Monthly Archives: June 2017

don’t let the behavioral revolution make you fatalistic

Posted on by
Reply

Beginning in the late 1960s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman shook the prevailing assumption that human beings can plan and make decisions rationally. Their experiments demonstrated that we use “simplifying heuristics rather than extensive algorithmic processing” to make decisions. We err in predictable ways even when we want to think rationally (Gilovich & Griffin 2002).

Tversky’s and Kahneman’s revolutionary program spread across the behavioral sciences and constantly reveals new biases that are predictable enough to bear their own names. Attribution Bias means explaining one’s failures as the results of difficult external circumstances, while others’ failures must flow from their bad choices. The Control Illusion is the tendency to overestimate how much we control events. The Halo Effect causes us to overvalue work by people whom we have previously judged as talented. And the lists go on for pages.

These phenomena are held to be deeply rooted in the cognitive limitations of human beings as creatures who evolved to hunt-and-gather in small bands on African plains. Not only has the burgeoning literature on cognitive biases challenged rational market models in economics, but it undermines the “folk theory” of democracy taught in civics textbooks and widely believed by citizens and pundits. The folk theory holds that “Ordinary people have preferences about what their government should do. They choose leaders who will do these things, or they enact their preferences directly in referendums. In either case, what the majority wants becomes government policy” (Achen and Bartels 2016). Citing the research on human cognitive limitations as well as other evidence, Achen and Bartels argue that this folk theory is not only false as a description of actual politics in the United States; it is impossible.

Such evidence should be taken very seriously. No reform program will work that doesn’t address human cognitive limitations. But we can design solutions. For example, people are not very good at measuring time, but most of us carry little prosthetic devices on our wrists that tell us what time it is. We’ve also sprinkled our walls and computer screens with clocks that are synchronized so that we can coordinate billions of people’s time.

Similarly, a newspaper is a prosthetic device for telling us what important events are occurring around the world that are relevant to our decisions as consumers, workers, and citizens. We didn’t evolve to know the news, but we have built tools that tell us the news.

To be sure, human cognitive limitations make the news business a hard one. We human beings are not very good at separating reliable information from misinformation, at seeing the world from perspectives other than our own, or at absorbing information that challenges our prior assumptions. We are not automatically motivated to pay for reliable information about public issues.

Some of these points have been known for a very long time. Francis Bacon, for example, was an acute observer of human cognitive limitations. Around 1880, there was no such thing as a professional, politically independent, reliable press in the United States. If people had considered the many reasons to doubt that human beings can know or value the news, they would not have set about to create the modern press.

Instead, naively, they went ahead and built the press. And they made it work by selling a desirable package that included entertainment and advertising as well as hard political news. The metropolitan daily newspaper had a pretty good run until new forms of advertising and entertainment finally shrank it in our century. Behavioral science would have predicted the demise of the independent newspaper–but about a century too soon. In fact, “the press” (reporters, editors, journalism educators, and others) sustained the newspaper as a tool for overcoming human cognitive limitations for decades. Nor is the newspaper the only such success story. Behavioral science would not predict schools and universities, research labs, or public libraries, either.

The moral is to be sober about the limits of reasonably rational and ethical human behavior without ever giving up on our ability to create better tools and contexts.

Sources:

  • Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)
  • Thomas Gilovich and Dale Griffin, “Introduction–Heuristis and Biases: Then and Now,” in Gilovich and Griffin (eds.), Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

See also: hearing the faint music of democracy; Joseph Schumpeter and the 2016 election.

 

New Video on Bringing Participatory Budgeting in Schools

Posted on by
Reply

We are excited to announce that NCDD member org – The Participatory Budgeting Project recently released a new video on bringing participatory budgeting in schools. The video is on the recent participatory budgeting pilot in 5 Phoenix high schools, where more than 3,800 students participated in their first PB process. We encourage you to read more about the new PB in Schools video below or find the original on the Participatory Budgeting Project’s blog here.

NEW VIDEO – Participatory Budgeting in Schools

We are proud to share our newest tool to make civics education meaningful by putting real money on the table, our new Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Schools video!

This video introduces you to participatory budgeting in schools by showing you how it worked in Phoenix. Featuring interviews with students, teachers, principals, local elected officials, and the superintendent — see how PB can be a tool for learning democracy while building stronger schools.

Check out Participatory Budgeting in Schools from PBP on Vimeo.

Now we need your help to share the video and redefine the way democracy is learned.

1. Share this video!
Connect with students, parents, educators, school administrators, PTAs or anyone who wants to see the future of democracy start today. PB takes work from committed volunteers, but learning the importance of real democracy as a school community is worth it!

2. Download the guide to PB in Schools.
Get 18 lessons, 6 worksheets, and everything you need to bring PB to a school budget!
Students will learn to work collaboratively, conduct research, solve problems, present solutions, build empathy, deepen community, and explore why participation in democracy matters.

3. Learn more!
Sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update about the future of PB in Schools.

Consider looking back to read our previous posts about PB in Schools—including the district-wide funds PB process that was featured in the video! [blog post link]

4. Join the community of supporters that make this work possible.
We’re really into this participatory budgeting thing.

Every year we set aside half the money raised by individuals to let our community directly decide how to spend it to make PB more equitable and effective. We call it PB2 (or “PB squared”), it’s PB for PBP.

We know that all PB processes address big concerns. It’s been surprising and exciting to see that for the last two years, our supporters have chosen to support PB processes in schools. You funded the PB in Schools Guide in 2015. In 2016, you supported this new advocacy video.

See what’s on the 2017 PB Ballot and donate to start building the pot of money for next year!

Support from donors lets us try new things. Without this support, thousands of students would never have had the opportunity to directly decide a portion of their school budgets.
PB works because you show up. Thank you for making democracy better with us.

You can find the original version of this blog post from the Participatory Budgeting Project at: www.participatorybudgeting.org/new-video-participatory-budgeting-schools/

And The Winners Are: Civic Games Contest Winners

Posted on by
Reply

Our judges played the games, and made their decisions. There were several strong contenders in every category. Each of the winners has been invited to this year’s Frontiers of Democracy Conference, where we’ll be showcasing their efforts.

Awareness-raising: Morgan Davie’s “Refuge“

Refuge is a storytelling game for 2 to 4 people. Players become refugees as they struggle to create new lives for themselves in an unfamiliar land. What might it be like to flee your home to a new land? It is a powerful testament to what games with simple rules can do to put us in the shoes of those who have lost almost everything.

Skill-building: Shawn Roske’s Last Item on the Agenda

Last Item is a LARP (a live-action role-playing game) for 4-6 people. The players are staffers at a group home for the developmentally disabled, struggling to discuss the sexuality of the residents. The game design creates a frustrating and difficult matter for deliberation, assigns roles to different players guaranteed to lead to conflict, and then asks these players to create a clear corporate policy the deal with the matter. This game was a contender for awareness-raising, but ultimately the mechanics make it particularly powerful as a tool for building deliberative skills.

Inherently Political: Mike Capron’s “Long-Term Community Organizing, Abridged.”

This is a simulation game for at least 8 people. It creates an abridged format for “one-on-one” meetings to show how such meetings can be used to create affinity groups who can work together to plan events and collective actions. It was a strong contender for “skill-building,” but the judges decided that if you played this game with people you don’t know, you’d probably end up in a political action network. (Maybe our categories are a bit too overlapping.)

And The Winners Are: Civic Games Contest Winners

Posted on by
Reply

Our judges played the games, and made their decisions. There were several strong contenders in every category. Each of the winners has been invited to this year’s Frontiers of Democracy Conference, where we’ll be showcasing their efforts.

Awareness-raising: Morgan Davie’s “Refuge“

Refuge is a storytelling game for 2 to 4 people. Players become refugees as they struggle to create new lives for themselves in an unfamiliar land. What might it be like to flee your home to a new land? It is a powerful testament to what games with simple rules can do to put us in the shoes of those who have lost almost everything.

Skill-building: Shawn Roske’s Last Item on the Agenda

Last Item is a LARP (a live-action role-playing game) for 4-6 people. The players are staffers at a group home for the developmentally disabled, struggling to discuss the sexuality of the residents. The game design creates a frustrating and difficult matter for deliberation, assigns roles to different players guaranteed to lead to conflict, and then asks these players to create a clear corporate policy the deal with the matter. This game was a contender for awareness-raising, but ultimately the mechanics make it particularly powerful as a tool for building deliberative skills.

Inherently Political: Mike Capron’s “Long-Term Community Organizing, Abridged.”

This is a simulation game for at least 8 people. It creates an abridged format for “one-on-one” meetings to show how such meetings can be used to create affinity groups who can work together to plan events and collective actions. It was a strong contender for “skill-building,” but the judges decided that if you played this game with people you don’t know, you’d probably end up in a political action network. (Maybe our categories are a bit too overlapping.)

it’s no accident that people distrust institutions

Posted on by
Reply

Bill Bishop (who is a terrific reporter and thinker) wrote a Washington Post piece on March 3 entitled “Americans have lost faith in institutions. That’s not because of Trump or ‘fake news.’” The article is illustrated with a bank of charts showing declining trust in almost all institutions. Bishop’s explanation throughout is cultural and attitudinal:

The leaders of once-powerful institutions are desperate to resurrect the faith of the people they serve. They act like they have misplaced a credit card and must find the number so that a replacement can be ordered and then FedEx-ed, if possible overnight.

But that delivery truck is never coming. …

We haven’t simply changed our attitudes. We’ve voted with our feet, walking away from the institutions we supported for generations. …

We have become, in Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s description, “artists of our own lives,” ignoring authorities and booting traditions while turning power over to the self. The shift in outlook has been all-encompassing. …

People enjoy their freedoms. There’s no clamoring for a return to gray flannel suits and deferential housewives. Constant social retooling and choice come with costs, however. Without the authority and guidance of institutions to help order their lives, many people feel overwhelmed and adrift.

My view is different. I think that when things are going well, institutions offer attractive deals to citizens that they would be very happy to accept today. For instance, if unionized manufacturing jobs paid decent wages, people would like unions. If local government agencies had enough resources to provide consistently decent services, people would like government. If political parties were driven by volunteers (instead of swamped by money that flows to for-profit consultants who work for entrepreneurial candidates), people would engage with parties. And if a metropolitan daily newspaper offered the best available way to get news, sports, classifieds, and comics, people would subscribe, the subscription money would pay for journalists, and readers would trust the news industry.

But there are reasons that these institutions are not prospering. They all have competitors or outright enemies. Unions, for example, did not decline because we became “artists of our own lives.” Industries that had been unionized lost jobs to automation and outsourcing, and states passed laws that frustrate organizing. As they used to say on the left, it’s no accident, comrade, that unions have lost support.

An attitudinal explanation puts all the emphasis on people’s preferences or values. I’d introduce power into the narrative and explain people’s low trust as a reflection of objectively weak institutions that, in turn, were weakened by their rivals and enemies. The whole story is no doubt complex, with reciprocal causation, vicious cycles, and elements of cultural change; but intentional efforts to dismantle institutions must be part of the diagnosis.

Can Commons Thinking Break into the European Mainstream?

Posted on by
Reply

As Europeans struggle to deal with their multiple economic and political crises – and now, the unreliable support of the United States – it may be time to consider some serious ideas that go beyond the standard left/right framework and open up some new conversations.  That is the goal of a recent report, “Supporting the Commons: Opportunities in the EU Policy Landscape,” released by the Berlin-based organization Commons Network. The report calls on EU politicians and policymakers to embrace the commons as a fresh approach to Europe’s deep structural problems and social alienation. (Executive Summary here.)

The prevailing EU neoliberal economic and social policies have a familiar, retrograde focus: Increase market growth at all costs, deregulate and privatize while reducing government spending, social protections and services. This approach is failing miserably and highly unpopular, especially in France, Italy, Spain and Greece. But politicians cannot seem to escape this box, and even where leftist reformers win state power, as with Syriza in Greece, international capital (in the guise of neoliberal politicians) overwhelm them. Even state sovereignty is not enough!

So how might the commons help instigate a new political discussion?  The Commons Network report makes clear that the challenge is not about policy tweaks. A new worldview is needed. A holistic systems perspective is needed.

The report opens with a fitting quotation by Donella Meadows, the great environmental scientist:

“Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. ... Human beings have been endowed with the ability to count but also with the ability to assess quality. … No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point towards their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”

Who is going to stand up for all the uncountable forces that make our lives liveable?  How can The System begin to take account of those things that can’t be tabulated on budget spreadsheets or aggregated into Gross Domestic Product?

Authors David Hammerstein and Sophie Bloemen write:   

“The current crisis facing the European Union demands new, unifying and constructive narratives.  The commons is an emerging paradigm in Europe – one that embraces reciprocity, stewardship, social and ecological sustainability. It is also a movement, one that can reinvigorate progressive politics and contribute to a more socially and ecologically sustainable Europe.

“….The commons perspective stands in stark contrast to the policy priorities that currently dominate in Europe,” they add, citing “individualism, private ownership and zealous free market-thinking” and the “major fault lines [that] are starting to appear in that dominant worldview….At the moment, almost all EU economic policy is focused on the promotion of purely commercial actors and the uni-dimensional view of people having the exclusively individual aims of selling, owning or buying goods or services. The dominant paradigm is rarely evaluated by applying clear indicators of social and ecological well-being to judge the success of an economic endeavour.”

It remains to be seen whether politicians will want to explore and develop a commons framing or try to re-imagine politics. The right has generally seen more advantage in striking an angry, reactionary pose against immigrants and elites, while the left generally sees few alternatives than to try to humanize the neoliberal agenda using old-style bureaucratic systems and more government money. 

However, there are some fascinating new attempts to develop a pan-European approach to democratic renewal, as seen in the DiEM 25 project and the European Commons Assembly, among other initiatives. The Commons Network report is an attempt to outline the logic, ethic and social practices of a new kinds of politics, with a focus on several promising policy areas such as participatory democracy, the urban environment and knowledge in the digital environment. 

Hammerstein and Bloemen:

“Commons…stand for a worldview and ethical perspective favouring stewardship, reciprocity and social and ecological sustainability. This outlook defines wellbeing and social wealth not in terms of narrow economic criteria like GDP or companies’ success. Instead it looks to a richer, more qualitative set of criteria that are not easily measured – including moral legitimacy, social consensus and participation, equity, resilience, social cohesion and social justice.

“The commons discourse considers people as actors who are deeply embedded in social relationships, communities and local ecosystems, instead of conceiving of society as merely a collection of atomised individuals principally living as consumers or entrepreneurs. Human motivation is more diverse than maximising self-interest alone: we are social beings and human cooperation and reciprocity are at least as important in driving our actions.  This holistic perspective also tends to overcome dominant subject-object dualisms between, for example, man and nature, and to consider human activity as part of the larger biophysical world. Recognising the multiple domains of people’s lives, these bottom-up, decentralised and participatory approaches to our major social and environmental dilemmas provide functional solutions to the crises facing our continent.

“…..New social values and practices are enabling communities to be generative instead of extractive, outside of the market and state. This is creating a new civic and cultural ethic that is breaking with conventional notions of citizenship and participation. The regeneration activities of commoners showcase, above all, cultural manifestations of new ways of daily life. Community supported agriculture, cooperative housing initiatives that ensure reasonable and lasting low rents, local energy cooperatives, do it yourself (DIY) initiatives, decentralised internet infrastructures, the scientific commons, community-based art, music and theatre initiatives, and many other activities, all provoke practical on-the-ground cultural change.”

There is a cultural shift going on at the ground level, mostly outside the view of conventional electoral politics. But since politicians are averse to wading into new and unfamiliar lines of discussion – oh, the risks! – it is likely that the cultural rumblings will first burst out in the style of Occupy, the Indignados or the Arab Spring: an abrupt surprise. We may have to wait for a cultural paroxysm for political leaders to develop the courage to think big and be bold.    

The sick thing is, Trump actually understood these deeper shifts. He just chose to exploit widespread resentments and frustrations in all sorts of manipulative, demagogic and self-serving ways. When will the pragmatic realists of the left and center begin to see the virtues of embracing the coming paradigm shift, and champion a humane social reconstruction? 

my working theory of Trump and the Russians

Posted on by
Reply

A working hypothesis, subject to being disproven and probably incorrect in several respects:

The Putin Government has a list of issues that they perceive as points of conflict with the US and NATO countries. At the top are Syria and Ukraine, but the list extends beyond that.

In 2016, they viewed Hillary Clinton as the most likely next president, but not as a sure bet. They saw her as competent and hostile to their interests. They created a barrage of fake news and stole and leaked true information to lower her odds of winning and to weaken her mandate if she prevailed.

They viewed Donald Trump as having some chance of winning, and they much preferred that outcome. He had ideological affinities with Putinism (as a form of macho authoritarian White Christian nationalism) and was likely to divide and weaken US political institutions and alliances while also bringing disrepute to the US. So they directed their propaganda to favor him and chose not to leak secret information about him, if they had any.

Meanwhile, Trump’s entourage included a bunch of characters who had strong ideological commitments to Putinism or financial ties to Russia, or both. By enticing these men into back-channel conversations or business deals, the Russians could gain leverage over them. This might influence US foreign policy. Alternatively, the Russians could suborn scandalous or unlawful behavior and use (or threaten to use) their knowledge of these secret interactions at their convenience.

Trump had no idea of any of this. He thought the stolen information from the Democratic Party should be public and he believed the fake news that he retweeted. He either didn’t know about the back-channel conversations or didn’t think they were inappropriate. To this day, he doesn’t understand what was wrong and he regards the criticism he’s receiving from the security agencies, Congress, and the press as sheer partisan hostility. This is why he continually draws attention to the scandal instead of trying to distance himself from it.

Trump did, however, state publicly and privately tell James Comey that he wanted the investigation to end. By firing Comey when he didn’t comply, Trump probably obstructed justice. That would be a felony carrying up to five years in federal prison. Although some people in Trump’s orbit may have committed original crimes (such as receiving Russian money unlawfully), the main violations involve interference with the investigation.

Meanwhile, Putin has gotten what he wants as the Trump government squanders American soft power and weakens the Western Alliance. Neither is exactly an intentional goal of the Trump administration, whose malice is exceeded by its sheer incompetence.