'Recruit to deny'

This is what happens when we blindly use badly-thought out metrics:

[M]any of our [ie, the US'] greatest universities have lately adopted an even more egregious new practice—“recruit to deny,” a policy in which schools actively encourage students whom they know will be turned down to apply anyway, despite the waste of time and money and effort and the disappointment that such a process must entail. This seems to be done mostly in order to increase each school’s rejection rate, a figure that plays a key role in where they end up in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of American colleges and universities. What we do in the shadows, Kevin Baker, 'Harper's Magazine', 27 June

I write quite a bit about metrics here, but how are the blog's own metrics doing? Not very well, is the answer. The number of readers looking at this blog daily has dwindled into the single figures. Not many more look at my home page, or access any of the essays, papers, book chapters, linked to thereon. That's according to the (free) analytic tools that I use.

Nevertheless, the non-tradeable version of Social Policy Bonds, about which I've expressed ambivalence, is in the policy mainstream and, largely because of that, I'm hopeful that, in time, the much greater possibilities that the tradeable bonds offer will be discussed and implemented. Until that hope is realised, mainly for my own edification and as a discipline, I will continue to post here and to maintain the SocialGoals.com site.

Metrics in mental health

An interesting article from two years ago looks at the use of simple questionnaires, metrics and big data in psychotherapy. It's a field that is in need of objective data:

Risk alerts [derived from clients' feedback] allow therapists to adjust treatment, and can help them compensate for natural overconfidence and clinical blind spots. In one study, 48 therapists, seeing several hundred clients at a single clinic, were asked to predict which of their patients would “get worse.” Only one of the therapists accurately identified a client at risk. What your therapist doesn't know, Tony Rousmaniere, 'The Atlantic', April 2017

Dr Rousmaniere points out that for the therapist merely to ask clients how they think they're doing doesn't work. Clients aren't willing to tell therapists face-to-face that their treatment isn't working, but they are more honest when completing a questionnaire before appointments. Metrics derived from these performance feedback questionnaires 'significantly improve the effectiveness of psychotherapy, reducing dropout rates and shortening the length of treatment.'

In our large and complex societies metrics, with all their potential flaws, are the only really robust way in which we can measure outcomes and progress toward them. I've wondered about the use of metrics in mental health, but this article points to the ways in which carefully crafted and aggregated metrics and their aggregation (big data) can be used not only to measure outcomes objectively, in what one would think would be an inescapably subjective field, but also to help improve those outcomes.

Climate change: do we care?

Do we care about climate change? We know that some do, passionately, and most of us, if asked, will say we do. But the evidence is clear that our collective, honest, answer to the question Do we care about the threat of climate change? is a resounding no, not really. Despite innumerable high-level conferences, apocalyptic rhetoric, doom-laden prognostications and worthy-sounding declarations, what have we actually achieved?

David Wallace-Wells tells it like it is:

The Kyoto Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the twenty years since, despite all of our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, we have produced more emissions than in the twenty years before.

Recent headlines confirm this:

·        Faking it on climate change;

·        UK is failing to meet almost all of its climate action targets;

·        Accept people don’t, and may never, give a toss about climate change.

Why, if climate change is likely to be as catastrophic as the scientific consensus paints it, are we so reluctant to do anything about it?

One answer is that the issue is so politicised that changing your mind on the issue is seen as a sign of weakness.

The other answer, though, is a bit more subtle. Science appears to tell us that it’s our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are causing changes in the climate, and accompanying changes like rising sea levels. Accordingly, these emissions have been the focus of our climate change policy, to minimal effect.

It’s not working, because:

1.   the science is not convincing,

2.   our goal is not really to stop the climate changing, so we have very little buy-in, and

3.   focusing on the alleged root cause might not be the best way of achieving what we actually want to achieve.

Not convincing

When I say the science isn’t convincing, that’s not my personal opinion. I mean that the science is literally unconvincing. It’s not convincing most of us to allocate our scarce resources into solving a problem that could well be catastrophic but, the way it’s formulated, requires big upfront costs for uncertain gains that that will probably be nugatory, slow to materialise, and whose provenance will never be able to be confidently attributed to past sacrifices.

No buy-in

The way it’s formulated. To solve this potentially calamitous problem, requiring spending huge sums now, we need buy-in. Saying that the problem is to do with the composition of the atmosphere might be accurate, but neither the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, nor the average rise in our planet’s temperature have meaning for ordinary people; you know, the vast majority of the human population who have more pressing concerns, but whose backing for the huge task ahead is critical. Limiting the Earth’s rise in temperature to two degrees Celsius, or reducing the level of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million: these are not goals with which ordinary people can identify. They are abstractions. They are means to ends, and we’d do better to decide exactly what ends we want to achieve and aim to achieve them.

Our problem is not the composition of the atmosphere nor the planetary temperature: it’s adverse climatic events, however they are caused, and their impact on human, animal and plant life. That is how the problem should be formulated to generate popular support for policies addressing climate change. There's no good scientific or moral reason for a policy that prioritises the adverse impacts possibly attributable to man over those caused by nature. It doesn’t matter whether the floods, hurricanes or rising sea levels that kill people or make them homeless are caused by man-made contributions to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere or anything else. We should aim to reduce the impacts of adverse climatic events on ourselves and our environment rather than what current - or rather, 1990s - science tells us is its most likely cause.

Tackle the symptoms as well as the cause

We waste a lot of energy trying to identify the root causes of social and environmental problems when it might be more efficient to address the symptoms. Even when we do know the root cause of a problem, getting rid of it isn’t always the best way to go. Take a weather-related example: people with vitamin D deficiency in northern latitudes. The root cause is readily identifiable: lack of exposure to the sun’s rays. But the solution isn’t to shoot laser beams upwards on overcast days to vaporise the cloud layer. In this instance, at least, we do the sensible thing and dispense vitamin D tablets. Often it’s best to tackle symptoms and causes simultaneously, which is how we approach most serious health problems. With climate change we think we know that greenhouse gas emissions are the culprit. It is scientifically plausible, but not certain. It is even less certain that we have correctly identified all the greenhouse gases, and correctly weighted the ones we can directly control according to their long-term impact on the climate. And it's not at all certain that reducing these emissions will stop the climate changing. We’ve staked so much on trying to identify and deal with greenhouse gas emissions that we have lost sight of what should be our priority, which is to look after our environment, rather than try to stop the climate changing. It’s a serious distraction. Our almost obsessional focus on greenhouse gases led the UK to cut the duty on diesel fuel, which emits less CO₂ than petrol but more nitrogen oxides and particulates. This switch contributed to 12 000 premature deaths in the UK attributable to nitrogen dioxide emissions. We seem now to be considering a similarly indirect and demented approach – this time on a global scale – by taking geoengineering seriously.

Outcomes versus root causes

In summary: trying to identify and eradicate the root causes of adverse environmental impacts might not be the best way of preventing them. With climate change, it's (currently) impossible to persuade enough people that cutting back greenhouse gas emissions is going to make an appreciable difference to their quality of life or that of the environment. Focusing on the supposed root causes serves, at best, as an excuse for inaction; at worst, as a distraction from, or cause of, serious environmental problems. And we need to be clear that even if we can show that greenhouse gases are the root cause of adverse climatic events, cutting emissions might not be the best way of solving that problem. Scientists, politicians and bureaucrats talk endlessly about degrees Celsius, parts per million, climate models and scenarios. They should be talking instead about the actual, current impacts of adverse climatic events on human, animal and plant life.

Kicking the (nuclear) can down the road

Sometimes we can achieve a short-term goal only by worsening prospects for the long term. Kicking the can down the road, in other words. It's something we may be doing when it comes to peace:

[I]t’s the same with [Steven] Pinker and war. 2011’s Better Angels of Our Nature argued that violence had been in decline steadily and we are now living in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. It was an absurd book, because it required readers to treat our own era, when thousands of nuclear weapons are stationed around the world ready to be fired, as “peaceful.” This is like saying that if somebody puts a gun to your head, they are being “nonviolent” until they actually fire it. A “Mexican standoff” is “peace” in the Pinker sense. The world's most annoying man, Nathan J Robinson, 'Current Affairs', 29 May

We can't say whether the nuclear weapons deployed over recent decades have increased or decreased the probability of a catastrophic nuclear exchange. But for me the more important question is how do we best ensure nuclear peace now and in the future? At first glance, current trends are encouraging:

The good news is that, as poverty has receded worldwide, the proportion of humankind who die in wars and civil strife has fallen sharply, from nearly four per 100,000 each year in the 1980s to less than one in the past decade. How to think about global warming and war, the 'Economist', 23 May

I wouldn't link poverty with war so unambiguously: there's no proof that poverty leads to war, and we don't really know why war and civil strife have declined, nor anything about whether it will continue to decline, whatever happens to poverty. Again, though, the question is how to ensure that the benign trend continues. It's quite possible that some proportion of the world's nuclear weapons stockpile will be used any time now, and the potential for catastrophic war doesn't seem to have diminished. It's quite possible, as many believe, that piling up nuclear weapons did ensure the peace (for a while). It's also quite possible that these weapons will be used, to catastrophic effect, some time soon. Indeed, the period of 'peace' might in future be seen as nothing more than a period of re-armanent or proliferation: a period during which a future war became more likely and more deadly. We simply don't know.

Conflict reduction makes an ideal application for the Social Policy Bond idea because ending war is one of those complex social goals whose causes (1) cannot be reliably identified, (2) vary considerably according to region, and (3) change with time. But the holders of Conflict Reduction Bonds wouldn't need to go about trying to find and address war's supposed root causes. Their goal would be to keep the peace, by whatever means are most cost-effective. Sometimes, in some places, it might be most efficient to try to identify root causes. Sometimes, in some places, it might be best to reduce the number of weapons in the protagonists' arsenals; in other circumstances it might be better to increase the number of weapons. As with many of our social and environmental ills, we need a mix of diverse, adaptive solutions: exactly the sort of solutions that don't come easily to governments or supra-national bodies like the United Nations. It doesn't help that the employees of these bodies aren't rewarded in ways that encourage long-term success in their peace-keeping mission. We need to be rewarding a sustained period of peace, so that short-term peace is not achieved by kicking the can down the road.

The past few decades have seen a heartening reduction in conflict. But have they merely been the prelude to a catastrophic global conflict? Conflict Reduction Bonds that reward a period of nuclear peace sustained for several decades would put in place a system of incentives that would channel our resources and ingenuity into achieving what must surely be one of our most important goals: the removal of the threat of nuclear catastrophe.