This newsletter is really a weekly public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?
PS: If you enjoy listening instead of reading, we have this edition available as an audio narration courtesy the good folks at Ad-Auris. If you have any feedback, please send it to us.
A Framework a Week: Internet + Politics
Tools for thinking public policy
— Pranay Kotasthane
Many predictions about the internet transforming politics have fallen flat. So, how about a framework that can help us understand the many facets of this interaction? I came across one such framework from 2013 — Six Models for the Internet + Politics by Archon Fung et al.
The paper first presents a stylised political model:
(Source: Six Models for the Internet + Politics by Archon Fung et al.)
The authors describe this model as follows:
“The model is a simple conveyor belt image of politics. The belt begins with citizens who have interests and views about politics, policies, and politicians. Citizens form into interest groups and social movement organizations—sometimes called pressure groups—that advocate for specific interests and policies. Once born, these groups reciprocally recruit and mobilize citizens to advocate more powerfully. At the same time, citizens form and express their views in the public sphere in which they discuss public concerns with one another in coffee shops, op-ed pages, water coolers, and town squares (and of course increasingly on the Internet). These traditional organizations and the public sphere are located outside of government. In a democratic society, however, they determine the personnel and content of government. Through the mechanisms of elections, lobbying, and communicative pressure (of which the pressure of public opinion is one kind), they exert pressures that determine which politicians hold office. Between elections, traditional organizations, and public opinion also exert pressures on the public agencies that compose government. Government action is at the end of this conveyor belt. Government acts in one of two ways: by passing laws and policies, and by acting directly in the world through agency actions.”
Now by introducing the internet in six different points in this model, the authors develop six pathways in which the internet changes politics.
Pathway 1: The Muscular Public Sphere
(Six Models for the Internet + Politics by Archon Fung et al.)
In this model, the internet strengthens the link between citizens and the public sphere, and between the public sphere and the politicians. Twitter outrage campaigns demanding attention and action from the government are examples of this pathway.
Pathway 2: Here Comes Everybody
(Six Models for the Internet + Politics by Archon Fung et al.)
This pathway is focused on direct action. Here the citizens are able to mobilise public action bypassing pressure groups, politicians, and the state. Internet-mobilised drives to fix street potholes or to clear up garbage spots are examples of this pathway.
Pathway 3: Direct Digital Democracy
(Six Models for the Internet + Politics by Archon Fung et al.)
In this pathway, citizens are able to reach the policymaking elite directly. Expat Indians reaching out to India’s former External Affairs Minister on Twitter for getting their visa/passport issues resolved is an example of this pathway.
Pathway 4: Truth-based Advocacy
(Six Models for the Internet + Politics by Archon Fung et al.)
Quite inaccurately named, in this model, the authors propose that the internet can become a platform “by which organised advocacy groups bring salient, often surprising, facts to light in credible ways that tilt public opinion.” The Panama Papers is an example of this pathway. What gets missed is that this pathway can also be used for malicious purposes by traditional pressure groups to malign individuals and groups, which is the more common use case today.
Pathway 5: Constituent Mobilisation
(Six Models for the Internet + Politics by Archon Fung et al.)
In this pathway, the role of the internet is to:
“thicken the connection between political organizations and their members. Lowering the costs of communications allows political organizations to communicate more information to more members at a fixed cost. Conversely, digitalization lowers search costs and allows individuals to find the organizations that advance their interests and perspectives. Finally, digitalization dramatically lowers the transaction costs of some kinds of political action such as donating money to organizations and signing letters and petitions.”
This is the pathway that has been used by political parties (some have been more successful than others) to form strong bonds with their constituents, effectively turning even a marginal voter into an unapologetic partisan supporter.
Pathway 6: Social Monitoring
(Six Models for the Internet + Politics by Archon Fung et al.)
In this pathway:
“public agencies (and/or civic organizations) deploy digital tools to enlist the eyes and ears of citizens to better spot public problems and so bring those problems to the attention of the government and the broader public.”
An example of this pathway is traffic police apps and websites that allow citizens to report traffic violations.
So this is a non-exhaustive set of interactions between the internet and politics.
I have refrained from making value judgments in this post. An underlying assumption in these six models is that social media improves governance and strengthens democracies. Seven years since this paper was published, we know that this assumption doesn’t always hold true.
Nevertheless, this typology is a useful starting point for people trying to decipher the connections between the internet and politics. One can even use this framework to imagine newer pathways for explaining how social media has vitiated our polity.
India Policy Watch: Agrarian to Industrial Society: Barrington Moore On India’s Trajectory
Insights on burning policy issues in India
— RSJ
Let’s for a moment assume the optimistic case of farm reforms comes true. The market mechanism works, farmers are freed up from the monopoly of the state and agriculture booms. Instead of accounting for 16 per cent of our GDP while supporting about 60 per cent of our population as it does today, in 2050, it will account for 6-7 per cent of our GDP and support about 20 per cent of our population. That would make us a solid middle-income country in 2050.
Moore’s Study Of Comparative Histories
The question I had was how would this transition from agriculture dominant society to a post-agriculture society happen in the next 30 years? What will be our path and what will it mean for our society?
While looking for answers to this question, I stumbled upon a classic: Barrington Moore’s 1966 book ‘Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World)’. While I didn’t find a clear answer to the question that led me to it, the book itself is a rigorous academic work that details the trajectories six countries took to transition from agrarian societies into modern industrial ones.
As Moore writes in the preface of the book:
“This book endeavours to explain the varied political roles played by the landed upper classes and the peasantry in the transformation from agrarian societies (defined simply as states where a large majority of the population lives off the land) to modern industrial ones. Somewhat more specifically, it is an attempt to discover the range of historical conditions under which either or both of these rural groups have become important forces behind the emergence of Western parliamentary versions of democracy. and dictatorships. of the right and the left, that is, fascist and communist regimes.”
Part 1 of the book titled ‘Revolutionary Origin of Capitalist Democracy’ compares the histories England, France and America from the late 17th century till their emergence as capitalist democracies in the early 20th century. In Part 2, titled ‘Three Routes to the Modern World in Asia’, Moore traces the rise of communism in China, fascism in Japan and the peaceful adoption of democracy in India as they attempted to make this transition. Part 3 titled ‘Theoretical Implications and Projections’ detail Moore’s conclusions on the three trajectories to make the transition from agrarian to industrial society.
It is a fascinating book that uses a neo-marxist lens to understand the society through social classes and the coalitions among them. The chapter on India is interesting with Moore wondering why Indian peasants didn’t revolt like those of China while providing a strong thesis in answer to the question. Moore believes Gandhi’s ideas of swadeshi, trusteeship and his suspicion of both the state and the markets created a society where abject misery of the peasants co-existed with their co-option into the state. It has this line from Gandhi that came as a surprise to me:
“Pressed further with the question why did he (Gandhi) not therefore advocate state ownership in the place of private property, he answered that, although it was better than private ownership, it was objectionable on the grounds of violence. "It is my firm conviction," he added, "that if the state suppressed capitalism by violence it will be caught in the evils of violence itself and fail to develop nonviolence at anytime."
There’s a very insightful passage about the continuing stagnation and halting progress of agriculture 20 years after independence:
“The proximate cause seems quite clearly to be the relative failure of a market economy to penetrate very far into the countryside and put the peasants into a new situation to which they seem quite capable of responding with a sharp rise in output. The structure of village society is only a secondary obstacle one that changes in response to external circumstances.
…Behind the weak push of the market lies the failure to channel into industrial construction the resources that agriculture does generate. One further step, taken with a glance at other countries, shows that the course of historical development in India was such that no class grew up with any very strong interest in rechanneling the agricultural surplus in such a way as to get the process of industrial growth started.”
Anyway, my view is India confounds Moore too. In his analysis, India stands as an outlier that follows none of the three trajectories he derives for transition to a modern industrial state – the capitalist-democratic route (England, France and US), the capitalist-reactionary route (Germany and Japan) and the communist route (China and Russia). There is a good description of these three routes here.
India’s Route: Moore’s Hypothesis
Moore ends the chapter on India wondering what route it would take for its transition from an agrarian state to an industrial one. The three routes he had devised didn’t seem to fit India, so, Moore suggests an alternative that has a strong element of coercion.
I was amazed by Moore’s understanding of the history of Indian farming under colonial rule, his foresight about how it was to pan out and the analytical rigour he uses to conclude about the only option available to India. I have reproduced the last few passages from that chapter. Remember he published this in 1966. Even the Green Revolution hadn’t taken off. He writes:
“If the prevailing policy in its essential outlines continues, as far as can be foreseen it would result in a very slow rate of improvement, mainly through the action of the upper stratum of the peasantry continuing to go over to peasant forms of commercial farming. The danger has already been pointed out: the steady swelling of an urban and rural proletariat on an ever larger scale. This policy could in time perhaps generate its own antithesis, though the difficulties of a radical takeover in India are enormous.
Much more desirable from a democratic standpoint would be for the government to harness and use these same tendencies for its own purposes. That would mean discarding the Gandhian doctrines, allowing the upper strata in the countryside free rein, but taxing their profits and organizing the market and credit mechanism in such a way as to drive out the moneylender. If the government in this way succeeded in tapping the present surplus generated in agriculture and encouraging the growth of a much bigger one, it could do a great deal more about industry on its own resources. As industry grew, it would sop up much of the surplus labour released in the countryside and spread the market ever more rapidly in a continually accelerating process. The efforts to bring technology and modern resources to the peasant's doorstep would then bear fruit.
The third possibility would be to go over to much wider use of compulsion, more or less approaching the communist model. Even if it could be tried in India, it seems highly unlikely that it would work. Under Indian conditions for a long time to come, no political leadership - no matter how intelligent, dedicated, and ruthless could, it seems to me, put through a revolutionary agrarian policy. The country is too diverse and too amorphous still, though that will gradually change. The administrative and political problem of forcing through a collectivization program against the barriers of caste and tradition in fourteen languages seems too formidable to require further discussion.
Only one line of policy then seems to offer real hope, which, to repeat, implies no prediction that it will be the one adopted. In any case, a strong element of coercion remains necessary if a change is to be made.
…Either masked coercion on a massive scale, as in the capitalist model including even Japan, or more direct coercion approaching the socialist model will remain necessary. The tragic fact of the matter is that the poor bear the heaviest costs of modernization under both socialist and capitalist auspices. The only justification for imposing the costs is that they would become steadily worse off without it. As the situation stands, the dilemma is indeed a cruel one. It is possible to have the greatest sympathy for those responsible for facing it. To deny that it exists is, on the other hand, the acme of both intellectual and political irresponsibility.”
Moore in 1966 had concluded that the only option that might work for India is the ‘masked coercion on a massive scale as in the capitalist model’ or the direct coercion of the socialist model. One way to look at the farm bills passed last week is to ask – is this the state biting the bullet and choosing masked coercion that Moore wrote about?
I don’t know about this. If anyone has a view on the trajectory this transition will take for India, let us know. Meanwhile, I will recommend Moore’s remarkable book. It is a great work of comparative history and I enjoyed reading it.
Matsyanyaaya: Prediction Markets as a Tool for Intelligence Analysis
Big fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action
— Pranay Kotasthane
(This post first appeared on the Takshashila Blog in Feb 2019)
The raison d’être for intelligence analysis is being able to predict near-future events with reasonable accuracy. Based on the little that I have read, there is no mechanism that seeks to improve Indian intelligence analysts’ accuracy over time. This leads to what Philip Tetlock calls ‘outcome-irrelevant learning’. This is a situation wherein no matter what happens in reality, people are in an excellent position to explain that what happened was consistent with their own view.
Outcome-irrelevant learning is quite easy to find in mainstream foreign policy analysis. Many analysts would, for example, argue that talks between India and Pakistan at the highest levels are a necessary policy instrument for managing Pakistan. When presented with the evidence to the contrary, they will still come up with a reason that deflects blame from their policy proposal.
The costs of outcome-irrelevant learning become very high if intelligence analysis also falls into this same trap. It’s all the more necessary in that community to make people remember their previous states of ignorance and make them update their Bayesian priors when things don’t go according to their expectations.
This is where a prediction market comes in. In such a market, a group of people speculate on future events. Each individual assigns a probability to a near-future event and these choices get registered. Once the event actually takes place, you get a chance to reflect on why you were wrong (or right). By looking at the track records of analysts over time for several questions, one can wean out the worse analysts from the better ones.
The US intelligence community recognised the value of these markets more than ten years ago. This CIA paper from 2006 concludes:
The record of prediction markets is impressive. For the US Intelligence Community, prediction markets offer a method by which to improve analytical outcomes and to address some of the deficiencies in analytical processes and organization. In the realm of intelligence analysis, prediction markets can contribute to more accurate estimates of long-term trends and threats and better cost-benefit assessments of ongoing or proposed policies.
It’s time that we introduce such prediction markets to the Indian intelligence community as well. To improve prediction skills, the training programme for new recruits can include elements from Tetlock and Gardner’s classic Superforecasting.
HomeWork
Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters
[Paper] An excellent overview of the Geopolitics of Semiconductors by Paul Triolo and Kevin Allison.
[Post] “Economists assume rational frameworks, not rational people.” — Economic Forces debunking a long-standing myth used to denigrate economics.
[Article] How democracies can claim back power in the digital world. Marietje Schaake argues for a global alliance for technology standards.
[Article] Why do we read Barrington Moore? - on the relevance of Moore’s classic in today’s times.
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