmers are still the majority of the African population, the incredible migration towards cities is occurring fastest in Africa. This brings with it new environmental challenges that thought-leaders like Wangari Maathai must be ready to address. Further, as this book is primarily concerned with the sustainable development of the African continent, it must recognize the changing economic conditions that urbanization will entail. In her desire for the historic roots of Africa, Maathai misses the role that industrialization plays in growth. Factories need not be unsustainable, and as the Chinese population is increasingly absorbed into more sophisticated manufacturing and services, Africa could very well aim to place its newly urbanized in positions of industry.

Three hundred pages is not a lot of room to construct a new vision for Africa, let alone analyze the challenge for the continent, so it is likely that Maathai, whose life has been dedicated to this work, is ready to address these short-comings; however, in attempting to refocus the debate, she frequently misses the mark. That is not to say the book is without merits: the world needs more strong African voices, and Maathai is clearly one of the most important.

The New York Times recently published a lengthy article about Pandora, the personalized online music site. In stark contrast to most Web 2.0 systems, Pandora has eschewed the model of collaborative filtering and social recommendations (think Digg or iLike); instead, they manually codify hundreds of attributes for individual songs to create a database that, in my experience, is able to provide very sound musical recommendations. Have they codified musical taste?

Jonathan McEuen told me he heard about Pandora a couple of years ago and started using it immediately, “with the goal of breaking whatever algorithm they had.” A devoted music fan and a musician himself, McEuen says he did not believe an online service could understand what sort of music he would like and introduce him to new artists based on some deconstruction of his listening tastes. “You can’t just reduce it to a bunch of numbers,” he recalls thinking. “This is a romantic, emotional thing,” and Pandora’s approach to it “can’t work.”

He has changed his mind. A 28-year-old clinical neuroscience researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, he’s a listener who lacks the time to keep up with music news the way he did while amassing hundreds of CDs as a student. Sometimes he runs Pandora as background music; sometimes he’s more engaged, using it as a way to learn about contemporary classical and opera — and as a result has become a fan of the music of a young composer named Eric Whitacre. “I don’t know how else I would have found out about it,” he says. “Except through the exhaustive process of making new friends on the Internet. Which is something I’m kind of loath to do.”

Have they succeeded in quantifying musical tastes through their labor-intensive algorithmic process? Is there a lesson for all the other realms in which people are attempting to quantify human experience?

They may have been successful, but I think there are limited lessons. The reason is because the cost of failure is so low. If they recommend a song that I don’t like (and that doesn’t happen too infrequently), all I need to do to fix the situation is click the ‘Thumbs Down’ button and it ends. In fields like economics, the thumbs down function is far more costly.

Update: Via my friend Alex’s Twitter feed… an algorithm that predicts music success with 80% success:

So far HSS programming boasts an 80 percent success rate, classifying tracks such as Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” and t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” as potential hits, according to a 2006 study from Harvard Business School. That compares to a 10 percent success rate for songs promoted by record companies as singles, according to the study.

That’s certainly a high rate of success, but:

• Though impressive, that rate of success, it would seem, is far from acceptable for scenarios where failure is far more costly to society.
• Does it evolve? Would it have predicted unique new sounds like M.I.A. or just boring stuff like Drake? Is the evolution of music what’s found in the 20% error zone? This is especially important when you look at things like GDP and see that they have largely been the same since the 1940s, despite its increasingly detrimental effects.
• I believe it was Mick Jagger who once said that the key to the success of a song was exposure. Science seems to back him up: the exposure effect posits that experience with something increases likelihood of liking it. So, if musical tastes are constructed, not given, how does the algorithm account?

One of the most pressing topics in the digital activism debate is that of slacktivism, a “pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. The acts also tend to require little personal effort from the slacktivist.”

Livestrong wristbands or green-tinted avatars are some prime examples of what Evgeny Morozov calls “the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation”. He worries that the same lowered transaction costs that were supposed to make activism more accessible are, in fact, displacing effective models of change:

“The real issue here is whether the mere availability of the “slacktivist” option is likely to push those who in the past might have confronted the regime in person with demonstrations, leaflets, and labor organizing to embrace the Facebook option and join a gazillion online issue groups instead. If this is the case, then the much-touted tools of digital liberation are only driving us further away from the goal of democratization and building global civil society.”

But placing political importance on every politically-inclined action misses the motivation behind it. Much of the involvement in what is seen as digital activism should, instead, be seen through the lens of social activity.

Fred Stutzman noted this while examining the success of the Students Against Facebook News Feed, a group that garnered hundreds of thousands of members and encouraged Facebook management to implement significant changes in one of their most important site updates:

In the Facebook, groups are arbitrary affiliation vectors. Groups can be whimsical, such as a group named after a movie quote, or serious, such as a group dedicated to volunteering. Groups are costless to join, and they simply require a click of the mouse to join. Many users partake in a large number of groups; groups are generally thought of as a low-involvement way to make identity statements.

Certainly many of the group members disliked the changes to Facebook, but this is unlikely to be the only, or even the predominant, motivating factor for “slacktivists.” Instead, as Stutzman mentions, these digitally mediated acts are ways to craft an identity. As danah boyd writes in her essay on teens’ use of social networking sites [PDF], these sites “are providing teens with a space to work out their identity and status, make sense of cultural cues, and negotiate public life.” Joining the Barack Obama for President group or tinting your Twitter avatar green may do little to actually beat McCain or Ahmadinejad, but that is not the motivation for many of the clicks. It isn’t, as Evgeny writes, that “our digital efforts make us feel very useful and important but have zero social impact.” Instead, it is that the digital acts are innately social that they have impact, but for important personal social interests, not necessarily wider societal goals.

To be fair, the widespread misinterpretation of digitally mediated actions isn’t just due to the skeptics who rightly point out that traditional power structures still matter. The digital activism adherents also place too much emphasis on the case studies like the recent Trafigura kerfuffle where Twitter hashtags seemed to play an important role. They look at cases like Students Against Facebook New Feed and see a political act where much of the action was, in fact, motivated by personal social motives. Mainstream media stories that breathlessly count the number of group members or new trending topics on Twitter are to blame, as well.

Humans are diversely motivated beings, and often these motivations are mundane or vain; it’s important to recall this while celebrating or vilifying next week’s digital activism case study.

[Photo credit]

To what extent can we quantify human action?

Given rapidly expanding computational capacity and the proliferation of cheap sensors, there is a large, distributed trend towards human quantification. Wired Magazine confidently threw it on the cover of its July 2009 issue, celebrating self-tracking as popularized by the Nike + iPod system. It’s certainly a trend with a lot of momentum, and I imagine a lot of success will be had by people building businesses around it, but I’m increasingly worried about the way in which the concept is treated in gushing terms and without an understanding of its limitations.

To be clear, I think there is solid evidence that making explicit certain types of information can induce better behavior. One of the best examples is the feedback loop created by displaying energy use in real-time to homeowners, a practice that has been shown to reduce energy consumption. In fact, anyone who has driven a Prius can probably attest to their effort to keep the real-time MPG monitor in the higher numbers, an effort that changed my driving habit for the more efficient.

But I think too much exuberance for human quantification runs the risk of falling prey to a form of techno-utopianism that has already stricken many fields.

This post was catalyzed by two recent articles. The first, by copyright crusader turned political reformer, Larry Lessig, is an extended critique of the drive towards more transparency in government. He writes,

“We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust.”

For Lessig, the work of groups like the Sunlight Foundation or MAPLight (“money and politics: illuminating the connection”) are too simplistic. The problems these groups rightfully seek to fix are too complex to be solved by transparency alone.

“This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required. The result is a systemic misunderstanding–at least if the story is reported in a context, or in a manner, that does not neutralize such misunderstanding. The listing and correlating of data hardly qualifies as such a context. Understanding how and why some stories will be understood, or not understood, provides the key to grasping what is wrong with the tyranny of transparency.”

Now, perhaps the people who need to know the entire story – the trial judges, the political decision-makers – will take the time to look past a simplistic “money + politician = bribe” equation, but I think the worry is legitimate. The reason for the worry is the seductiveness of simplicity.

This is a point Paul Krugman makes strongly in his recent essay about failure of economists to predict or avoid the current recession. As he chronicles the shortcomings of modern economic thought, he writes,

“As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”

The “impressive-looking mathematics” are the economic models that academics have conceived and investors embraced. The short-comings of these have been noted time-and-again by critics like Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Richard Bookstaber (whose book I reviewed here), but these are minority voices. Bookstaber’s Congressional testimony is actually quoted by Krugman:

One thing that seems clear is that risk models that are designed to function in normal market conditions should not be relied upon to predict outcomes in times of crisis. On this account, VaR doesn’t kill banks; executives who don’t recognize the limits of VaR [the value-at-risk financial model] kill banks. As Bookstaber put it, “one has to look beyond VaR, to culprits such as sheer stupidity or collective management failure: The risk managers missed the growing inventory [of risky assets], or did not have the courage of their conviction to insist on its reduction, or the senior management was not willing to heed their demands. In other words, models succeed because they meet the needs of real human beings, and VaR was just what they needed during the boom.

This, to me, is the same point that Lessig was making – technologically-induced simplicity (in the form of “money + politician = bribe” or VaR) is seductive and likely to be misinterpreted to the detriment of society.

Certainly some people understand this. Carl Malamud, who has led an impressive effort to opening up government, responded to Lessig’s article as such,

“Lessig’s point is that transparency, naked and by itself, with no broader and deeper aims, will not automatically produce good results, and may indeed produce randomness in our government or far worse. Merely revealing data is not enough. One must work with it, work with policy, and monitor effects. Transparency without a long-term commitment to policy is transparency without context, transparency that is merely naked…”

The parallel for Krugman’s world is, very likely, the work of behavioral economists who are placing humanity’s knack for irrational activity within the framework of economic thought. However, in his vehement response to Krugman’s essay, U Chicago professor John Cochrane writes,

“The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research…”

This is what Lessig calls “the problem of attention-span,” and even were Krugman and Cochrane to coalesce into a sophisticated macroeconomic theory that took into account the limits of human quantification, I fear the simple, erroneous models will win the day (again).

Update: Tim Wu responds to Lessig’s piece with an important reminder that civic virtue is the key ingredient, not technology.

[Image Credit 1 and 2]