In Silicon Valley, companies discuss and worry about their “technical debt.” That’s the friction caused by the accumulation of bad design choices, expedient compromises, avoided decisions, and postponed work. Enough technical debt makes your product less attractive and your company less capable. In providing social goods, we incur an analogous “social debt” for many...
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When I say in this blog that we are social creatures, I’m being quite literal. Our brains are physically wired to be social. Each one of us has an interpersonal neurobiology that responds to the world around us....
The effectiveness of social goods often comes down to distribution. Can you put social goods in the hand of the people who need and want them? This is a huge challenge in the informal settlements in the world’s urban areas. A team of university researchers, government agencies, and software companies are showing how AI...
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As shown in my previous post on fairness featuring video about Capuchin monkeys who were paid unequally, fairness is innate. But what is the evolutionary benefit of fairness? Brian Hayden, professor emeritus of archaeology at Simon Frazer University in British Columbia, Canada, has an interesting theory. It revolves around scarcity and the distribution of...
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I visited Estonia in the mid-1990s. Back then, I said it would be fascinating to return in 20 years and see what changed....
We have elections all over the place: within companies, nonprofits, homeowner’s associations, kid’s sports league. Civic elections are a social good. As with all social goods, marketing principles apply to elections....
Urbanization continues, but urban can’t mean completely paved and mechanized. For protection, sustainability, and happiness, we must align our cities with the natural systems where we build. We need to be consciously designing, funding, and distributing nature in our cities. Urban trees, and nature more broadly, need to be treated as critical infrastructure for...
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For social goods like health care, the buyer and the end consumer are often two different parties. In much of health care, an insurance company or a government agency is the buyer, while the individual patient is the end consumer. At least in the United States, for-profit medicine companies exploit this split. They charge...
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How do you deliver help to homeless people with no fixed address and little to no money? ...
When human communities subsisted as hunter-gatherers, we recognized the evolutionary benefit of fairness. As our social nature evolved to living in settled communities, some people started having more than others. We accepted a certain level of inequality–as long as everyone had enough. But that begs the question: what is the fair distribution of social...
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