MH17 and big data: preventing the tragedy?

This might be a good time to take a break from our usual Internet of Things and Predictive Analytics technological musings and take a quick look at current events. Can big data be applied to the tragic  recent shoot-down of MH17? Could a country-scale analytics dashboard (or lessons derived from analytics) have prevented this tragedy? We think so.

In an earlier blog article (before the tragedy), we discussed possible frameworks for  country-wide analytics dashboards. For any such dashboards to be successful, it needs to be as apolitical as possible. For this to work, these models need first to be accepted by stakeholders (e.g., politicians, corporations, voters, citizens, tax-payers, oligarchs, dictators). There needs to be a general consensus that the models’ predictions are based on sound social science.  Even if the models are not perfectly accurately, there should be an understanding that they are at least directionally correction in terms of connecting input parameters with future outputs. In particular, there must not be a sense that various factions are playing politics with the model. That is, the models’ predictions must be seen as good-faith attempts to predict the future rather than an attempt by some special interest to influence events by creating a bad, intentionally-manipulated model. This may be easier said than done. However, it should first be possible to convince men and women of good will that a good-faith analytics framework can be created, and let this guide events at least among these enlightened individuals.

In our earlier post, we argued that new social science metrics as well as predictive financial markets can serve as an analytics dashboard for an entire country (or even the world). Since some large corporations have operational logistics on par with small countries, some aspects of these ideas are also potentially relevant to corporate analytics dashboards.

A key point from our article back then is that certain metrics, such as perceived corruption, perceived freedom of the press, and the security environment. As we’ll see more in a bit, there is interplay and trade-offs between these various factors. For example, there is sound evidence that investment in early education (or better quality early education) improves the security environment with a decade or two lag, thus eventually reducing the need for future security spending in a very significant way. Another area of perceived tension is between freedom of the press and the security environment, which we’ll explore in a little more detail shortly. The goal of the analytics framework is to accurately model these trade-offs, so that investments in primary education can be appropriately balanced against military spending or improved freedom of the press.

Although we take freedom of the press for granted in the U.S., we can tease out from some recent media articles that, even in the United States there is some perceived tension between “freedom of the press” and the “security environment.” This is touched on briefly at the end of this VOA piece and more explicitly in articles on the costs of perceived surveillance like this.

Recall that social scientists cannot measure press freedoms directly. They can only survey journalists and experts in different countries and ask them to score how free they think the media is in their country (or score for other things, such as awareness of incidents of harassment of journalists.) So the established link is not between freedom of the press and economic growth, but rather perceived freedom of the press and economic growth. Anytime you have large numbers of articles coming out questioning freedom of the press in the United States, you can be assured there is a negative impact on economic growth (and one that can be estimated in dollar terms by social scientists). We’ve speculated in our earlier article on why freedom of the press (or at least perceived freedom of the press) is observed to directly contribute to economic growth.

(incidentally, in the Internet area, these countries can intimidate foreign media through Cyberwarfare. These is anecdotal and not-so-anecdotal evidence that this is happening. Entrepreneurs, in particular, need to always be able to challenge the status-quo in order to bring new products and services to market. That  includes government, simply because government is always a player in the marketplace. Our own company, for example, has suggested more widespread adoption of PM2.5 environmental sensors to create more intelligent living spaces, improve quality of life and save lives. PM2.5 causes 2.1 million deaths annual and has been implicated in allergies, asthma, household dirt and even autism, not to say at least billions in economic losses from equipment failure. Some vested interests create a great deal of PM2.5 pollution and apparently aren’t too crazy about the idea of ordinary citizens being able to easily monitor and track it.)

There is, of course, the contrarian point-of-view: that press freedoms (and, in the corporate case, employee access to information and colleagues) need to be curtailed, weakly or strongly, in favor of the security interests of the state, the corporation, or a corporate department. This is the classic argument made by either your national strongman or your typical over-controlling corporate boss. This is the argument made by Russian authorities for new laws in Russia requiring blogs to register in that country. (They need to prevent people from reading Western propaganda to ensure the survival of the state.)

Let’s say you accept that the state security environment is strengthened in the short-term through press censorship or intrusive surveillance. Peer-reviewed economic models show that, longer term, this reduction in press freedom will lead to reduced economic growth. Since wars are fought with silver bullets, this can ultimately reduce the security environment as well. (In the US, of course, we take it as an axiom that press freedom issue usually dominates the security environment, and that a loss of press freedom would actually have a very several impact on economic growth.)

We’re going to have to do a future blog post on corporate culture. The reasons (aside from a clear and present threat of invasion) for controlling press freedoms or preventing employees from talking across departments are the same between country strongmen and dictatorial corporate managers. In some corporations, the corporate culture is dysfunctional, and the way managers achieve career advancement is by sabotaging their rivals (at least according to one academic expert on corporate politics, who will cite in a future blog post). This is not a good or efficient corporate culture, but it is not an uncommon corporate culture, either. In that kind of environment, if you allow your employees to establish relationships with other departments, they might develop political alliances with these departments, which could ultimately unseat your authority. So you try to limit inter-department communication, and try to insist that all corporation information flows through you before reaching your underlings. This boosts your power as a corporate manager, but hurts the corporation. (Good corporations are aware of this phenomenon and try to police against it.) If you are the boss of an entire nation, controlling all information puts you in a similarly strong position. Limiting freedom of the press is very good for the boss (or dictator) but bad for the corporation or country as a whole.

The goal of a good government or corporate dashboard is to tease out these competing effects. The head of state insists on limiting freedom of the press due to a pressing “national emergency”? Fine. But the analytics model should be able to predict, in dollar terms, how this will lead to a long-term loss of economic growth and competitiveness, eventually indirectly harming the security situation. It is then up to the intellectual elite of that country to persuade the leadership that the analytics models are honest ones, and that long-term limits on freedom of the press will harm more than help. (Since the boss may have personal reasons for nevertheless preferring controls on information, these elites may need to be extra-persuasive in some countries.)

This brings us to MH17. If these models had been available and respected a few years ago, could this tragedy have been prevented? We think so.

One of the main actors in this drama, Russia, scores very poorly in accepted indexes of press freedoms and political corruption. At least up until recently, Ukraine has done only slightly better. If our analytics models are honest, we can see how these issues led to the current crises.

Had governance in both Ukraine and Russia been better a few years ago, this current conflict would likely not have occurred. A freer Russia would likely not have tried to impose a less-free government on Ukraine (as it has been accused of doing by the West). Had the Ukraine government been freer in the last few years, we would likely not have seen the turmoil in government that preceded this current crisis.

Russia and the West have accused each other of “informational warfare.” However, there seems to be long standing consensus via the these accepted metrics (established well before the current crisis) that media in Russia is among the least free in the world (while Western media is among the freest). Therefore, if we accept these indices as fair, we can objectively say that Russian media reports are more likely to be “information war” than Western media sources. We could make this claim long before the present crisis, without even reading a single Western or Russian media store, provided we trust the index. Since “information warfare” seems to be facilitating the current crisis, had Russia been persuaded to adopt a freer press several years ago the shootdown of MH17 would have been much less likely.

There is at least one more analysis we can do. So far, we’ve applied the rough outlines of our country-scale dashboard to the West, Ukraine, and Russia. But we could also apply it to the entire world (or, if you prefer, the United Nations).

Internationally, freedom of the press is simply press freedom in each country weighted by the population of each country. You might also want to adjust this weighting by how influential the citizens of that country are in venues such as the global economy or a global governance body such as the UN.

Similarly, most of the political power in world government is exercised through the UN Security Council and its P5 members. The intention of the founders of the UN was that the Security Council would simply reflect geopolitical reality, to ensure that the UN retained the support of the key players on the world’s stage. (At the time, this was due to these countries military might, specifically their large stockpile of nuclear weapons.) More than one P5 member of the Security Council scores poorly on indices of press freedom and political corruption. Since these countries have such a disproportionate impact on the UN Security Council (and, in reality, much of the rest of the United Nations even without veto powers), political corruption extends from these countries into the UN. This weakens world governance, even among the P5.

Our point is that the best social science evidence suggests that these P5 nations would be better off internally and externally if they adopted a freer press and become less corrupt. (Analytics models are one way for intellectual elites in these countries to make their case to leadership.) Improved governance in the P5 countries would then trickle down to all of the countries of the world via the UN.

Of course, the P5 countries are important not because they hold seats on the Security Council, but because of their large standing armies and nuclear stockpiles. In general, the world does not want a single dictator presiding over the doomsday “red button” in these countries. Therefore, making these countries freer and less subject to the self-interested or, worse, irrational whims of a small group of individuals should be a shared goal of humanity. We believe it can prevent tragedies like MH 17, as well as improve the quality of life in these countries and world.

We did lightheartedly promise a series of articles on using big data for territorial expansion. Although there is no shortage of countries interested in these analytics applications, this article series will have to wait.

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