Solving for Pattern

Harvard social and political scientist Theda Skocpol offers a detailed post-mortem on the 2009-10 U.S. national effort to pass climate change legislation in “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight Against Global Warming” (pdf).

From her conclusion on a cap and dividend policy (p.125-127):

Politically speaking, the cap and dividend route has a number of advantages. Instead of building political support by bargaining with industrial interests about how many permits they may get cheaply or for free, the cap and dividend approach makes it possible to speak with average citizens about what they might gain as well as pay during the transitional period of increasing prices for energy from carbon sources.

Cap and dividend is simple to spell out (the Collins-Cantwell bill was 39 pages, compared to over a thousand pages for cap and trade) and it is also relatively transparent. Citizens could understand and trust this policy. Like Social Security, taxes or proceeds from auctions are collected for a separate trust fund – and the revenues are used to pay for broadly valued benefits for each citizen and every family. No opaque, messy, corrupt insider deals.

The dividend payments also deliver a relatively greater economic pay-off to the least-well off individuals and families, precisely the people who, as energy prices rise, would have to spend more of their incomes as home heating, electricity, and gasoline. Popularly rooted organizations like labor unions, churches, and old people’s associations might rally behind such an approach, because it is economically just in its impact. …

All of the examples listed here are instances of what political scientists call “positive feedback loops” from a policy breakthrough. The most powerful kind of reformist policymaking uses an initial law to create material benefits and normative claims that, in turn, reinforce and enlarge the supportive political coalition behind the new measure. A classic example is Social Security, which in addition to furthering the economic wellbeing of older Americans, also enhanced their capacities and willingness to be active citizens – who in turn have lobbied and voted to sustain Social Security over the decades.

Cap and dividend has the clear potential to launch such reinforcing feedback loops as well, attracting voter support and enhancing the leverage of the businesses and reform organizations that have an interest in completing America’s transition to a green economy. Cap and dividend is a deal with the angels, not the devils.

Grist’s Dave Roberts responds:

I certainly wouldn’t oppose a long-term push for cap-and-dividend under the banner of a New Social Security. Pressing the moral case is important. So is pushing the bounds of the possible. But I fear that Skocpol’s vision of cap-and-dividend sparking a shift in national politics is forlorn.

[Update: Forgot to mention, the last time I wrote about advocates for a cap-and-dividend type shareholder trust, it was Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs. Strange bedfellows.]

Tim O’Reilly’s September 2012 Long Now talk on “the birth of the global mind” offers plenty to mull over. Here’s the video.

These notes are all from the q&a with Stewart Brand, following the talk:

The thing I worry most about is that we’re not applying our collective intelligence to hard, interesting problems. We’re applying them to trivialities. … We need to celebrate the people who are using this new superpower for good. …

The main point I’m trying to make is that when we think about this (concept of) artificial intelligence … it’s us. We are becoming a multicellular organism in a new way. …

You want to build systems that are affordances for collective intelligence. …

The financial crisis is a sickness in the global brain. … I look at Goldman Sachs and say, “There’s one of the avatars of the global brain gone wrong.”…

If you look at the way that spam is regulated on the internet: That’s the beginning of an immune system response to a pathogen. … You recognize the signature of something new and hostile, and you fix it. If you compare that to how government regulation works — it’s badly broken. … Ultimately, the financial system needs to be algorithmically regulated, the way that spam is regulated on the internet. …

We don’t necessarily have a democracy any more, we have a plutocracy. …

We have to move away from the notion that politics has anything to do with governance.

Scenarios of a very near future: If Fido and Rover jump the backyard fence, their collars send off an SMS message. When motion is detected around the house, photos are snapped and saved to Dropbox. If the baby awakes, her cry triggers whatever kind of alert you choose.

These promises of superconnectivity are the types of scenarios on offer from personal sensor hardware companies Twine, SmartThings, and Ninja Blocks, all of which recently gained six- or seven-figure funding on Kickstarter.

If This Then That (IFTTT), the “digital duct tape” that offers simple recipes for connecting Craigslist to Evernote to email and 50+ other digital channels, is also moving into the physical world of personal sensors, and in December announced $7 million in funding.

As I’ve followed these developments, I’ve bounced between a couple of different responses.

The optimist in me recalls Sheldon Renan’s concept of netness, with its principle that, “The more things are connected (able to communicate) the better things work.”

On the other hand, there’s Evgeny Morozov: “I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes,” (from this piece, his response to this year’s Edge question).

What I think is trivial about these stories — the scenarios described by Twine, SmartThings, and Ninja Blocks — is that they are all pitched as private goods. They help out with my dogs, my house, my baby; they are amazing technologies that offer private benefits. Maybe that’s just the type of marketing that works on Kickstarter. Or maybe when these devices are more broadly available, creative types will use them to support the larger public good.

Here’s one such story.

Leif Percifield was concerned about combined sewer overflows in New York City and, using Arduino and Pachube (now Cosm) technologies, he patched together a sensor system for sending twitter and SMS alerts whenever overflows occur.

As described on Percifield’s website, DontFlush.Me:

The idea behind this project is to allow NYC residents to help reduce the amount of pollution in the harbor. Some 27 billion gallons of raw sewage is dumped into the harbor every year. This comes from Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) that open when the sewer system is overloaded. The idea is to enable residents to understand when the overflows happen and reduce their wastewater production before and during an overflow event.

From an article by Philip Silva in The Nature of Cities blog:

The reasoning behind DontFlush.Me is elegantly simple: if New Yorkers knew exactly when an overflow was underway, they’d think twice about loading the dishwasher, taking a long shower, or, even, flushing the toilet. Its the old “let it mellow” logic, with a twist. Once the overflow is over, city dwellers will get the “all clear” to flush once again.

According to the EPA, combined sewer systems serve roughly 40 million people in over 750 towns and cities around the U.S. Here’s the EPA map:

Stephen Talbott of the Nature Institute, former senior editor at O’Reilly and author of The Future Does Not Compute, is organizing his NetFuture writings into a project called, “Toward a biology worthy of life”:

After Crick and Watson unraveled the structure of DNA, molecular biologists were destined, so they thought, to understand organisms as physical mechanisms and nothing more. Instead, ever more sophisticated experimental techniques have been revealing organisms whose wisdom and subtlety, whose powers of development and adaptation, whose embodied insight and effective communication, and whose evolutionary ingenuity far outstrip our current capacities for comprehension.

Yes, new molecular “mechanisms”, isolated from the organism as a whole, continue to be proclaimed daily. But when we restore these products of our one-sided methods to their living contexts, allowing them to speak their own meanings, what they actually show us is this: every organism is intent upon telling the eloquent story of its own life. Its living intentions govern and coordinate the lawful physical performance of its body, not the other way around.

No, you have probably not heard about these developments; they don’t make the pages of the New York Times or even Scientific American. Indeed, many biologists themselves lament that their unavoidable focus on the minutia of their own narrow research topics prevents their paying adequate attention to wider fields of discovery. But the reality now being proclaimed from the pages of every technical journal could hardly be more dramatic. Perhaps the central truth is this: we human beings discover our conscious, inner capacities — our capacities to think and mean, to plan and strive — unconsciously and objectively reflected back to us from every metabolic process, every signaling pathway, every gene expression pattern in all the organisms we study.

We are akin to these organisms in ways we have long forgotten. This matters in a world whose future has been placed in our hands. No form of life is alien to us.

Last week, Greg White, director of the Global Studies Center at Smith College, circulated a request:

I’m keen on finding scholarly or solid journalistic treatments on “adaptation.”  It’s an oft-invoked concept, of course…  I wonder if people have suggestions for good articles suitable for syllabi — pieces that would bring home the political implications of adaptation and/or the challenges to building resilience.

Here are the responses that Greg compiled, reprinted with permission:

• Adger, Neil, et al., 2007. “Assessment of Adaptation Practices, Options, Constraints and Capacity,” Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of the Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, Parry et al., eds., Cambridge.
• Adger, Neil, Irene Lorenzoni and Karen O’Brien, eds., 2009. Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance (Cambridge).
• Bierbaum, Rosina, et al., 2012. “A Comprehensive Review of Climate Adaptation in the United States: More than Before, but Less Than Needed,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, October.
• Chasek, Pamela S. 2012. “Rethinking the Law and Policy of Protected Areas in a Warming World: Evolving Approaches of American Conservation Organizations,” Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, 15:1, 41-59.
• Fraser, Evan D.G., 2007. “Travelling in antique lands: using past famines to develop an adaptability/resilience framework to identify food systems vulnerable to climate change,” Climate Change 83, 495-514, 2007.
• Jamieson, Dale. 2005. “Adaptation, Mitigation, and Justice”. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. and Howarth, R.B. (eds.),Perspectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics. Advances in Economics of Environmental Resources, Vol. 5, 217:248.
• Kolk, Ans, and Jonatan Pinske. 2012. “Addressing the Climate Change—Sustainable Development Nexus: The Role of Multistakeholder Partnerships,” Business Society 51:1.
• Lehmann, Evan, 2012. “POLICY: Ideas to reduce future storm damage include carbon tax, cutting disaster aid.” E&E Daily, Published: Wednesday, December 19, 2012.
• Moser, S. C. 2009. Good Morning America! The Explosive Awakening of the US to Adaptation. Charleston, SC: NOAA and Sacramento, CA: California Energy Commission.
• Moser, Susanne and Julia Ekstrom. 2010. A framework to diagnose barriers to climate change adaptation,PNAS, 107 (51): 22026-22031.
• Moser, Susanne and Maxwell Boykoff, 2013. Successful Adaptation to Climate Change: Linking Science and Policy in a Rapidly Changing World, Routledge.
• Pelling, Mark. 2011. Adaptation to climate change: from resilience to transformation. London and New York: Routledge.
• Pelling, Mark. 2011. “Resilience and Transformation,” in Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Chance to Reclaim, Self, Society and Nature, Pelling, Manuel-Navarrete and Redclift, eds., Routledge.
• Rosencranz, Armin, Dilpreet Singh and Jahnavi Pais. 2010. “Climate Change Adaptation, Policies, and Measures in India, Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, 22:3, Spring.
• Smit, Barry and Johanna Wandel. 2006. “Adaptation, Adaptive Capacity and Vulnerability,” Global Environmental Change 16, 282-292.
• Thompson, Allen, and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, eds. 2012. Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, MIT.
• Turner, B.L., et al. 2003. “A Framework for Vulnerability Analysis in Sustainability Science,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100: 14, 8074-8079, July.
• US Gov Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ceq/initiatives/adaptation

Shannon McNeeley suggested these websites:

• http://www.adaptationlearning.net
• http://www.cakex.org/directory/organizations/ecoadapt
• http://www.georgetownclimate.org/adaptation

Susi Moser suggested these articles:

• The Washington Post, December 14, 2012, The coastal conundrum
• Scientific American, November 14, 2012, US ranchers struggle to adapt to climate change
• The Washington Post, August 4, 2012, Built on sinking ground, Norfolk tries to hold back tide amid sea-level rise
• The New York Times, June 14, 2012, Vast defenses now shielding New Orleans
• The New York Times, May 12, 2012, In Rhode Island, Protecting a shoreline and a lifeline
• ClimateWire (E&E), May 4, 2012, Adaptation: highways, bridges and sewers take an expensive hit from wild weather – study
• The Washington Post, March 18, 2012, As climate changes, Louisiana seeks to lift a highway
• Yale environment 360, February 2, 2012, Florida Counties band together to ready for warming’s effects
• The Washington Post, December 17, 2011, Virginia residents oppose preparations for climate-related sea-level rise
• Scientific American, December 2011, After the Deluge (sub. req.)
• AlterNet, September 9, 2011 (online), September 30 (print), We’re locked into unavoidable climate disruption – so how do we begin to adapt?
• USA Today, August 15, 2011, US cities prepare to adapt to climate change
• Grist Magazine, August 1, 2011, Be unprepared: The GOP war against climate adaptation
• The Economist, November 25, 2010, Facing the consequences
• The Washington Post, October 2010, Last house on sinking Chesapeake Bay island collapses
• Boston Globe, June 6, 2010, Defending Boston from the sea

[After yesterday’s Yi-Tan conversation on institutions, Jerry Michalski reminded me of a post I’d written in March 2010, reprinted below.]

Legal scholar and economist D. Bruce Johnsen offers a fascinating perspective on indigenous cultural practices in “Salmon, Science, and Reciprocity on the Northwest Coast,” a recent paper in the Resilience Alliance open-access journal, Ecology and Society.

To summarize: Johnsen develops a theory of knowledge management to explain the success of Northwest Coast tribes in cultivating salmon as a source of food, wealth and prestige. He calls this theory the “salmon husbandry hypothesis.”

[T]he salmon husbandry hypothesis (SHH), holds that the tribes had substantial knowledge of salmon population dynamics, that they actively accumulated and perpetuated this knowledge, and that they used it to engage in purposeful husbandry of their salmon stocks.

This claim of “salmon husbandry” might seem unremarkable. After all, in the terrestrial environment, the idea that Native Americans used fire for wildlife, crop and pest management has gained much attention. In the Ecotrust office where I work, anecdotal discussion of Native salmon management would seem to point without hesitation to Johnsen’s conclusion. Moreover, couldn’t this type of purposeful husbandry describe the intentions or activities of every watershed group along the West Coast?

What Johnsen theorizes is that long-term scientific knowledge gave rise to the Northwest Coast’s particular institutions, including: exclusive rights to fishing locations, the use of fish weirs for trial-and-error fishery experimentation and potlatch ceremonies for social ranking, reciprocity and buffering of environmental shocks.

“Theirs appears to have been an economy in which the initial accumulation of scientific, or Popperian, knowledge led to relatively purposeful and dramatic institutional change designed to reward further entrepreneurship,” Johnsen writes in a 2000 paper, “Property Rights, Salmon Husbandry, and Institutional Change Among Northwest Coast Tribes.”

And from the recent paper:

Influenced by the peculiar biology of Pacific salmon, these institutions effectively functioned to resolve conflict, promote technological development, provide reliable information, provide feedback about the environmental effects of resource-harvesting decisions, and encourage the accumulation and transfer of relevant knowledge.

Johnsen’s writing – like that of economic historian Douglass North – centers on the role of institutions, broadly defined, in structuring social and social-ecological interactions. For Johnsen, institutions are: “behavioral algorithms that economize on the social costs of accumulating, gathering, and acting on valuable information.”

One institution that Johnsen proposes for contemporary salmon husbandry is a return to terminal fisheries, targeting stocks on a river-by-river basis, a system that would offer precise feedback mechanisms for coastal watershed groups.

As a student of knowledge management and theories of change, I greatly appreciate Johnsen’s analysis and would seek to explore its boundaries, to understand his writings – or what I know of them, from the two papers referenced here – within a larger context.

Take the case of a given society in which improvements in institutional design are understood – yet seem to be socio-politically unachievable.

Or the case where competing certainties, arising from differing worldviews, translate into institutional designs that seem to align but marginally, if at all. (see: “Climate, Worldviews and Cultural Theory“)

For now, let’s give Douglass North the last word, from his 1993 Nobel Prize speech (economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel): “Both institutions and belief systems must change for successful reform since it is the mental models of the actors that will shape choices.”

“Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics,” declared management guru Peter Drucker in a 1997 Forbes article.

Here’s some more recent commentary.

“How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education,” a report by Clayton Christensen and colleagues, partnering with the Center for American Progress (pdf):

Disruption hasn’t historically been possible in higher education because there hasn’t been an upwardly scalable technology driver available. Yet online learning changes this. Disruption is usually underway when the leading companies in an industry are in financial crisis, even while entrants at the “low end” of the industry are growing rapidly and profitably. This is currently underway in higher education.

“Who Takes MOOCs?” by Steve Kolowich in Inside Higher Ed:

The broadest and most easily comparable data that both companies were able to share had to do with geography. Across all Coursera courses, 74 percent of registrants reside outside the United States. (The biggest foreign markets have been Brazil, Britain, India and Russia, according to Ng.) At Udacity, “a great majority” of the students registered for its six current courses live abroad, according to Stavens, who could not immediately provide exact figures.

“Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses” by Jeffrey Young in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The contract reveals that even Coursera isn’t yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled ‘Possible Company Monetization Strategies,’ lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses.

“The Future of Higher Education,” a report and from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center:

[We] asked digital stakeholders to weigh two scenarios for 2020. One posited substantial change and the other projected only modest change in higher education. Some 1,021 experts and stakeholders responded.

39% agreed with a scenario that articulated modest change by the end of the decade:

In 2020, higher education will not be much different from the way it is today. While people will be accessing more resources in classrooms through the use of large screens, teleconferencing, and personal wireless smart devices, most universities will mostly require in-person, on-campus attendance of students most of the time at courses featuring a lot of traditional lectures. Most universities’ assessment of learning and their requirements for graduation will be about the same as they are now.

60% agreed with a scenario outlining more change:

By 2020, higher education will be quite different from the way it is today. There will be mass adoption of teleconferencing and distance learning to leverage expert resources. Significant numbers of learning activities will move to individualized, just-in-time learning approaches. There will be a transition to “hybrid” classes that combine online learning components with less-frequent on-campus, in-person class meetings. Most universities’ assessment of learning will take into account more individually-oriented outcomes and capacities that are relevant to subject mastery. Requirements for graduation will be significantly shifted to customized outcomes.

“Researching Online Education,” from Union Square Ventures (USV):

The work led us to a few hypotheses:

1. We’re skeptical a business model that charges for content will work at scale and in the long run.
2. We expect education platforms that offer vertical content and/or specific education experiences will be more successful than horizontal platforms, though we think credentials and careers offer two opportunities for horizontal aggregation
3. Without credentialing or careers, online education seems aspirational and removed from the day-to-day of many people.

The USV research was followed by some sharp discussion:

Blake Jennelle: If you assume #1-3, it sounds like the winners in online education might themselves be schools. …

Fred Wilson: For sure. But schools of a different sort. Codecademy is a school. Duolingo is a school.

Blake Jennelle: Yes exactly. And Khan Academy isn’t a school.

Jeffrey McManus: Schools have instructors. Those are web apps. They’re more akin to books in that respect.

Fred Wilson: Why do schools have to have instructors?

Marco Fisbhen: They don’t have to, but to ignore the power of great teachers is to ignore the impact of great storytelling. The best teachers engage the students in a way that’s hard for technology to emulate. Perhaps when it comes to coding (or STEM in general) technology does the job of “teaching” the subjects in a “hands-on” approach. But do you believe that a “codecademy” delivery is possible for literature? History? I’m honestly asking the question. I’m not 100% sure of the answer.

Fred Wilson: i think teachers are the most important thing in the education system. but i just don’t buy that schools have to have them.

Blake Jennelle: Maybe the essence of a school is a “community of learners.” Always teaching but not always teachers…

Fred Wilson: Yesssssss

Colleges offer more than just lessons. A degree. A network. An experience. The idea of “unbundling education” is that these value propositions might be disaggregated. Here’s a visualization by Michael Staton, whose draft paper on the topic is published by the American Enterprise Institute (pdf):

There has been a lot of recent commentary on the state of U.S. education. I’m going to pull some excerpts, starting with some data points:

• From 2000 to 2008, the percentage of undergraduates enrolled in at least one distance education class expanded from 8 percent to 20 percent.¹
• Nearly thirty percent of higher education students now (2010) take at least one course online. Over three-quarters of academic leaders at public institutions report that online is as good as or better than face-to-face instruction (compared with 55.4% of private nonprofits and 67.0% of for-profits).²
• A systematic search of the research literature from 1996 through July 2008 identified more than a thousand empirical studies of online learning. Analysts screened these studies to find those that (a) contrasted an online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes, (c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information to calculate an effect size. As a result of this screening, 50 independent effects were identified that could be subjected to meta-analysis. The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.³
• The price of college tuition and fees increased 274.7 percent from 1990 to 2009, which was a faster increase than the price of any basket of goods and services outside of “cigarettes and other tobacco products.”⁴
• An estimated $1.29 trillion was spent on U.S. education in 2012, 10 percent in for-profit education, serving childcare, K-12, postsecondary, and corporate training.⁵

1. Radford, A. W. 2011. Learning at a Distance: Undergraduate Enrollment in Distance Education Courses and Degree Programs. U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics.
2. Allen, I. E. and J. Seaman. 2010. Class Differences Online Education in the United States, 2010. The Sloan Consortium Babson Survey Research Group.
3. Means, B. 2010. Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies. U.S. Department of Education Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development Policy and Program Studies Service. (pdf)
4. Christensen, C. et al. 2011. Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education. CAP and Innosight. (pdf)
5. Silber, J. 2012. Equity Research: Education and Training. BMO Capital Markets.

I wonder how many CEOs have considered the move that Link Exchange cofounder and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is making?

Ditch the office park. Forget the corporate campus. Move all the staff downtown. Reinvest in cities, in walkable neighborhoods. Accelerate opportunities for collisions (of ideas), community formation, and co-learning.

Hsieh’s campus vision, as described in the Downtown Project slide above and in his “City as a Startup” talk, was inspired by New York University, in the heart of Manhattan. The project aims to invest $350 million in downtown Las Vegas.

From a December 21st editorial (“Downtown visionary“) in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Every city in America pushing for downtown investment should be so fortunate to have someone as motivated, capable and wealthy as Mr. Hsieh to make things happen. …

The lone shortcoming of Mr. Hsieh’s campaign? By now he should have some high-profile help. He needs other private-sector partners in his work. Who’ll step forward to join him?

From a December 20th article (“Hsieh makes $45 million in property deals downtown”) in the Casino City Times:

With new deals in place for about $45 million in downtown Las Vegas property, the real estate buying phase of Zappos chief Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project is nearly complete.

Subsidiaries of The Downtown Project, Hsieh’s vehicle for reviving downtown Las Vegas, closed deals this week for 14 properties just east of Las Vegas Boulevard.

More in the Verge talk and on the Downtown Project website.