Societal versus Market benefit
On digital sovereignty — Part II
The role of Government.
Government has many roles and many functions, far too many for us to list here. For this discussion on sovereignty and its interaction with the market, I’d like to focus on one particular conundrum: inclusion and exclusion.
Any Government need a people to govern (i.e. citizens). Those citizens are members of a society and they have needs, for example the need to buy & sell goods and services through a marketplace. You might sell your skills as a full-time employee to a company and use the return to buy luxuries like the occasional margarita (with a salt rim included). However, our needs as citizens don’t just stop there, we have many including the need for opportunity, for fairness.
The marketplace itself is built upon trade which requires property which requires some form of exclusion to be enshrined in property law i.e it’s my property, not your property. Without that exclusion, I couldn’t sell it to you, as you could just take it. That commercial activity is what enables the market which enables the economy that Governments also need to fund their activities.
Fairness and opportunity however are based upon values of inclusion. Hence, one key role of Government is balancing our needs for exclusion and inclusion (see figure 1). Get the balance wrong and we either tumble into a laissez faire free for all or a brittle centrally planned economy — neither of which tend to be stable.
Investment : Who Benefits?
Since we have a handle on situational awareness and its role in sovereignty (from Part I) along with a basic idea of one of the roles of Government, we can now talk about investment because you’re not going to get far with the idea of sovereignty without this.
It’s not enough for someone to wave their arms and declare that “this tech stack is vital for sovereignty” and expect everyone to nod. We need to understand the landscape, identify what matters, and determine where to invest. But here is the kicker — are we investing in order to strengthen society or investing in order to strengthen the market? Are they the same thing?
At this point, some people claim they are and the society is best served through the market. Well, hopefully in figure 1 — we have at least captured the idea that society and the market are not the same. In some economic systems there is no market (e.g. communism), in others the market serves the society (e.g. socialism) whilst in others the society serves the market (e.g. capitalism). This is not a value judgement on what is right or wrong, simply an acknowledgement that they are not the same. So let us explore that idea more.
Mapping Healthcare
In 2022/2023, I brought together a group of doctors & clinicians to map out the concept of healthcare. These clinicians came from the US, South America and across Europe. We started by listing what we thought was important and grouped those lists into themes (see figure 2).
We chose some of those themes and decided to map the spaces out (highlighted in purple in the above). But why multiple? The reason for doing this is fairly simple. Imagine if no-one had mapped Paris before and you send a group out to map it. When the group returns, you ask “what’s important and where should we invest?” — they might tell you “Pierre’s Pizza Parlour” because they’ve mapped it from a perspective of nice places to eat pizza. If you want to understand a landscape then you have to map from multiple perspectives and aggregate them together.
An example map — for healthcare, clinical decision making — is provided in figure 3. This followed the same path outlined in Part I of thinking about the users, the components involved and how evolved those components are.
The group (in this case all clinicians) mapped out clinical decision making until they felt that it was a good enough to discuss the space. Obviously, we had multiple groups mapping healthcare from different perspectives and so we had many maps.
Once we have a map, then we can talk about areas in which we could invest. Once we have categorised those (see figure 4 — the circled areas such as preventative healthcare or compliance) then we can discuss where should we invest.
To test this idea that the market is best for serving needs, we asked the question “Where should we invest for the benefit of society” and highlighted them on the map (in purple). In later versions, we also ask the opposing question “Where should we invest for the benefit of the market”.
We then aggregated the results across all the maps to identify high priority to low priority investment areas and then cross compared with market analysts. Unsurprisingly, the market benefit tallies with what the analysts were saying — they are very good at identifying and marketing market opportunities. In other words, the market is very good at aligning with itself.
But societal needs? They diverged. Drastically (see figure 5).
Beyond Healthcare
We didn’t stop at healthcare though, we did the same for agriculture, construction, manufacturing, telecoms, defence and eleven other industries. In each, we identified 12–25 investment areas. We then ranked them by priority for society and for the market. Since those days, I’ve tightened up the process so that we can now map and determine investment areas in about ten hours of work.
In figure 6 — I’ve taken the first 12 of those industries and placed them in order (from those with the most investment options to the least) with each industry having two columns — the societal investment (first) and the market investment (2nd) for each industry.
Of the thirty areas for high priority investment for the benefit of society, the market agreed on only one (marked with X). That’s 3% overlap. Even more disturbing: 12 of those 30 high priorities were ranked lowest priority by the market (marked with 0).
The market may claim to serve society’s needs, but I’ve seen no proof of it and plenty of counter-evidence. That statement of markets serving society has more than a whiff of a “trickle down effect” to it. The market is very good at identifying and marketing its own opportunities. Society, on the other hand, might need something else entirely.
A note on LLMs.
Out of curiousity, I also took all the major LLMs and asked them to rank the various investment areas for priority. I’ve repeated this exercise and the results have so far been the same. It might be unsurprising to you, but I quickly discovered that they all have a very strong bias towards market needs. I would suspect they are mostly trained on market data — investor reports, tech blogs, product pitches. That’s their epistemic diet.
I would strongly recommend not using LLMs for any social policy work, unless your intension is to drive towards more market needs, more exclusion and hence destabilise your nation in slow motion. If you’re feeling especially Machiavellian, you could encourage your competitors to use them, it is a valid course of economic warfare.
Summary
Part I was about mapping the landscape. Part II is about what you do once you have the map i.e. you invest. But you must decide whose interests you’re serving.
Investment is a very loaded topic. The market will always argue for investment in its own direction, cloaked in the language of sovereignty. But the role of government is to balance the needs of both society and market — not to pick one over the other blindly.
Inclusion. Exclusion. Fairness. Profit. These are not incidental. They are structural forces and if you’re not mapping then you’re not governing, you’re gambling.
You need to think about these things clearly.
….
On digital sovereignty series.
Part I — Sovereignty and Landscape
Part II — Societal versus Market benefit
Part III — Whose interests are you serving?
