Optimization and Its Discontents in Regulatory Design: Bank Regulation as an Example

Economists and economically-trained lawyers tend to speak about regulation from a perspective organized around the basic norm of optimization. By contrast, an important managerial literature espouses a perspective organized around the basic norm of reliability. The perspectives are not logically inconsistent, but the economist’s view sometimes leads in practice to a preoccupation with decisional simplicity and cost minimization at the expense of complex judgment and learning. Drawing on a literature often ignored by economists and lawyers, I elaborate the contrast between the optimization and reliability perspectives. I then show how it illuminates current discussions of the reform of bank regulation

Systemic design and its discontents: Designing for emergence and accountability

“Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal-minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us! (Wiener, 1950)” In this paper we seek to advance the discourse and prospective impact of systemic design through challenges and opportunities centred in perspectives from psychology and ethics. We argue that systemic design is adolescent. It has a growing sense of its power and potential, yet it is prone to clumsiness and yawning lapses. To advance its role in fostering inclusion and flourishing, how might we lead systemic design to greater maturity, responsibility, self-awareness, in a word, to accountability? We assess that systemic design is on track to fulfill its potential as a holistic practice and discourse, akin to an advanced form of service design. Yet for this to happen the community must undertake more careful processes of development. Systemic design needs to balance its ambition and confidence with humility and ethical commitment. Toward this end we propose that systemic design covet skills, insights and awareness from its ‘aunts and uncles’. We indicate that greater use of psychology is needed to inform descriptive work, and more ethics is needed to uphold normative purposes. We advocate developing systemic design theory and practice through the further introduction of concepts from social and group psychology, as well as ethical governance. This groundwork is timely and needs-based, as it sheds light on potentially manipulative techniques at the intersection of choice, persuasion, influence, politics, and other nonlinear, societal forces. Our proactive goal is to better equip systemic design to address complex problems at the level of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including equity, diversity and inclusion. We examine developments at the intersection of democracy, social media and automation that are highly unsettling, including the use of Facebook users’ data by Cambridge Analytica in the context of the Brexit campaign and the 2016 US election. In this light we articulate an urgent and remedial call for the systemic design community to develop and uphold a code of professional ethics and conduct, not unlike those adopted by engineers, doctors, management consultants and planners. Pathways We ask, has psychology successfully lent its wisdom to other disciplines? Indeed, behavioural economics is one pathway that has found significant value and traction. This project, which synthesizes demonstrably irrational human motivations and biases into the brittle, positivist models of classical economics, has begat a more resilient and mature hybrid. We take encouragement from experiment and exploration in arenas that hold strong interest for systemic design: policy, governance, community development, economic cooperation, innovation. To better understand inherent systemic design’s risks, and establish historical and critical context, we ground this study with reference to early twentieth century work, including Norbert Wiener, considered “father of cybernetics,” and Freud’s American nephew, Edward L. Bernays, portrayed as “father of public relations.” More than any single figure Bernays understood and anticipated spaces and practices of persuasion including marketing, public relations, and consumer psychology. In the early twentieth century Bernays pioneered forms of ‘advertising without advertising’, that is to say product placement. His works provide considerable architecture for modern mass culture. From their titles alone we may glimpse both the power and pitfalls of industrial, design-fueled techniques of persuasion: Propaganda, 1928; Public relations, 1952; The Engineering of Consent, 1955. Our brief critical review reveals that Bernays ideas are unsettling in their relevance to contemporary concerns and its frank assertion that democracy requires guidance and constraint by a shadowy elite. Bernays’s work has never been well known to the public. This is all the more surprising considering his long and influential shadow. We argue that his work is critical to understanding the use and misuse of persuasion for social purposes. Bernays describes ‘engineering consent’ as follows: “Use of an engineering approach—that is, action based only on thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs. (Bernays, 1955)” Purposes We lay out tactical scaffolding for the psychological maturation of systemic design through a discussion of projects led by the authors. Here the values, design principles and choices demonstrate alternatives to the twentieth-century manipulation model and to other inherited, status quo approaches. Skelton outlines the open software platform Betaville, a massively participatory, editable, urban mirror world project elaborated by an international network of partners and collaborators. Van Alstyne presents Strategic Innovation Lab, a large, decade-old Toronto-based social lab dedicated to envisioning possible and preferable futures through participatory foresight. Our strategic goal is to better prepare the systemic design community for two purposes. We want to address complex problems at the level of UN SDGs, including reduction of poverty, hunger, inequality, consumption, and GHG emissions, while boosting wellbeing, sanitation, social justice, innovation, and strong institutions. More troublingly we want to stem and mitigate consequences arising from broad design and deployment of automated and augmented systems in which emergent dynamics lead to unsettling social and political effects. This work extends and deepens the theoretical framework “Designing for Emergence” (Van Alstyne & Logan, 2007), presented in RSD5 Toronto (Van Alstyne & Logan, 2016). Understanding innovation and knowing how we might give rise to desirable, emergent processes within systems requires us to understand emergence — bottom-up forces of morphogenesis. As one exchange at RSD6 pointed out: We don’t design systems, we design pathways through systems. In summary, the purpose and process we are advocating for the systemic design community is to advance our maturity and thereby our positive impact for the many, not the few. In other words, we want to learn to act more responsively and responsibly, to do both risk-taking and risk-management. Is this enterprise deeply intertwined with psychology and ethics? Clearly. Does this describe the primary opportunity and challenge facing Systemic Design as a community? We think it does

Proceedings of the Conference on Globalization and Its Discontents

Poverty is increasing around the world while the world appears to globalize. Even the wealthiest nation has the largest gap between rich and poor compared to other developed nations. In many cases, international politics and various interests have led to a diversion of available resources from domestic needs to western markets. The fight against poverty is interest in as a social goal and many governments have some dedicated institutions or departments. In general, the government can directly help those in need. However, another method in helping to fight poverty is to use microfinance system. Microfinance tries to fight global poverty and bring opportunities to the world's poorest people. Of course, microfinance approach does not offer sufficient solutions reduce to poverty. Otherwise, with tiny loans and financial services, it helps the poor, mostly women, start businesses and escape poverty. Micro-finance programs targeting women have become a major plank of donor poverty alleviation strategies in the 1990s and funding is set to further increase into the next century under governments, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s), some initiatives and donor agencies activities. This study focuses on some solutions for global poverty problem such as mikrofinance approach. In addition, it examines Turkish conditions the aspect of microfinance practices.microfinance, microcredit, poverty of women, globalization

Proceedings of the Conference on Globalization and Its Discontents

This paper aims to put forward an original conceptual framework and a renewed perspective on monetary analysis applied to trans-national corporations based on some of the views of Bernard Schmitt developed over the last forty years. After reviewing the terminological principles of the theory of money emissions, we show that Bernard Schmitt’s theoretical insights have enabled the successful integration of money and output at the conceptual level along the lines of a Keynesian monetary theory of production. We then examine the issue of the definition of the trans-national corporation and its exponential rise in the world economy with regard to the globalisation process. Finally, the inclusion of trans-national corporations in the theory of money emissions allows us to redefine transnational production as an additional conceptual level in monetary macroeconomics, with far-reaching implications as far as the monetisation of trans-national production and the subsequent reform of international payments are concerned.trans-national corporations, Bernard Schmitt, Monetary Theory of Production

Prefigurative Post-Politics as Strategy:The Case of Government-Led Blockchain Projects

Critically engaging with literature on post-politics, blockchain and algorithmic governance, and drawing also on knowledge gained from undertaking a three-year empirical study, the purpose of this article is to better understand the transformative capacity of government-led blockchain projects. Analysis of a diversity of empirical material, which was guided by a digital ethnography approach, is used to support the furthering of the existing debate on the nature of the post-political as a condition and/or strategy. Through these theoretical and empirical explorations, the article concludes that while the post-political represents a contingent political strategy by governmental actors, it could potentially impose an algorithmically enforced post-political ‘condition’ for the citizen. It is argued that the design, features and mechanisms of government-led projects are deliberately and strategically used to delimit a citizens’ political agency. In order to address this scenario, we argue that there is a need not only to analyse and contribute to the algorithmic design of blockchain projects (i.e. the affordances and constraints they set), but also to the metapolitical narrative underpinning them (i.e. the political imaginaries underlying the various government-led projects)

Proceedings of the Conference on Globalization and Its Discontents

This paper examines whether globalization causes the loss of monetary-policy independence in developing economies. By using India as a case study we find that globalization does not necessarily cause the loss of monetary-policy independence. A country with foreign exchange constraints may lose its monetary-policy independence even in the absence of globalization under limited capital flows as long as it attempts to maintain a fixed or a stable exchange rate. This was the case in the 1960s when India controlled capital flows, maintained a fixed exchange rate, and Indian interest rates used to follow US interest rates in a significant way. In contrast, a country can exercise monetary-policy independence even under free capital flows as long as it does not maintain a stable exchange rate. Thus, monetary-policy independence is anchored in the nature of the exchange-rate regime along with the state of foreign-exchange constraint, and not necessarily in globalization per se.globalization, Monetary-Policy Independence , developing economies, India

Multidimensional Poverty and its Discontents

More data on non-income dimensions of poverty are available than at any previous time in history. Alongside this, multidimensional measurement methodologies have advanced considerably in the past fifteen years. These advances together have created new possibilities to measure multidimensional poverty at the local, national and international level. Yet the fact that overall measures can be constructed does not mean that they will necessarily add value. This paper focuses on the question of when, how and why certain multidimensional poverty measures add value, sketches the limits of the contribution, and introduces a set of standing questions. The key value-added of a rigorously implemented multidimensional poverty index is that it conveys additional information not captured in single-dimensional measures (or in a dashboard) on the joint distribution of disadvantage and the composition of poverty. It also provides a consistent account of the overall change in multidimensional poverty across time and space. The paper discusses the joint distribution approach to multidimensional poverty measurement and presents one class of poverty measures within this approach. It then introduces one recently implemented measure within this family: the 104-country Multidimensional Poverty Index 2010 and uses concrete examples to explain its construction further. For example, without weights one can only identify the multidimensionally poor by the union or the intersection approaches; by these approaches the 2010 MPI would have identified an average of 58% or 0% of people across the 104 countries as poor. It also shows how to ‘unfold’ the MPI by sub-group or dimension, and also by intensity – because similar ‘intensities’ of poverty can conceal different distributions of intensity among the poor. Pointing out the added value of multidimensional poverty indexes is not to suggest that single-dimensional measures be abandoned but rather supplemented. Investing further in multidimensional measures has the potential to generate significant advances in understanding and useful policy tools.

What’s all the fuss about Disney? : narcissistic and nostalgic tendencies in popular Disney storyworlds

This paper seeks to study the narcissistic and nostalgic desires cultivated in cinematic audiences by modern Disney story franchises. Through its storyworlds, the Disney conglomerate is a key player in the cultural formation and consciousness of global audiences, young and old. The research demonstrates how narcissism and nostalgia are used as a means for personal development and amelioration of the present condition as well as a means of control over the viewers’ self-understanding and knowledge of past and present realities. The paper explores Baudrillard’s concept of controlled narcissism which illustrates how a subject’s self-development is hampered by media conglomerates that disseminate a fixed formula which becomes their means of exercising control over time, space and identity formation. This paper also considers the use of nostalgia by media and entertainment industries. Using the works of Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon and Svetlana Boym, this study investigates the commodification of nostalgia which promotes a recyclable and romanticized view of the past as well as the prospective use of nostalgia which allows the viewer to critically reflect on past and present times. These theories are applied to two contemporary case studies to understand better how narcissistic and nostalgic tendencies are manifested in the complex and transformative journeys of the flawed protagonists in contemporary popular Disney storyworlds.peer-reviewe

Strategy and its discontents: the place of strategy in national policymaking

This paper presents a collection of views about the definition, role, purpose and health of strategic policymaking. Introduction One of the liveliest debates to have taken place on ASPI’s blog, The Strategist, concerned the place of strategy in Canberra’s policymaking community. It seems that there’s little consensus around what strategy’s core business should be, let alone who should practice it and whether indeed enough strategy is being done by DFAT, Defence or other parts of government. The 11 short pieces printed here by eight authors with quite diverse perspectives span a broad range of views about the definition, role, purpose and health of strategic policymaking. There’s no more important debate in public policy than on the place of strategy in meeting complex national challenges. This paper hopefully will encourage a more structured debate about strategy’s place at the heart of national policymaking

The ruin and the circular narrative

The written component submitted to the University Research Degree Committee in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTERS BY RESEARCH in Fine ArtThis study constitutes the written component of a practice based Masters by Research in Fine Art. The research arises from my practice as an artist working in film and video in which I have come across links between the representation of ruins and aspects of narrative structure that have suggested the possibility that the ruin represents a nodal point in the work. Ruins have tended to be treated thematically by art historians and theorists and I will demonstrate that there are very few attempts to take the subject beyond the role of metaphor or allegory. However, Jacques Derrida has taken the idea of ruins into the idea of origin and it is this insight that lies at the core of this study. This leads to the idea of the ruin as a condensation of the end and beginning thereby giving it an important role in relation to narrative structure. The circular narrative is a form in which the end and beginning are stitched together at the same theoretical point as the ruin. In terms of practice the circular structure is explored in the form of film and video loops in which the circle structures the way the works physical production, its contextual background, its content and the ways in which it can be interpreted. Underlining this is Derrida's idea that the ruin is always already present at the origin of the work. These ideas are also combined with Freud's theory of the Death Instinct which is rooted in the compulsion to repeat. I have extended Peter Brooks' linking of the Death Instinct with linear narrative structure to include the circular narrative and tested this against my studio practice and the work of another artists, a writer and a film maker. In combining this link between the Death Instinct and the circular narrative with the ruin I have used the Freudian Theory of Primal Phantasies. This was also done to resolve the link with fantasy that was identified at the beginning of the project. My argument ends with the consolidation of these strands with Elisabeth Bronfen's use of the navel as a symbolic intervention into the conventional structures of psychoanalysis. In conclusion the identification of this nodal point in the structure of the work is shown to present an example of the ways in which theory and practice in contemporary art can be dynamically combined. In this way the art work is not only the result of the context from which it has emerged but also provides the means of interrogating that context