David Cameron and The Next Age of Government

David Cameron, leader of the United Kingdom's Conservative Party, gave a very thought provoking speech at a recent TED Conference on how he thinks the information revolution can benefit government and policy. The TED conferences, standing for Technology, Entertainment, and Design are devoted to just that, but more specifically new innovations with the slogan "Ideas Worth Spreading." Speakers are often scientists, researchers, inventors, but rarely politicians. So I was surprised to see that Cameron gave a talk, but it still certainly fit the TED brand.

Here's the gist of what I got out of it - he talked about how information today spreads incredibly quickly, cheaply, and to almost anywhere in the world and government's are not using this to their advantage. He stated that the information age can give more power to the people, and has lead us to understand people better. Understanding people better should lead us to designing policies and programs that treat people the way they actually are, rather than the way we wish them to be. And more power can be given to people simply by translucency of information which is now much cheaper and easier.

One simple example he used was putting government spending, dollar by dollar, available online. He reminded the crowd that the world has over 30 trillion dollars in debt, and the easiest way to start alleviating it is to reduce government spending. And that's exactly why there are always people going line by line through our budgets, trying to analyze what programs work or don't work, in order to decide what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. But what if all of our spending, down to every individual government contract, was put online? Businesses could search the database for contract jobs they could fulfill, and compete to do it for a lower price. And he promised that should the Conservative Party gain control of Parliament, they will do just that in the UK.

He also showed a screen shot from a Chicago website called Clearmap, which updates publicly the occurance, description, and location of crimes committed in the city. Before the internet this is information that only the police department would know, but now it is public for all citizens. Kind of like the e-mails I get from my USC's Department of Public Safety, this information can show people how to avoid being the victim of a crime. It can show where not to go at what hours during the day in a very obvious visual display. Not to mention the fact that this makes the Police Department to their jobs better because they have easier access to and representation of information that had previously been stored in file cabinets or personal memories.

The most interesting thing to me though, being a psychology major, is how he believes we can use behavioral economics and our understanding of ourselves to improve culture. One easy example we're all familiar with is recycling - people started doing it more, when you started offering them money for it. Yes I know it's simple, but that's why it's such an easy way of using something we know about people (they like money) to do something that collectively makes a difference. An example he used, which I'm not sure I agree with but makes a lot of sense, is a simple way of reducing energy usage. Politicians have tried everything from those PSA's telling you to turn the lights of when you leave, to city-wide voluntary no-power hours. Cameron suggests using the vast amount of information we have and giving it to people to really show how they fit in - what if your monthly electrical bill had a bar graph with your energy usage, your neighbors' average energy usage, and an eco-friendly energy aware household's usage? Psychology experiments for years have continued to confirm that people feel uncomfortable giving/taking more/less than everyone else; essentially, people like equality and collaborative altruism. So if Joe Shmoe sees that he's using four times as much energy as the rest of his block, maybe he actually will start turning lights off when he leaves rooms. Obviously this proposal may bring arguments of privacy, but the point of it is really using what we know about people to design more effective policy.