Big data analysis and politics

Big data analysis is popping up in more contexts, and what better place in an election year than in politics. A ‘barcamp’ for campaign finance took place at Stanford May 19-20, 2012 where a hundred erstwhile participants quietly busied themselves in ten teams addressing different ways to apply big data and informatics to analyzing and improving the political process.

At the weekend hackathon, DataFest: Analyzing campaign finance data, participants learned some basic R, scripting, and quantitative data techniques to analyze data from websites like Influence Explorer. One project, for example, attempted to determine if House of Representatives Members who changed their vote at the last minute might have been influenced by campaign donations, or other factors obtained through data-mining techniques such as constituent demographics, ideology, and party voting record.

Key challenge of our era: health and preventive medicine

Delivering health care and keeping populations healthy is a key problem of the current era. Health expenditures currently comprise 17% of U.S. GDP and are growing; simultaneously health in the U.S. is in decline, with a new CDC report estimating that by 2030, 42% of American adults will be obese, compared to 34% today and 11% will be severely obese, compared to 6% today.

The Realization of Preventive Medicine
A key part of addressing health challenges is the realization of preventive medicine. Preventive medicine and health maintenance consist of identifying and managing conditions in the 80% of their life cycle before they become clinical, ideally avoiding clinical onset. Workable models for the execution of preventive medicine need to be developed. By definition, a broader ecosystem than the traditional medical establishment will be participating in all steps of the value chain ranging from health research to clinical delivery. More flexible regulatory models are needed that preserve the core ethical principles of the traditional models, but are geared towards the internet era and an expanded notion of health and health maintenance with a larger ecosystem of service providers and participants. The payments ecosystem needs to adapt in parallel, allowing for a wider range of payment mechanisms including out-of-pocket payments, H.S.A. dollars, patient advocacy group funding, and traditional (and increasingly diminishing) insurance payments.

Philanthropy 2.0 and Voluntourism

Leading philanthropy consultant Katherine Fulton's November 2006 talk at the LongNow was interesting and informative but unfortunately ignored the Accountability 2.0 and Effectiveness 2.0 that should be accompanying Philanthropy 2.0. It becomes increasingly clear that the roadblocks are more about political, structural, procedural, institutional and organizational issues than the receipt of funds. As Amy Chua points out in "World on Fire," there is no incentive for ruling elites to take any action to diminish their power. Philanthropy 2.0 should be about the effective usage of financial and other resources not simply their presence.

Peer-to-peer finance is the Markets 2.0 improvement - a more direct way of allocating philanthropic resources, using services such as third-world entrepreneur lender Kiva, international grassroots project donation site GlobalGiving and livestock donation service Heifer.

Even better than personally-directed philanthropic capital is moving into an active role by being a volunteer tourist, voluntouring for two or more weeks in a country of your choice with programs run by UniversalGiving, Social Venture Partners and other organizations. A nice antidote to regular travel, adventure travel, extreme travel and eco-travel.

World's Ruling Elites Must Power Share

The Long Now and other future prognosticating outfits made the prediction that an end to human suffering would occur in this century. This means an end to starvation, massively preventable disease, poverty and other impediments to basic life fundamentals.

Indeed, this will probably come to pass more quickly than originally expected in this century due to a variety of factors. First and most basically, eradicating third world need is an idea whose time has come. Perhaps somewhat guilt-triggered, it is increasing unacceptable and unpolitically correct for the developing world not to have its basic human needs met. The July 2005 Live8 worldwide concerts exemplifies this reigning attitude.

Second, together with the unacceptability of developing world status quo is the belief that it is possible, even easy, to resolve these issues. Although, as Paul Saffo reminds, we should not mistake a clear view for a short distance, it is increasingly clear that solutions exist and have not been implemented as a matter of choice, partly due to the choices of the ruling elites and geopolitical influences. Amy Chua's "World on Fire" notes that development or indeed any modicum of progress is not in the incentive of ruling elites (in industrialized or developing worlds!) because it erodes their power base.

Third, the simultaneous realization that previous aid programs failed and the implementation of programs with results as a requirement is helping to eradicate poverty and disease. Former World Bank officer William Easterly points out in "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics," that aid recipient countries were worse off in nearly every dimension twenty years after the formation and deployment of the World Bank and IMF. Unstructured and unmeasured financial aid failed. Newer philanthropic, NGO and non-profit efforts such as the Gates Foundation malaria program and Dr. Paul Farmer's Partners in Health tuberculosis and other programs are generating success with a results-oriented focus and willingness to address the cause rather than the symptom.

But.......the really interesting idea is not that humanity will progress (this is excellent but not the most interesting aspect), the really interesting idea is that world power and influence dynamics must necessarily change when there are suddenly hundreds of millions of people "coming online." Hundreds of millions of developing world people will be becoming independent, capable, educated and healthy and competing in and contributing to the global market. For example, Africa's labor force could quadruple rapidly because malaria is no longer an issue. What is really interesting is how the (current) industrialized world will respond to the increasing weight and influence of the (currently) developing world.

Economist Jeremy Siegel's view is that this will be a fairly smooth transition. The retirees in Europe, Japan and the US will welcome, indeed rely on, developing world purchasers of their stocks, bonds and businesses as they liquidate their assets to retire. Multinational brands, as recent trends suggest, will continue to matriculate to developing world ownership.

However, cultural issues and value systems are very difficult to manage, especially with the perceived diversity that currently exists in this world. There can be hope but not likelihood in the possibility of industrialized nations not seeing the inevitable and hastening decline of Western world rule but rather focusing on the continued higher levels of human achievement that will now be possible, massive innovation and transcendence into the next era of human civilization and advancement.