Innovation ideas in Government for earning exponential return?

What technologies could government invest in to earn an exponential return?

(thank you to Noah Reandeau for his question from back in 2008)

As Noah rightly pointed out, it is hard to quantify a return of government "investment". To just mildly qualify some assumption, while it is true and demonstrably so (thus even quantifiable) that every dollar invested in early childhood education or preventive medicine offers an exponential return, the return is in money saved, and not necessarily _earned_ by governments.

Governments however do not ever save money, they just _may_ collect "less" tax revenue, thus giving tax payers the chance to pay "less" taxes for (presumably) the same or better government services. The last part gets so fuzzy, that it is rarely if ever possible to assign weights to factors having determined the changes in taxation policies or budget priorities alone, so forget about tracing back "savings" as ROIs.

Shifting money spent on prisons and policing and welfare to spending it on quality of life improvement projects becomes the return on investment in early childhood education Noah, the original question author, seemed to be suggesting.

The same with preventive medicine. Healthy people make a happy and productive workforce. People advance in careers, have increased incomes which get taxed more, while also making employers better profits/profit margins which again get taxed more, but which also allow for further investments and thus sustained economic growth, and the government again taxes more...

It's been said for two decades now that Internet (from back in the dial-up era) was one of these areas of exponential return on government investment. Now the hype is all broadband in rural areas. I may agree and disagree with both. I disagree because wires or fiber optic do not change anything, services available over the medium do. So if broadband in rural areas improves the equity of access to education/knowledge or (preventive) health care of rural residents, then the technology would qualify under a positive for your question. Yet, if we stop at deployment of fiber alone and do not match said investment with an even larger one in making new targeted services available to beneficiaries, that investment in broadband alone becomes almost meaningless in terms of your question (exponential government ROI) [2015 update: we thankfully see that happening at mass level, but it is mostly from private initiative of hospitals, HMOs etc.]

The problem, as always and as you know better than I do, is that often government officials are usually naturally reluctant to tackle long term policies or problems, as on those it is always hard to see immediate results while in office or seeking reelection. Federally sponsored R&D in pharmaceuticals has been among those you ask about for years now, yet depending again whom you ask. Many military technologies later declassified and adapted to civilian use are among those too. We both read and write over the grand-grandchild of a former DARPA network turned the Internet, with huge exponential government ROIs, which have even enabled President Clinton to balance the budget during the .com bubble of the late '90s. How more quantifiable than that can we conceive something to be? Before that satellite tracking technology, again civilian disseminated in the meantime (as almost everyone has a GPS in their pocket/car these days--those firms get taxed), and did I say airplanes? For today,bioengineering, human genome research etc. the list is too long... I believe it is much easier to quantify ROIs on the latter cases, past, present, or future (when we find them)... Just my two cents, Adrian"

[note: I wonder if this is a good place where one can introduce personnel hiring practices and the second story with my Bulgarian friend, namely the one whereby his expert proposed strategies for a personnel and administration position dealing with working environment and health and welfare did not get him the position, but the person getting the position may have gotten it due to being an internal hire, even in spite of the other "equitable hiring distribution" policies of the hiring institution.  Would said story qualify as addressing one of the many factors that may lead to high ROI projects/problems not being tackled well/often enough? What is the private/public sector variance on this likelihood, if there is any?]

(C) Adrian S. Petrescu, 2008-2015

The Art of Innovation

A few pages from a great book by a good friend of mine… Enjoy…

What I wish for Christmas...

What I want for Christmas…

 

1.      more wisdom in the world, large and small, surrounding us, so that…

 

1.1.         … national leaders can listen to each other, to expert constructive critics, and to the people they represent in their decision making,

1.2.         … organizational leaders recognize and value human capital and promote true creativity and innovation conducive environments,

1.3.         … scientific icons and knowledge self-proclaimed gurus recognize their own and everyone's ignorance and take honest steps to proactively seek production and/or utilization of new knowledge,

1.4.         … religious leaders stay truthful to their own preaching and act in ways that truly promote mutual understanding and respect among everyone,

1.5.         … political leaders stay truthful to their role of representing those who entrusted them with their vote and ultimately their lives,

1.6.         … business leaders stay honest and dedicated to both customers (or potential future customers) and shareholders alike, and not just to self-interest,

1.7.         … people are more appreciative of each other and manage thus to stay happy and to induce happiness in those around them by simply sharing a smile, a listen, and a good word whenever, wherever, and with whomever

 

2.      less censorship, direct and indirect, anywhere and everywhere, and by anybody and everybody,

3.      less surveillance anywhere and everywhere,

4.      less waste anywhere, everywhere, and by everybody, including much less waste of human capital by sub-optimal resources allocation in human capital markets,

5.      more compassion and mutual respect anywhere, everywhere and by anybody and everybody,

6.      more art and culture and less consumerism,

7.      more empathy and understanding and less ordering and imposing,

8.      more self-realization objectives achieved by everyone everywhere and less pride in "great" purchases supposedly making us look "better,"

9.      more time to simply take pictures of nature and smile, and more fridge magnets of places we've visited,

10.   much more application of Carnot's views in thermodynamics to the entire world, so that we strive as a global society to achieve "close-to-Carnot-ideal-efficiencies" in everything we do, from love and affection, through education, to acting as economic, social, political and cultural actors.

 

Adrian S. Petrescu, December 2014

Epistemologic Question asked of Colleagues Economists, and Three Proposals in European Parliament hosted Committee of the Regions Plenary

European Commission DG ECFIN Annual Research Conference 2010--nice part of Speech by Commissioner Olli Rehn, Brussels, European Commission, November 22, 2010

European Parliament hosted Committee of the Regions Plenary, 2010--modest question, Brussels, October 5, 2010

Is it up to governments to mold public opinion about low carbon technologies?--Brief Interview with Euronews and European Voice

(original here www.commentvisions.com/2010/10/12/other/not-in-my-backyard/

Thank you for watching... Send me an email or post a comment to learn what my daughter (who is now 11 y.o.) said about this;)

Happy June 1 (Ziua Copilului), Mica

On June 1, may you have the most wonderful childhood, Mica. Stay strong and as passionate about the many things you like as you have been so far, and more! With all my love, Daddy

of cups, pints, miles, kilometers... and innovative accountable governance...

In their 1998 “Understanding Policy Fiascoes” book, Mark Bovens and Paul t’Hart analyze a framework of understanding “system failure” in policy making, and test the framework on several (ex-post) high profile cases.

In his decades long work on Pragmatic Eliminative Induction, William N. Dunn offers a complementary systematic methodology meant at identifying “hidden” from the untrained eye strong relationships that not-so-well-researched factors affecting socio-economic phenomena have on these phenomena.

In their best-selling book “Freakonomics” Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner also look systematically at “the hidden side of everything”. This book offers a great popular introduction towards understanding what is called usually Quasiexperimentation (Cook and Campbell 1979)

In his classic work on the Advocacy Coalition Framework, Paul Sabatier

When children are tested for their logical reasoning, they often have to solve problems such as:

“Pint is to glass the same as ___ is to highway.” The answer is of course mile.

For non-US people that would translate of course in:

“Centiliter is to glass the same as ___ is to highway.” The answer should be kilometer instead.

Malcolm Gladwell points out in his Outliers book some interesting facts about socio-cultural and other environmental factors affecting success of individuals or behaviors of communities, and/or both. It goes without saying that the above test is by far discriminatory to anyone for whom the International System of measurements is embedded in their perception and thinking. The reasoning time necessary when working with notions outside your core “vocabulary” would be clearly much larger than for those to whom pint belongs in their core set of notions they easily understand well, from having been subjected to them for long times. Whereas a US grown child jumps straight to the core of the question, for a non-US born child it take a set of intermediary questions they need to ask and answer before ever starting addressing the core logical inference question. We mean such “elementary” questions as “what is a pint?” Except of course for the non-US child these are not that elementary. Furthermore, there may even be a negative psychological effect of the test on the non-US test taker subjected to the US focused test.

Things may get even more interesting when dealing with the “glass, cup, pint, ounce” test. Which one does not belong in the list? It turns out it is glass. Yet, cup in the above list is a very odd member of the category of volume measuring units to which it belongs. In every non-American English speaker’s mind cup can be closer to glass than it would be to pint and ounce. Cup is a measuring unit, but it is also a synonym for mug, and hence perceived as being in the same category as glass (if looking at glass as a glass of water, and not as what is a window made from).

Our question is then:

What is to truly innovative accountable governance what was the early 1970s oil crisis to highway traffic fatalities?

Moreover, what barriers to our understanding and addressing comprehensively the question are there? We mean the barriers hidden from the untrained eye, such as the ones in the above simple tests with pints and cups and glasses and mugs… Can one draw the systemic diagram of all the factors affecting our ability to trace down the core factor(s) affecting the likelihood of developing an innovative accountable governance system? What would it take?