Fixing all the things from the bottom up
Imagine this. Imagine you can increase the capacity of highways by up to 30% in one year with no cost. One year! NO COST!
What is this awesome solution?
Roland Kuper, who led a Friday Seminar in the Computational Social Science department of the Krasnow Institute, led his presentation with the research using complexity modeling that provides the solution.
He points out that policy makers usually think that the solution is to build more roads.
↑ Roads == ↑ Capacity
And while that might be true, it is also more costly. Roads cost more money, and also require the areas in the wake of the construction to be disrupted, sometimes displaced.
So, what’s the solution? Adaptive cruise control. According to the example that Kuper presented if 10% of the cars on the road had adaptive cruise control, the capacity of the highway would increase by up to 30%.
↑ Adaptive cruise control == ↑ Capacity
What is adaptive cruise control? Exactly what it sounds like. Here is a video I found on Youtube of someone demonstrating it in their Audi.
Now, since one of out every 10 cars are replaced from the highway every year, this means that if 100% of those cars have adaptive cruise control this increase could be implemented in one year.
Certainly, a lot would have to come together for this to be implemented, but it is still an interesting means to increasing capacity. I don’t know about you, but my Subaru doesn’t have adaptive cruise control and Audis are a little outside what I care to spend on a car.
The road capacity example is how complexity modeling can be used to make decisions in public policy. Kuper explained that traditional public policy has two frames — a) economics frame or b) market fundamentalist frame.
In the first frame, policy made is based off of economics, the policy might be to increase taxes or tolls on the road to build more roads. In the second frame, the market fundamentalist is in the spirit of “laissez-faire,” which means government should not interfere. I guess that means the road situation will solve itself, maybe less people will drive because the traffic will get bad?
Kuper proposed a third frame — complexity, which looks at how various components of a system interact with each other — leading to the emergence of patterns. Often this is referred to as a “bottom-up” means of looking at a problem. This approach is was used in the proposal to cut road congestion using adaptive cruise control.
To illustrate the application of complexity to policy further, Kuper touched on the obesity epidemic. Often, the approaches to solve this problem are “top-down” fixes. In the case of the obesity epidemic, many make the argument that obesity is caused because everything has sugar and therefore, we should cut our sugar. For example, recently major soda companies agreed to cut sugar in their products.
Kuper argued and presented other research that treats obesity is an epidemic and should be treated as such. Essentially, we are mirroring social behaviors of those around us and “catch” the disease from those around us. So, policy should consider a bottom up resolution, because that is how obesity is spreading.
If you would like to learn more about complexity and applications to public policy, you should pick up Kuper’s book, which is co-authored with David Colander. The book is titled: Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up.
