Governing the digital commons

Yochai Benkler wrote the wonderful book "The Wealth of Networks" which discusses various consequences of the increasing use of internet and other digital processes in economic development, creative production and politics. In the past mass media was controlled by a few people who could control the signal. Now everybody can express their opinions and contribute to cultural production. This leads obviously to conflicts in how to organize this, especially in the protection of copyrights and intellectual property.

The fact that many voices can be heard does not mean that every voice is heard. Search machines filter the internet, and we see the phenomena that a few blogs (not this one :-)), websites or youtube videos (e.g. Susan Boyle) become very popular, while most are not consumed. This leads me to wonder how this affect opinion formation and politics. Is the polarization and populism in politics in different regions in the world affected by this digital involvement? Those who are talented in creating effective sound bites instead of content (e.g. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands) might get more attention, but those with a more nuanced story are clicked away. Due to the reinforcing effects of networks is web based politics really contributing to a sustained democratic system? What the book of Benkler shows is that the internet revolutions provide many opportunities to study institutional diversity in progress.

Good intensions

Giving aid is a difficult dilemma. A Samaritan's dilemma. There are different ways to help the poor in developing countries. Beyond Good Intensions provides a series of videos from aid projects all over the world to find out what works and what does not. It also provide an option to discuss the problem of aid giving and voluntering on their website. What these videos show is that most successful cases have strong roots in the local community (what they want and can do) instead of providing volunteer holidays for youngsters with good intensions. Providing technical knowledge and facilitating that local communities can self-organize might often be the best help.

Institutional context and how good people turn evil

Philip Zimbardo, an emeritus professor of social psychology from Stanford University, did in the early seventies a famous experiment where a group of young men randomly were assigned to be prisoner or guard. The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), as it is known know, was cancelled after a week when a collegue of Zimbardo who saw the consequences of the experiments intervened. Zimbardo became part of the experiments where some "guards" were abusing "prisoners". The original intension of the experiment was to understand how context affect behavior, a line of work in psychology which was inspired by the question how ordinary citizens could turn to evil in World War 2. The SPE provides a clear example where context turn good people into evil.

Zimbardo wrote The Lucifer Effect based on his experiences with the SPE and other research he did like the prisoner abuse and torture in Abo Ghraib. As in the case of Abo Ghraib the first response of officials is that it is an isolated incident from bad people. Zimbardo shows convincingly that lack of oversight of higher autorities provide the conditions that people reveal their dark side of personalities. Due to lack of correcting autorities guards did what they thought was right "I only followed orders" "I needed to prepare the prisoners to confess", etc.

The facinating book of Zimbardo relates to one of the key findings from the study of institutional diversity, the importance of monitoring and enforcement. Due lack of oversight by their superiors and lack of correcting actions, hence ineffective monitoring, abuse escalated from small violations to enduring torture. That's why the Bush administration and not the guards are responsible for the prisoner abuse and torture in Abo Ghraib.

The role of autority in action arena in many contexts, from prisons to many other organizations, is therefore key. Besides being aware of the special position of autority and its affect of other actors in the action situation, it is important to think about how autority can be corrected. Hence the need for different levels of checks and balances.

Nudging

An interesting book of 2008 is Nudge by behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Based on behavioral studies they discuss incentives structures for many different topics. Thaler and Sunstein introduce the term choice architecture to refer to carefully designed incentive structure that gently push the people into desired chosen. From empirical studies we know that people often follow default options, chose more the first option in a list of options, are sensitive to the decisions others are making, etc. In making decisions on insurances or retirement options, the way the information is provided can improve the decisions participants make (more relevant to their individual situation). Even when we like to address a global challenge like climate change, nudging is possible. For example, by technical options that make energy use more visible (daily energy use on your website) or automatically turn of devices when people do not use it. Selling cars with a "low-carbon" or traditional version will not take of is one can not show clearly one use the "low-carbon" option. Hence the success of the Prius which is only availble as a hybrid. Thaler and Sunstein were colleagues of President-elect Obama and act as informal advisors. So there is hope that we will experience more nudging in the future.

For more information see also http://www.nudges.org/

Sh** happens

The big necessity by Rose George is an unusual book since it discusses the details of how human societies deal with human waste. 2.6 billion people have nowadays no form of sanitation which has immense implications for public health. When excrement is disposed in open fields flies, the weather and other factors disseminate the droppings. One of the startling statistics of the book is that people in areas without sanitation 'consume' on average 10 gram of human waste a day contributing to the spread of diseases and bad public health in general.

The book describe the diverse ways countries and communities deal with human waste. From the untouchables in India, the lowest caste who are responsible for removing the human waste, to the hygiene obsessed Japanese with high-tech restrooms. From the Chinese who use the 'night soil' to create energy to the experimentation with new latrine pit designs in Tanzania. The diverse ways of human waste managements show some of the difference in social structure and culture around the world.

The provision of sanitation is an important public good that not only requires monetary investments but also cooperation of the users. Especially lack of maintenance of sanitation systems may prevent the development of this public good. Various examples are discussed where communities in India are rewarded when their community is open defecation-free. The solution to sanitation is not necessarily the same for each context due to variation of population density, availability of water, etc. Hence institutional diversity can also be studied for the problem of human waste.

Plastic brains

Just finished "The brain that changes itself" of Norman Doidge which discuss new developments in brain research. Mainly the findings that brains can adapt to lost functions. Many examples are discussed of people who lost brain function due to stroke, or had only half a brain, and were able to train other parts of the brain to take over functionality.

What has this to do with institutional diversity?

In the last few years there is a lot of research on detecting areas of the brain that correlate with cooperative behavior in social dilemmas. But what if brain functions are not all genetic but in important ways wired due to repeated activities. The example of brain washing of children in North Korea is discussed in the book where children are confronted the whole day with propaganda material on adoration of the leaders and defining other nations as enemies, including in arithmetic exercises. In this way children are wired with "cultural norms" which will be difficult to unwire. Hence habitual behavior and social norms might become wired during childhood. Rewiring the brain will require persistent and repeated training of other areas of the brain. This might be possible for people who like to function after hit by a stroke, but it is less likely to expect to be plausible or desirable for changing habitual behavior. This again shows the importance of education in addressing the long term global challenges we are facing.

The benefits of theft

Stealing somebody's property is illegal, but sometimes it has benefits and is tolerated. Within the increasing digital world copying software and other digital products is easy to do. The Economist of July 19th discusses some cases where one likes to benefit from piracy. For example, for each music track that is legally exchanged, 20 music tracks are illegally derived from peer-to-peer systems. The music industry starts now to adapt to the situation and start making use of data mining to figure out who is downloading what and where (see BigChampage) to improve the scheduling of concerts and other events.
Microsoft tolerates illegal copies of their software in China. The reason is to maintain a large share of users and get them locked in with Microsoft products. If they would enforce intellectual property seriously, Chinese customers may move to cheaper open source products and get locked in with those products. For the longer term allowing some stealing now would be beneficial.
The benefits of theft seems to be restricted to those products which benefits from lock-in effects or where during the process of illegal possession of the products information (on preferences) of the thieves could be derived. If your main gain of revenue depends on dominating the market, piracy is a good sign that there is demand for your product and contribute to the dominance of the market.