Changing Behaviour - Is it Child's Play?

Many of us who are working for new metrics of progress are interested in changing behaviour for two broad reasons:

1) We believe that what we measure affects what we do - and so we believe new measures will lead to new (improved) behaviour; and

2) New measures will not simply be adopted on their own: we need also to change behaviour if we want society to start paying more attention to the measures we build.

Small children are - quite possibly - the world's most effective (and definitely the most persistent) changers of behaviour. At least mine are when it comes to me and my behaviour. Millions of years of evolution has instilled ruthless strategies within their DNA to help them get what they want. And this weekend I had the dubious pleasure of being subjected to every weapon my two kids could deploy in operation Xbox. Perhaps there are some parallel approaches we in the indicator business can learn.

I can think of at least 5 strategies employed.

1) Please can I have one

Neither convincing nor effective. At best it will provoke a muttered 'We'll see' (or 'we will run a consultation and scoping study'). More likely outright refusal. (c.f. nice idea but we have no resources).

2) Everybody else has one

Again, unlikely to be successful. It may give momentary pause for thought ... but this is almost always immediately followed by reasons why the circumstances are actually different at home. "Well you already have a nintendo, a wii ..." (c.f. we already have a mature set of national accounts). In fact, as few countries do have a set of progress measures the argument is often used by those opposed to the idea.

3) If I don't get one I will make life difficult/ If I do get one I will cooperate

Does anyone ever give into this? Promises of better behaviour might carry more influence but are unlikely to be all that impressive ... and shouldn't they be behaving well anyway? (c.f. if you really want to help improve our measurement system then why not join our statistical advisory council).

4) I need one because it will help me do A, B and C

One of the more convincing arguments, this one, especially if A, B and C are worthwhile in themselves or can help overcome some other problem (its educational.. it will help me have more friends). But while it will often give pause for thought it may not be decisive to push the wavering decision-maker to action. (I'd say most of the arguments included in the work of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission for example fall into this category).

5) If I do X, Y and Z then can we have one?

The weapon of last resort of any scheming child but - depending on the merits of X, Y and Z - is quite often the winning pitch. The benefits that will foreshadow the purchase (or the construction of the indicator set) are sufficient in themselves to justify the investment, even if the game (or new indicators) will not be used as much as we'd hoped.

This last argument is one that I have long been interested in when it comes to indicators and it is one that has been largely neglected by those advocating for change. A variety of partial evidence around the world suggests that the process of discussing and constructing an indicator set can bring important benefits, notwithstanding how - or even whether - the indicators are used. For example, discussing indicators of progress can:

a) Engage citizens in important discussions about their future and help get citizens and NGOs talking more – and more productively - with government (and vice versa);

b) Help different sectors (or even bits of government) agree on the outcomes they are jointly trying to achieve;

c) Help statisticians engage better with users (and vice versa); and

d) Reframe contentious issues in a way that can help find common ground. This in turn can lead to more trust and more constructive debate. (The political right and left may never agree on how to tackle poverty, but they might agree on why poverty is an important issue to tackle and how it should be defined for example, which is a significant step in itself).

In April last year I was at a meeting with Joe Stiglitz in New York and he too noted his interest in the benefits that can flow from the process of indicator construction. Nine months later I'm pleased to say the Bertelsmann Foundation have launched an important research project to look into this more closely. We are trying to develop an armoury of arguments around the benefits of the construction process that will help persuade those sceptical policymakers to take new measures of progress more seriously.

If you know of indicator projects where the process was particularly beneficial, or can think of other ways in which the process can help, please do get in touch because the research is just beginning. And if the arguments that come out are half as effective as those used by my kids we will be one step closer to a more informed public debate. And, yes, the Xbox arrives tomorrow.

Jon Hall

The Revolution IS Currently and Will be …. Facebooked?

Last Friday, at the International Conference on Social Cohesion and Development organised at the OECD there were several papers presented on civic participation. The basic premise of our paper is that social networks are a good tool for citizens and governments alike to communicate and even develop their programs and agendas.

The session was on Friday morning at 11:00 am Tunisia time.

In this session, a very interesting comment came up while discussing hard and soft social capital was the idea of where and whether these social networks like Twitter and Facebook can actually make a difference. Where is the point where they actually matter? Well, if you are following any of this debate, you have seen that there are two very clear camps. Clay Shirkey is most prolific on in the pro-social network camp and Malcolm Gladwell in the anti-social network camp.

An article in the New Yorker by Gladwell (anti) entitled “Why The Revolution will not be Tweeted” states that Twitter will never be able create a revolution because the ties are too loose to bind people to create a movement. He also stated here that there just isn’t enough evidence to prove that in the absence of the internet these demonstrations wouldn’t have happened anyway.

Clay Shirkey (pro) in the article From Innovation to Revolution in Foreign Affairs stated that “Digital networks have acted as a massive positive supply shock to the cost and spread of information, to the ease and range of public speech by citizens, and to the speed and scale of group coordination. As Gladwell has noted elsewhere, these changes do not allow otherwise uncommitted groups to take effective political action. They do, however, allow committed groups to play by new rules.

Perhaps the evidence that Gladwell is looking for to prove that these networks matter is that reportedly authorities in Tunisia had been hacking into Facebook in order to steal passwords of users. But, if Facebook hadn’t been there, there would have been nothing for them to steal and therefore the identities of activists would have been safer. New rules indeed. According to Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic “If you need a parable for the potential and pitfalls of a social-media enabled revolution, this is it: the very tool that people are using for their activism becomes the very means by which their identities could be compromised”

Jillian York of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University, who has been tracking the Tunisian situation closely. "There are a lot more Facebook users than Twitter users. Facebook allows for strong ties in a way that Twitter doesn't. You're not just conversing." So, Mr. Gladwell seems to have some agreement on Twitter. But, what about Facebook? Suddenly, Facebook is providing virtual “stronger” ties that can make a difference.

This article in the Atlantic came out on Tuesday morning which I think is the first we have seen on how Facebook had to rapidly respond to user information being compromised in Tunisia and how “Facebook went from being a waste of time or procrastination tool, to my go-to source on up-to-date information. It was stuff the major media channels weren't reporting, such as numbers to call to reach the military and what was happening when in what specific neighborhood" according to one activist.

Here we are now at 18:00 Cairo time today and on the Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/#!/elshaheeed.co.uk entitled “We are all Khaled Said” there are up to the minute updates on where and when the next demonstration will be in Egypt, live video and photos as well as some incredibly good illustrations about this movement. The illustration on this blog is from there.

So, to answer the question as to where and whether social networks matter, the answer is (as of now) Tunisia and Egypt and yes they do. I lean on the side of Shirkey. Gladwell is not wrong though in that these events probably would have happened anyway. But, they are now happening faster and cheaper. This matters.

Angela Hariche

Illustrator's link: http://www.facebook.com/#!/elshaheeed.co.uk

Why the G 20 should look at Social Cohesion

Violent protests by youth in Tunisia and Algeria against persistent high unemployment… the unresolved cleavage between “red shirt” protesters and government supporters in Thailand… food riots in Mozambique… protesting strikers in Chinese factories demanding higher wages… and Maoist guerrillas organizing indigenous people and other groups who have not shared in the economic boom in India…

All these examples remind us that social cohesion - “the glue that holds society together” is challenged even as poverty goes down across the developing world and many countries start to converge to rich country standards of living. Surprisingly, discontent is not only rife in poor countries but also in the emerging – many G 20 - countries that contributed to and benefited most over the last economic boom.

Last week an International Conference on Social Cohesion and Development was organized at OECD to try to shed some light on this puzzling topic. Some 150 researchers, academics, and development practioners from more than 20 different countries met to discuss various aspects from measuring social cohesion to what is needed to foster and develop it.

Through parallel sessions presenting more than 30 papers on different aspects of social cohesion and its relationship to development, participants tried to hammer out some common understanding on how best a cohesive society can both help and benefit from development. Three important common threads emerged:

1. Poverty reduction is not enough to ensure social development. Fabulous gains against poverty have been made in many emerging countries over the last few decades. While frameworks like the UN’s Millenium Development Goals keep an important focus on the perils of extreme poverty, we must not forget that being non-poor isn’t an automatic guarantee that someone isn’t excluded in a society, does trust their neighbours, or feels capable of improving their lives further themselves. Building cohesive society requires shared spaces and viewpoints where all citizens can feel included and manage collective action problems peacefully.

2. Relative comparisons are important both within and across societies. Individuals love to compare themselves to their friends, family and fellow citizens, but also to people living elsewhere on the planet. As differences between countries decline, and differences within countries increase in a world interconnected by technology, the differences between those who benefit most from globalization the most and those who don’t is easier than ever to see around us everyday. Societies need to watch out for the emergence of a “Facebook” generation of elites, who feel closer to each other than they do to their own neighbours.

3. New data sources make the difficult task of defining, measuring, and fostering social cohesion a realistic objective. Recognition by the international community that data and indicators to measure societal progress need to go beyond single measures of progress, like GDP, has helped stimulate the creation of new and interesting data. A growing wealth of data on inequality, multidimensional poverty, subjective well-being and social capital are helping to make social cohesion possible.

Yesterday, President Sarkozy of France laid out the G 20 and G 8 agenda for the coming month calling for more attention towards the social dimensions of globalization. Social cohesion provides a useful framework for doing so as a means and an end of development. We are currently witnessing the shift of the center of economic gravity from the west to east with many ensuing opportunities and risks. It is now the right time to put this topic on the agenda as it is of high and increasing relevance for all the G 20 countries and beyond.

The recent events in Tunisia and elsewhere clearly demonstrate that there is an urgent need for tackling the concerns of citizens of being excluded, not heard, marginalized and without any power. Putting social cohesion on the agenda of the G 20 could provide a useful first step to this end.

Chris and Johannes

Thank you to all Prog Blog readers

Dear readers,

We would like to thank you for following the Prog Blog this year. We will be taking a little break until January.

Some of the things I will be reading over the holidays are “The Spirit Level, why equal societies almost always do better” and also “Difference, how the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools and societies”. Ok, I do admit that I am totally addicted to this Millennium series so I must plow through “The Girl Who Played with Fire”.

It has been a really good year for measuring progress in 2010. We were just talking about how the Community Portal in late 2009 had maybe 1 or 2 articles per week on measuring progress mentioned in the media. Now, we have over 50 articles in the news each week about governments, communities and researchers measuring progress. Check it out in 2011 as we will try to make sure that our media review is even more comprehensive. If you see anything that we have missed or think we should highlight, please do contact us (or add it to the wiki yourself!).

We are also playing with this new tool from Google which searches the frequency of words in Google books over time. Prog Blogger Chris Garroway sent this around to our group this morning. See below the search that Chris did on social cohesion, social exclusion, social capital, social mobility.

Talk of social capital took off in the early 90's.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

Best wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season from all the Prog bloggers.

We look forward to blogging with you in 2011.

Angela

Turning Statistics into Knowledge - seminar report by Trevor Fletcher

For the last three days I’ve been attending the seminar on “Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge” held in the wonderful city of Cape Town. The seminar, co-hosted by Statistics South Africa, the OECD and World Bank, has provided a platform for international organisations, statistical agencies, research institutes and companies to showcase their software for visualising data to make it more easily understandable and interesting to a wider audience and we’ve seen some very, very interesting new developments. And as well as seeing the new tools, I learned several new terms for my vocabulary that I shall definitely use at my next cocktail party. These include “informavore”, “informationally obese”, “Homo Statisticus” to quote but a few…

The seminar opened with a session devoted to the use of maps to visualise data that featured, for instance, the combination of Geographic Information System techniques with Neural Network Prediction in an Automated Valuation Model: you heard it here first! There were also other impressive uses of dynamic mapping interfaces such as using the web-based mapping revolutionary era to turn African statistics into knowledge.

Next up was the session on “How to get the most of data with Discovery and Analysis software”. Some highlights were the OECD Development Centre’s presentation (and I’m not being biased here, promise!) on “How IT tools can help support the global partnership for development” that had some very snappy animations, and “Making statistics matter – improved access to Pacific regional information” that showed a very innovative system for users to enter their own data very simply into a very lively web-based graphics tool.

The session on storytelling covered a very broad range of topics which featured a “Children’s HIV and AIDS Scorecard” from South African research institute the Yezingane Network, a presentation of a very comprehensive storytelling software package from NcomVA of Sweden and a personal favourite of mine, the “Statistical Self Portrait” from Statistics Korea.

There were other excellent presentations too numerous to mention that demonstrated that data storytelling software is very much a growth industry.

And to reinforce this fact, the seminar was treated to a premier of the BBC programme “The Joy of Stats” featuring Hans Rosling (who presented his Gapminder software at previous seminars) showing some cutting-edge tools for presenting statistics that fitted perfectly on the agenda of our seminar. So thanks to Hans and the BBC!

Educated in the School of Life: Education through a Well-being Lens

This week the OECD has released another round of PISA results. PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, is one of the Organisation’s greatest success stories. It has had a profound influence on education policy in many countries and now captures headlines around the world when the latest data are released. Clear proof that measurements matter and can drive change.


PISA surveys 15 year olds in more than 70 countries to assess their performance in mathematics, science and reading. By producing comparable outcome measures of student performance in each area it has allowed countries to compare their education systems with those of their peers. And this has been a powerful motivator for reform.


But how do you judge if an education system is performing well? To answer that you must know what you are trying to achieve with an education system in the first place. And the more I think about this, the more I realise it is not such an easy question to answer.


Unless education systems are just glorified day care to help working parents, schools must surely be trying to ensure that the kids that come out of the other end are going to have better lives (or greater well-being) than if they hadn’t gone into the system in the first place. So a system is performing well if it somehow optimises the amount of well-being it can create for the resources (money and time) it uses. Of course, having a job and a pay packet is a key part of well-being for most of us, but it is not all that matters.


So far, so good. But how do you define ‘better lives’ or ‘greater well-being’ and how do you know what education contributes? This is where it becomes more complicated. There are some economists who argue that educational attainment (particularly at higher levels) is important primarily as a signalling tool to help employers hire smart people. In other words they argue, it doesn’t really matter what you learned in your degree but the fact you passed with a first class distinction means you are going to be a better choice at interview than the other guy who scraped a pass. If this is true, a degree seems quite an expensive IQ test.


Other economists try to quantify the value of education through looking at the higher income it can generate over a lifetime. The so called ‘lifetime labour income approach’ treats education as an investment, the return on which is higher income later in life. This approach has many merits, but ultimately it is quite depressing for anyone who sees education as valuable for reasons other than as a path to a bigger pay cheque.


Meanwhile, the OECD’s PISA aims to assess how well students have acquired “some of the knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society”. This is a less mercenary approach and seems much more closely allied to well-being.


However, I still prefer the idea of viewing education as a means to greater well-being. Looking at education through a well-being lens might one day significantly change the way we think about our schools and what they teach and how it is taught. But, while this is fine in theory, it is not so easy to operationalise for two reasons. First, we don’t have a very good understanding of how education contributes to well-being because (and this is the second reason) … because in part we don’t have much of an understanding of what well-being is.


We know already that education contributes to many aspects of well-being but we don’t know quite why. Another fascinating piece of OECD research – the Social Outcomes of Learning – investigated just this. It looked at whether and how education contributes to other social ‘goods’. And the answers were interesting though really only scraped the surface. Educated people are healthier and not just because they are richer, but also because they are better able to assess risks and live healthier lifestyles. And there are intergenerational effects too. Educated parents can look after their kids better.


Education also goes hand in hand with increased civic and social engagement. Here the relationship appeared to be not just about what is learned, but also (partly) to do with the amount of time students spend in education.


Imagine if we had a clear understanding of the way in which education contributed to all the key aspects of well-being. And imagine if we decided to organise our education systems so as to maximise people’s lifetime well-being. Now imagine just how different the education systems of the future might be, and the extent to which resources might be reallocated (with schools taking a slice of the health and social cohesion budgets too).


Of course similar arguments could apply to other areas of policy when seen through a well-being lens. These are big questions, and they are unlikely to be answered any time soon. But they are fascinating and important. And they are proof, to my mind at least, that thinking about government through a well-being lens will, sooner or later, revolutionise public policy making. And then, and only then, might we truly have joined-up government.



Jon Hall