 Hello, good morning or good afternoon. I should say my name is Andres Martinez. I am the editorial director here at Future Tents and a professor of practice at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University Really glad you could all join us and apologies that we're starting a few minutes late Our food delivery was was delayed today So we wanted to give people a chance to grab something beforehand But we do want to get started Briefly Future Tents for those of you who have not been with us before is a partnership between New America slate magazine and Arizona State University we we publish content daily on Slate's website, and we like coming together In person to have events like today's we had a great event last week on who's afraid of online speech We have a movie coming up soon So you can follow us at Future Tents now. We're really delighted today to also be sharing The organization of this event and co-sponsoring it Having a co-sponsored by Tech Congress Which is a project here of OTI the open technology Institute Tech Congress is an organization That has created a congressional innovation fellowship Bringing diverse tech talent ideas and training to Congress To build a practice a practical and pragmatic understanding of Washington within the tech industry and vice versa So the mission of Tech Congress is very much aligned with our broader subject today So we're thrilled to be doing this with with Tech Congress and I also wanted to give a shout out and Credit one of my colleagues at Arizona State University Dave Gustin who directs the school for the future of innovation in society who really is sort of the One of the co-conspirators of of today's event and in bringing it Together and unfortunately had a last-minute issue Arise back in Arizona, which is preventing him from being here with us But I do want it to credit him and his sort of intellectual authorship of of today's subject Quickly on the housekeeping front. Please remember to silence your cell phones. This is being live streamed So when we have q and a's if you could wait for a microphone When a moderator Calls on you and if you could introduce yourself, that's always nice as well So without any further ado given our time constraints, I am really thrilled to Welcome on to the stage To give some opening remarks on what we're calling the crisis of expertise another key co-conspirators Co-conspirator in terms of bringing It's sort of weird to talk about co-conspirators these days in washington. So Maybe I should I should stop using that phrase, but Sheila jazz enough. We're really thrilled that you helped us conceive of this event and are going to Get us started with some opening remarks Sheila is a foresigner professor of science and technology studies at harvard universities. Kennedy school of government She's the founder and director of the program on science technology and society at harvard At the kennedy school of government She was the founder of the department of science and technology studies at cornell university as well And shila is one of the the great minds in our country in terms of This interplay of policy science and technology, which is what Future tense is all about. So we're thrilled to have you shila. Thank you So first of all andres, thank you for that kind introduction and I'd like to offer my own small shout out to dave gustin because this was Not co-conspiracy co-labor Elaboration, I mean so Collaborators all the way down and therefore it's also not An occasion for great minds or monopolies or anything of that sort I think that the title of what our democracies need to know is An invitation to think broadly about the topic that brings us together crisis of expertise Well, I mean there's a level at which to understand the crisis of expertise that would say Damn right expertise ought to be in crisis Because it is a kind of thing that has set itself apart From what ordinary people know and what ordinary people care about and maybe this is one of those You know generational corrections such that expertise is forced to account for itself in a more plausible way And one of the things that our democracies might need to know is A better explanation for why This group of people who call themselves experts deserve Credence respect A special status at all so in a sense I see this occasion and a number of other occasions of this sort that I've been present at as A great self-corrective moment in democracy It's not that we should give up hope and expertise at all But we should think more deeply about what it is that allows Some people to claim that they should be allowed to know for the many In democratic thought we've thought forever and ever about why some people should be allowed to govern for the many And we keep thinking about it all the time We have elections every two years four years whatever and we think about it then but with expertise We haven't done the same kind of thinking so Andres has already pointed out that this is a collaboration in many respects There are different agencies and different interests involved here And so I don't want to occupy too much time right now. I want to say that they're at least Three or four different strands of thought about The notion of expertise and public life that I think you will be hearing about and hearing from So first of all, there is a set of questions about what kinds of knowledge It is important for us to generate collectively and to accept that we should be doing this So is it a public good theory of knowledge that these are Kinds of things that people would not produce left to their own devices Much of the information that we have for instance about toxic pollutants in the country Nobody would have gone about generating it if there had not been some impetus to generate it and yet We all benefit from knowing that kind of thing. So some sort of some set of reflections on The kinds of expertise where we all benefit Even though nobody has a very specific interest in generating that kind of knowledge How is it that we can make sure that that knowledge is there? So I think that is one thread that you'll be hearing about this afternoon Another thread is about the special role of the federal government particularly in the era of big data in being a repository and a source of data collection And why and how we depend on that, why and how it is important to maintain that capability And what we can do to make that capability better understood and respected and accepted by People in the society because without their buy-in we would not be able to maintain that capability It's often said that America got founded in part on the commitment to producing collective knowledge When president Clinton unveiled the map of the human genome He called attention to the fact that in that very room Thomas Jefferson had unveiled the first map of the united states of america So those are examples of public knowledge being created by the federal government with its involvement But also that you need a political Manifestation of the legitimacy of that knowledge in order to secure the kind of democratic Buy-in that you need for that knowledge to be accepted and relied upon Another strand I think that we will hear about is what about uncertainty Ignorance and decision-making and what do we do as democracies when there is a need to move forward But there isn't definitive knowledge to what extent do we rely on experts to what extent do we rely on citizens What is the right relationship between citizens and experts? And what about institutions that we may not think about immediately such as our public museums in mediating Those sets of relationships between citizens and experts. How do we produce public? Institutions that that sit at the interface between common knowledge and expert knowledge And of course I work in a university where I'm daily aware of the fact that one of the products we produce is Citizens so I'm hoping that that strand of discussion How do citizens relate to experts under conditions of Imperfect knowledge or still fluid knowledge that that will be another of the themes that we'll address So I'll leave it right here. We have very distinguished speakers representing these various themes And I'm looking forward to learning a great deal from the afternoon Thank you. Sheila and Sheila. I should mention will be in one of the the subsequent conversations. So We will hear more from Sheila. Now. I just want to welcome up The moderator for our next conversation is david leonhardt. I've known David for a long time I knew him when he was young at the new york times and he was very wise even back then He is the op-ed an op-ed columnist as as i'm sure most of you know and the associate editorial page editor at the new york times And david will introduce the speakers in the next conversation I should say I was teasing david the other day that he's He was he was waiting by his phone hoping he'd be called to moderate some Think tank event because the news these days is so slow. There's nothing going on in dc So i'm glad we could give you an opportunity to do something I responded that actually I was thrilled to have an opportunity to not talk about the news for at least one hour It's a pleasure to be back here I of course am up here with cecilia muñoz Who is the former head of president obama's domestic policy council? And is currently the vice president of policy and technology right here at new america as well as the director of the new america national network. Hello cecilia And sylvia matthews berwell who was who ran both the office of management and budget and the department of health and human services In the obama administration and is currently the president of american university. This being washington a relatively small town I actually met sylvia. I don't know five or six years ago at the bottom of a slide while we were both waiting for our small Children to come hurtling out of So we want to talk we're talking about the crisis of knowledge and expertise And I think we we want to separate we're going to talk for a few minutes Then we're going to open it up to questions from you all And I think we want to separate this into two different parts here And in the first part we're going to talk about the elephant in the room and in the second part We're not And I think the elephant in the room is the sort of crisis of of doubt in this country about expertise and knowledge The fact that people have lost faith in nearly every institution that exists whether it's the media whether it's congress Whether it's the health care system Whether it's organized religion organized labor big business And what we might be able to do to try to deal with that situation because if we can't even agree About what the facts are and what knowledge is and we think one expert is no different from Anyone else it creates a real problem for our democracy So I want to start there which obviously gets to the heart of some of the partisan polarization we have And then we're going to get into some stuff that takes us away from partisan polarization silvia i'll start with you So I think as we think about uh the question of I think it's important to understand how we got here And I think too let's touched upon some of the things and you just did in terms of saying Is it that we're at this place where people don't trust Experts or sources of knowledge is that because of a trust issue? Is it because of a time issue in terms of they don't have time? They they don't know how to access and I think that's one of the questions as we go about this that we need to Think through and I will use an example near and dear to my heart Which is health care and when one starts to have the conversation about the substance and I'll use a very specific example That is not a partisan example Um because it's something everybody agrees on and that's the issue of pre-existing conditions And the coverage of pre-existing conditions And so there was a lack of knowledge That in a period before a piece of legislation those were not covered and that then they were covered But when education went about to help people understand That pre-existing conditions were something that would no longer be covered that the law did that and you used lots of different tools to do that But that's something that took people actually wanted that knowledge They heard that knowledge the question of what resources they heard it from You had to do that very broadly and that gets to the trust issue So I think this question of why is it that people Don't want the knowledge is it because of trust of experts? Is it about time and not being able to access it appropriately? Is it about the sources that they're getting if you gave them the right sources that they had other sources? What they do it and so as we try and resolve the issue for the democracy I think getting to the core of Is it different groups of people that have different feelings about this to get to a solution understand how we got to where we are Almost take the big and make it smaller bring it down to people's level Yes, and understand why is it that they don't uh, why is it that people don't want to hear from Experts is it that they don't want to hear from experts or they don't want to hear it from those experts or Is it a trust issue or is it it's not accessible having been a person in policy? I can tell you You know trying to make Very sometimes like abola we can talk about that in a little bit in terms of the questions of communication around that What you know and what you don't know? That becomes difficult. So is the problem. We're not doing it right. Is the problem Who's doing it? Uh, or that people don't want it Cecilia I would just add to that that I think part of the problem is that we're in an environment We're there and there is hostility to knowledge In particular with respect to policymaking that's sort of a new and unprecedented thing And as you noted if we're unable to agree on sort of what the underlying facts are of a situation It becomes really hard to have a debate about how to resolve a situation. I mean at some level I because this is feels Well pretty new and pretty Extraordinary I don't think we have answers but I do think it's important to be sort of relentless about Putting knowledge into people's hands and and giving people the capacity to develop expertise themselves rather In addition to relying on people who have spent lifetime studying an issue And so some of that is about making sure that Folks have access to data that you that um You know people who act as advocates In addition to sort of amassing knowledge and presenting a case Um democratize the ability for others to present the case and just to give you a quick example I am Sadly old enough to remember the first time that the Census actually counted Latinos with any accuracy for the first time that was the 1980 census And I Worked at a Latino civil rights organization Which was for the first time had numbers to actually That allowed us to demonstrate what we knew because we were living it We suspected there were high poverty rates. We were suspected there was low educational attainment But we didn't know because there wasn't census data um, so by essentially a bunch of You know policy nerds crunching numbers putting it in people's hands We began to formulate a policy agenda on the basis of some evidence that was corroborated by Our own experience and ultimately that becomes the basis for a policy agenda being And none of us had particularly special expertise. This was just something that we cared about There's no reason that we can't Make sure that folks who care about an issue about a topic Have access to data. In fact, they have We have more capacity to do that now than ever before not just by democratizing things like the census but by You know the data dot gov making data available But also making it available in such a way that people can can play with it themselves and reach their own conclusions Given the polarized times that we live in it seems to me that It's worth distinguishing between some of the the skepticism on the right and the skepticism on the left And i'll throw this out there in part with an invitation to disagree with my framing of it But it seems to me that there is more hostility to the idea of experts And science on the right I would argue that the problem the hostility on the right is worse than it is on the left But i think there is also a problem on the left Which is i think on the left there's this increasing problem of when when when someone on the left Here's kind of a symbol that that someone else is not on their team. They tune them out Right, they say that speech is equivalent to violence I know this has been a big issue on some college campuses. You've mostly escaped it. I think so far Um, uh, but the uh, but I worry about both of those two halves. I don't mean to equate them But I think that that's sort of solving some of this hostility to knowledge and debate and democratic functioning Might require acknowledging that we're not necessarily trying to solve the same problem across left center and right I think that's entirely fair Um, I think that's entirely fair and to address the critique of the left I mean i'm experiencing it in my on my twitter feed today Having this week participated in an organization that's trying to that is Unveiled itself is trying to formulate bipartisan bipartisan conversation and approaches to access to health care um The the I get ugly stuff on my twitter feed from the right particularly every time I tweet in spanish by the way Uh, but most of the ugliness coming in is from our friends on the left Who are not happy that i'm allowing myself to associate with folks who disagree with me on other stuff? And I just don't know how you can expect to have a policy conversation that arrives at results If you're not prepared to even engage in a conversation with people who carry a different view now having said that I have also participated in you know pushing back against What passes as expertise when it's when it's coming from for for example anti-immigrant groups who who get money from from White supremacists for example Those are hard tensions, but we have to have some capacity to talk about them I would just Interestingly in the examples that you were giving in terms of the right and the left and this gets back to sort of the First thing of it Do we think the problem is is that people don't want knowledge? Or they don't trust the source and so let's just take an example from the left vaccinations and The anti-vaccine kind of folks which are tend to be more from the left than the right And do we think it's that these people don't want knowledge or it's that they don't trust the source? And this is why in the first response this understanding at the root of this is it about You know Cecilia you said that you know there's an aversion to knowledge Is there an aversion to knowledge? Or is there an aversion to expertise and as you were saying democratizing information I think indicates that perhaps there's not an aversion to Knowledge necessarily, but it gets to some of the opening remarks about the questions of expertise And so as we think about that In terms of both the right and the left is it about where it comes from? And how it is validated and how we get to that space that can help us move forward Let's let's now come away from some of the polarization stuff That's actually a nice segue to it, which is there are a whole bunch of policy areas that are not polarized, right? I mean driverless cars are a really good example, right at least not yet that is not a polarized issue There are lots of people who are skeptical of them. There are lots of people who are excited about them But if you knew how what someone's attitude was to a driverless cars Unlike so many other issues you couldn't guess what their opinion was about 10 other different issues There are many issues like this. We see Mayors and governors and people from both parties often trying to implement better policies Whether it's mitch daniels in indiana bill haslam in tennessee Gina romondo in ron island rom emmanuel in chicago the list goes on and on and on right and in many cases These are not obviously partisan issues How do you think as people who've served at the highest levels of government? How do you think we are failing to make sure that our policy makers have access To absolutely the best and most relevant knowledge that they could So I think the question of knowledge for policymaking has a couple different elements to it when you're trying to to make policy And one is actual factual analysis and aggregate And so that's the kind of data that comes from the census from the bureau of labor statistics from much healthcare data and so There's that piece of it And then I think there is information that is at the macro level and at the micro level when you're policymaking You also have to get that information. This is part of the democratization question And I think part of hearing people's voice In terms of making policy sometimes and how you do that to bring these things together It's factual aggregate factual individual as reported to come together to policy make and when you're talking about how you Get all of that to do it I think one thing that we have to do is we have to stand up and protect the entities that produce this data And those are in the government those are sometimes outside the government But Um undermining their legitimacy is something that I think is not helpful to policy makers in the long run I think we also have to encourage policy makers to do that kind of listening and what was interesting about all of your examples There was a consistent theme There were actually all examples of executives. Yes And I having been in kind of different roles in different places and having worked with all of those governors having spent lots of time with bill haslam and um Other all of the folks that you mentioned What is interesting is their proximity to actually having to execute every day and respond to A group of people Their state their city whichever it is and they actually In certain ways, I think that's a very important thing because they need the facts And they have to move and move quickly every day. They're expected that they are on the line for Delivering and they themselves are on the line. And I think that's also Part of it which is creating accountability Yeah, I would just add to that that as policy makers you have to be willing to um To explore data and actually find out answers that may not correspond with with Your ideology right or where you thought the policy should be going To give you an example the one of the things I spent time on that we spent time on In the obama administration was a policy aimed at um Helping folks who were returning to society from incarceration By this there was a whole initiative and lots of advocacy around banning the box right asking employers not to ask the question about criminal record To avoid discrimination against people who had a criminal record Um, but who had served their time and were ready to reenter the workforce There was some suggestion in the middle of that debate some evidence came forward that it was possible That banning the box led some employers to discriminate against entire categories of people because they didn't they couldn't In their minds, they felt they couldn't be sure whether they had the information about whether there were criminal records or not So they would avoid hiring for example, african american men Now however you feel about that The the data is important. That's an actual it's a question. We actually don't know the answer to yet and it's important not to Forge ahead with a policy As a result of ideology or pressure or whatever it is um In the absence of information about whether or not your theory of the case is actually true and being willing to um To explore whether or not your theory of the case is true is Tremendously important if the policymaking is going to be effective. That's about data ultimately Can you talk for a minute about the college scorecard and uh, because I think there's a really interesting point to make about it Yeah, so this is Lots, I mean there are lots and lots of stories I could tell about this But the so this was a president obama was very eager to have an impact on reducing the costs of education And he reached the conclusion that if people had in is at least As much information about what you were getting out of a college education as you have when you are say buying a refrigerator That that more information could lead to better decision making This is what kind of information you measure is a hugely controversial subject I say this as a proud liberal arts holder of liberal arts degrees That where it's pretty hard to to to quantify their value in economic terms compared to You know, my brother with the engineering degree Um, but the goal was to Um make data available So that people could could Look at it and make decisions that were better informed than The decisions you would make just looking at the brochures of the colleges and universities who were marketing to you The controversial is that assertion is One of the things we learned was that so we were going to produce what the president asked us to produce was a website through the intervention of something called the us digital service, which is the Unit where we essentially recruited lots of hot shots from the silicon valley to help us do things better That crowd taught us that instead of just Producing the data and creating a static website. We should Incorporate user center design and actually ask 17 year olds how they might use this data The result of that was both a website and an api. We just released the data and now there are lots of different Entities that use it to produce their their information that's being aimed at students So as a result this data is now informing lots of different things that we never envisioned or imagined And that was because of innovation from some data scientists, but in addition Whether or not students are using it universities know that the data is being produced And that seems to be having some of some effect as well That's what I find so interesting And this is a good place before we open it up to you all to have civilly or wrap it up for us Because this combines your two great fields Um It seems to me the record of getting a lot of this mass information out there and having consumers or citizens use it Is shall we say mixed right people aren't choosing what hospital to go to based on its performance? Based on the metrics from what we see and yet putting the information out there can still have a huge impact Because when the information goes out about how american is doing you all are looking at it at american And you may care how you look I will never forget the story that a doctor named bob walketer told me when The federal government started publishing statistics on door to balloon times about how quickly basically er's were treating cardiac patients And he said before we got the data We thought we're the university of california at san francisco We of course are going to be great at this and then we got the data and we were decidedly mediocre And our first reaction is the data was wrong But then we dug into it and we realized no we actually were mediocre And while there was no consumer demand that they fix it They were embarrassed and they fixed it and it seems to me that there can sometimes be knock on effects Of data getting out there that isn't as simple as what we've at first imagine it will be Um, so I think you know there are two parts to this and one is when you run and manage complex organizations and big organizations I mean that's what you want I mean there's a reason that people use dashboards and that sort of thing and so You know, I believe that you know in an or any organization I'm in I want that I want to know I want to understand and I want to understand myself relative to others I want to know how i'm doing relative to where I've been As an institution. I want to know where i'm going and so I agree with you that there's value In terms of having the access to information and measurement that's important internally and I do think externally That people do use and it is important and it's important both for decision making of individual consumers It's important for Something that cecilia touched on in terms of that information creates tools it drives the economy You know, I would say most of you probably have the weather app On your phone And when you think about you know the national weather service and the department of commerce Freeing that data and what that led to was the creation, you know, so it there's economic value as well So I think there are many pieces and parts of this that argue for Data becoming available more broadly more widely But it needs to be accurate and funded to have the ability like the census needs to be funded so that we can get the accurate data Let's let's leave time for a couple questions from you all. Please tell us who you are and ask cecilia or silvia a question I just feel for any secretary who's living with that Just in terms of these are big Large and important places and for one to have the ability to do all the kinds of things that we're talking about Doing right, which is making sure you have the right analytics and substantive information I said you also need to listen And understand from you know constituents and people to understand what you're doing and that becomes very hard When you don't have that ability to have a team in place and so I would just say that the outcome of that does make policy making harder Makes policy making harder makes implementation hard and you know implementation Isn't just like a theoretical thing implementation could be Making sure everybody gets a flu shot when you're in the when you're in a flu epidemic for example That's life or death. That's not it's not an academic question My name is joe freeman I know you didn't want to talk about news But in today's news was a report on how the census is going to be Going to define where people live in particular those on military bases who will be defined as living on their base Oh be counted as living on the in the in the area of the base And prisoners who will not be counted that way Now in the case of the former that's obviously an attempt to increase the number of people living in red states since military bases are Heavily found in red states. I'm not sure what it means to not count prisoners But I would appreciate some Comet on the use of census to bias political outcomes. Thank you I worry about this actively every single day as somebody who got my policy training on the basis of that first census Which counted my own population meaningfully It's this isn't Perhaps the nerdiest and wonkiest of policy topics and the but also the one which really affects Everything everybody in this room everybody in the country because resources are Allocated as a result of the census obviously political districts are a portion Or congressional districts are a portion because of the census and it has political implications All kinds of implications with respect to money all kinds of implications with respect to just knowing Who we are what our educational status is our health status is our housing status all of those things Um, there is I have yet to figure out whether or not there's sufficient funds for the census in this budget deal That's being discussed today in on congress, but it's a vital question There is the census typically does three end-to-end tests Before it happens in you know every 10 years Funding has been allocated only for one of those and it may be a truncated one at that All and the census is going to be conducted digitally for the first time ever Which is A big deal and we may or may not be ready for it. We don't really know and that's terrifying so And our I've heard people say You know, what do we really need a census for I can get any information I need just by googling it without recognizing that Like the basis for the stuff that you're googling guess where it comes from So really the ability to make policy on the basis of data Starts with the census and starts with these really critical nerdy wonky policy questions about how we count people who we count what questions we ask And how accurately Um, we conducted and how and I think this is a really vital question. How confident americans feel participating Um, which in this environment I am worried about Thank you. I remember for UNESCO task force and my question is the following Uh, how It's based on some experiments we conducted in scandinavia How would you relate with your experience and central government lever? How can you inform educate everyone everywhere, especially in rural area and small cities We have been overwhelmed with feedback. We got this from remote rural area Small medium-sized cities not to mention capital cities And we learned a lot. So how to make them participate So in terms of results and data and information um, I think one of the things is There is an overload of information And we didn't really talk about that in terms of people and knowledge and information That the question is is how people prioritize the information they receive and also how they receive it And I think as one thinks about what move people move when and how That you have to think about those kinds of considerations. For example Um, Ebola and zika are both probably important examples of the need to move information To populations broadly and very quickly And in a situation like that determining what are the key you have to limit it to the key Elements so we couldn't go into all the details of uh in zika because it's a complicated I'm in Ebola too, but you had to figure out what are the three most important things that are the critical path issues And then figure out for those particular things What were the channels and what happens in the world we live in today is I think you just have to know Communication is going to be complex. It's going to be multi-channel You know, we used community public health centers. We used nursing associations We used all of the trade associations. We used public health We used it at the community level. We used it at the state level. We use social media. We used influentials and so First what is it? How do you get it to the the bite size that you think and then the second? What channels for the issue that it is and for most effective? I mean I spent in terms of talking to people about health care that are 18 to 34 I went to a lot of beauty salons. I spent a lot of time with djs I learned about gaming Um, and that's because that's the means by which one needed to communicate with that population And Cecilia a great partner in this Did a lot of Spanish media in terms of did it in a language that people could relate and hear from And secretary Vilsack did a lot of rural radio lots and lots and lots of rural radio Last question Hi, thank you all. I'm Sonia Sarkar. I'm a public interest technology fellow here at new america And I was really interested when it comes to knowledge and expertise in this tension You were talking about between policy and politics and Cecilia You mentioned the causation theory behind the black box policy And I was wondering if either of you could just speak to some tangible examples of when an unintended Of a potential policy was uncovered and there might have been resistance from people who wanted to be able to claim that policy victory either for political reasons or for the policy reasons and how you were able to overcome that resistance to actually Rather than have paralysis around the decision or around implementation move forward And in some ways ban the box was my was my best example Of one where we really thought You know one policy was the right thing to do and and now there's plenty of room to question Whether it's the right thing to do having the courage to Actually say to folks who were pushing in one direction or another Look, let's follow where the data leads and I guess another example is We did in the Obama administration. We did the first ever HIV and AIDS action plan. It was a five-year action plan and then there was a second one To to make sure that we were thinking over a longer time horizon and part of what was essential to that was actually Insisting that the decisions that we would be making about where to allocate funds would be actually driven by data at that time There was a lot of pressure to invest in particular communities in particular regions of the country for good reasons But ultimately having that plan in place allowed us to say look, here's the data It's public. Everybody can look at it and we're going to make these decisions Which may you know, which in some cases were kind of going against the political currents But we had a basis for doing it the basis was driven by the science and it allows you to withstand Political currents that otherwise would be really hard to navigate Sure, you know everything from let's just go back to when the loan was given to Mexico Uh, and you know, it was a question of Mexico Being able to survive this is in the 1990s And at the point in time, they were supposed to be legislation That was when I was in the Clinton administration. We were working together with Trent lot Newt Gingrich The leaders Because they were controlling the house and senate and they were the leaders and they came in were honest and said We don't have the votes And that was the plan to to do it and so coming up with another approach and a plan And part of the reason they didn't have the votes the day that the administration Announced its decision that we would provide a loan through various sources to The mexicans it was printed in the wall street journal that there was 80 opposition To that as a nation And you know in the end The american government made money On the effort probably many of you won't know that point or fact you'll remember it and probably even remember it negatively But I think that gets to the fundamentals of a different conversation which is about leadership And when you have these decisions that are tough and looking at the ramifications Of not taking the actions that You know substance drives you to take But that's a part of what you do and that's a very big one But those kinds of things are every day when you sit in the seats And you're in the seats of execution because the question about the census is a an execution question really I mean it's a policy question, but when you're at that level it is an execution question Thank you both. I think we need to yield these chairs to other folks Thank you, david. Thank you very much and thank you silvia and cecilia. That was a fantastic conversation David, we'll let you get back to your slow news cycle. Thank you for joining us And just to show how nimble we are here at future tense, there was a Great question about the census. So in our next conversation, we are slotting in the former director of the census bureau That's that's how nimble we are here But to introduce that conversation. I want to call up our next moderator My good friend Ari Ratner Ari is the founder and CEO of inside revolution. He was also a he's an alum here He was a fellow in the class of 2014 and he came to new america after a stint at state department where he was Working very closely on this issue of bridging government and the tech sector. So arie. I will let you take it from here Can everyone hear me? So first of all, thank you for the kind introduction. Well, it's also An honor and a privilege to follow in the seat of david leonhardt who's Personal idol in many respects, which I think is something that can only be said in washington in new york, but I don't have a long introduction prepared. I think my co-panelists Laura like kelly kind of priet and travis morr should Should join on the stage, but we're going to have a A treat in many respects because we have two experts on congress Which is has a knowledge deficit in many respects. They're an expertise deficit and an expert on the census former director of the census And we're going to speak about how government can keep up In increase its knowledge infrastructure and keep up with other sectors of society like the private sector Where knowledge is just much stronger. So I'd invite my panelists to join me on stage And I'll I'll take the opportunity to ask the first question to ketted Which is you know, we had a discussion about the census in the last panel You know in an era of big data when google or facebook or amazon Know more about any of us than we'd like the government to know Or that we'd probably allow the government to know And they know it not on a every 10 year basis, but on every moment by moment basis What is the role of the census? How can it utilize the private sector? How can it keep up with the private sector? How should it change? I mean this was once a And still is a vast scientific demographic and physical undertaking Now many things can be done by computer So I'll start with the phrase uninformed. I hope everyone presumes that's an oxymoron Uh, it an uninformed democracy cannot function as a democracy Um, therefore, uh, a democracy has to have an information platform and it has to be shared Because if everyone doesn't work off the same information platform, uh Holding cost of the need for security of certain kinds of things on how many terrorists there are in the country and so forth But nevertheless fundamentally if the information platform is not shared Then you cannot have a robust discussion about What's going up and what's going down? I mean, uh, the the information platform in part is a huge source of trend lines Uh, and trend lines are actually how we think about public policy Uh, school dropouts abortion Educated population unemployment Whatever it is, uh, how many people are online and using google and so forth Trend lines are a critical component of actually a functioning democracy But that means an information platform that has a baseline and therefore you can measure things that are improving or not improving Because you hold the government to account for uh, for what's not improving or you should If it's functioning democracy And reward those who are making the trend lines go up or down depending on which direction makes the most sense for both the economy and the polity and the society So, um, how do we get an informed informed democracy? Um, thomas jefferson is responsible for two pieces of it, which is the census. He was the first census director Um That's that's slight exaggeration. There was no census bureau. He's kind of went out and did it But uh, the Federal marshals actually conducted the the early censuses. Um, but also the first big map maker Lewis and claire, uh, as as was mentioned this morning about uh earlier in this day Um, so you need that you simply if you don't know the map of your country, but that's both a physical map Were the borders and so forth and so on And you don't have a demographic map map of the country you can hardly govern it and it can hardly speak back After all a healthy census is voice It is the american people speaking back and has already been mentioned about trust If you don't if american people do not have trust in the census either in In the holding confidentiality clauses in place Then you're in deep trouble. There is no census that people don't fill in the fill in the form and send it back And so forth for all practical purposes now. I'm gonna quickly get to your question I just sort of set it up For since 1790 to about 1840 The census is what I would call a one-player game The government did it Starting about 1840 The census began to cooperate with the academic community What I mean by the academic community in 1840 was race science And a question got put on the census form in 1840 about race at the at the express request Of race scientists and a different one was put on in 1850 Again at the express request But that was a partnership if you will between the private sector and the public sector now that partnership with the academic community Got more and more robust And indeed even dislodged race science to a degree By the end of that century and became even healthier across the 20th century So we have a very very critically important interaction Between collecting statistical data about this population. I when I say the census, that's a shorthand For the federal statistical system, which has 15 major agencies in it health justice education Agriculture and so forth as well as another seven 78 to 80 Statistical programs inside of agencies, which aren't inside of their embedded someplace else like the veterans affairs has its own data collection and so forth and so on So I mean it's a big operation a data collection by the federal government So I say the census is shorthand for that much much more elaborate thing so So between 1840 and today There has been an enormously active constructive interaction between the academic community That is a certain form of expertise about how to do it What questions to ask how to interpret them how to write them up and so forth I do think that the 20 not this census We will talk about this census if you insist But and there's mess to be said about it But i'm going to leap ahead of it. Uh leap over it momentarily and simply say the 2030 census I believe the 2030 census. I just said this is equipped. It's a very very bold thing to say I actually think the 2030 census will be more unlike the 2020 census Then the 2020 census is to the 1790 census There's that big of a transformation in store for us and I believe that that transformation will In very large part require the census to be a three player census and the third player will be the private sector It will be the it industry. It will be everything from your visa data to Amazon to uber to google and so forth putting that all together is a big complicated thing and I don't Pass over that as if it said oh, well, why not? It'll take some hard work But I do think that the next census the next decade census in 2030 Will have witnessed a fundamental transformation because of the it A transformation we've already going through as a society and I think it has the potential to be a much more powerful Information base both in terms of of the things that matter demographic resolution people like granularity How many you really want to get down and talk about particular groups? Not just Hispanics, but parts of the Hispanic population or parts of the Asian population put them together If you worry about health conditions and so forth and so on and then look at their simultaneous experience and and Demographic and geographic resolution, of course granularity. We call it down to as small as spaces as possible enormous issues about privacy enormous issues about confidentiality enormous issues about accuracy Uh, and I don't mean to minimize those at all, but that's the future I see going forward a fundamentally new information platform for our democracy because we do not want an uninformed democracy But the next stage of informing our democracy will involve a transformation of the federal statistical system Uh, let me ask a follow-up to Travis and then we'll go to Lorelai To have the type of transformation that kind of is talking about In many respects, you need to bring government up to speed not only congress But the executive branch in terms of the type of things that are known and easily understood where you live in the san francisco bay area You know one of the things that strikes you If you work in the federal government is there's a big generation gap The federal workforce tends to be Well composed of many many wonderful people In part because of the difficulty of hiring Hiring freezes over the last decade tends to be older than Certainly the tech workforce or the workforce as a whole So how can we take the talent? That exists in places like the bay area that knowledge and bring it into government As a related question, how can we do that? And are trying to apply that to the legislative context and so we have fellows So we place technologists to work in congress through our congressional innovation fellowship fellows work on everything from autonomous vehicle regs to surveillance reform We give them a year on the hill and some of them want to stay But some of them don't But it's important to provide that pathway And provide the opportunity to serve and that that doesn't exist Right now, I mean, you know, it's it's not just silicon valley, but it's also There's a there's the there's the demand side of government But there's also the supply side of people coming out of cs or engineering or informatics degrees Um, and some of those folks want to work in policy But they don't have a way to do so. So I was up at mit this fall and talking to The director at sea sail up there the computer science and ai lab We said listen, uh, it's not a majority of my students It's not even a big minority, but five or ten percent want to work on policy I've nowhere to send them and so part of what we need to be doing is connecting the supply side to the demand side and um, you know, our fellowship I think is is one way to do that and To your point about being captured by industry, I mean that one reason that we're trying to work with academics We're launching an extension of our program trying to recruit phd's and masters students right now To start this summer Are non ideological and they're coming from an information Space so I think I think connecting those supply and demand sides not just with industry, but with academia is super important And let me ask Lorelai on congress in particular You know, how do you see the knowledge infrastructure there? How how might it change in 2018? Where for good or bad many members of congress are retiring so there's kind of A loss of institutional knowledge and how does it compare to the other branches of government? Sure. Thanks. Actually. I wanted to out nerd everyone with a slide. I don't know. Can you okay? It's not a tesla in space Um, I hate to disappoint so congress, um the replenishing the knowledge and expertise inside congress Is uh has been my sort of obsession. I came to dc in the late 90s Actually the inventory the damage done by with something called the contract with america Which was a turnover in the leadership of congress where there were real intentional Demolition of some of the in-house resident expert knowledge. This is The legislative status steps of congress and the reason i'm showing you this is because everybody likes to point to that Schoolhouse rock video from 1975 about the life of a bill and how it is generated by a community meeting and the Member of congress is there in person and then goes and a lot of if you'll notice and go back and watch it A lot of the time has been in committee and then it comes out the other side as a law Well, right now congress is working with 45 less expert capacity in house than it had in the 70s when that video was made And the committees themselves are convening about 50 of the time What that does fundamentally is erode the the sort of Democratic sharing of knowledge from the public and citizens back to the institution itself So the question i'd like to pose to the audience because we're all going to have to figure out sort of what is The new division of labor and a democracy for the 21st century In the introduction we heard about this idea of trusted public entities like museums Like land grant and public universities cooperative extension programs. We have a knowledge grid in this country that is fine museums They should be the information intermediaries for policy purposes because right now I think As much as we need technical upgrades. We also need a change of heart in this country Anger is not a sustainable emotion for living much less for governing and we have to move past that into this Idea of sharing and and dare I say institutional empathy congress is Is always the bad guy, but what I'd ask you to do is separate personalities and headlines from The institution itself which is really a very durable and participatory mechanism for democratizing knowledge in the 21st century My feedback from and I've talked to hundreds of staff and right now my project is how to crowdsource expert capacity For congress in congress in districts. So I go out of dc and i'm in districts now talking to members About what they need and who they trust There's going to be a rule for technology and data in this but there's nothing that's going to just replace the gut check Of who's talking to you? Who do they know? What network do they come from? How timely is the information? Are they a constituent or not and I would just point out that every step on this Needs a different kind of knowledge from a different kind of time and place And the other argument I would make on behalf of the institution is we're going to have to Have some compromises and negotiation on the level of transparency that's going to be allowed In the legislative process Um Congress is fragile in certain ways right now as for institutional memory I did a quick average on the back of a napkin and we're going to lose 700 years of institutional memory in 2018 That's huge And we can talk in the q&a about what citizens can do about that But we're going to need to surge into that Memory vacuum which didn't happen in the 90s and I think that's one of the reasons we've gone from sort of issue capture In this country to process capture It's not going to work and it's not sustainable and the only thing that I think is going to be able to fix this problem is A real love for the institutions and going back to basics And rebuilding the shared knowledge system that was Eliminated over the last 20 years Let me ask a question for all the panelists and we can take this in whatever way you want But the the title of the panel is can government could keep up To some extent To me, uh, the question is do we want government to keep up it in this sense Our government is designed deliberately Um to be fractious To be a a slower institution where things can be considered carefully Albeit that's not always the case in practice at least in theory where power is Split among different branches and within branches themselves um Yet the speed of society and the speed of technology Is unlike anything government is designed to be built for so there ought to be an interplay on where can government keeps Increased speed to keep up with particularly new types of technologies coming down the pipeline ai or blockchain Or wherever the case is but where does government have the responsibility to slow the technology or to be if not to slow the technology itself to be a institution that deals with A lot of the longer term effects of of this kind of increased speed I can give you an example from rural arkansas and rural new mexico where i'm from You know Wi-Fi is defeated by a rainstorm and a tin roof And parts of the country that are rural I was just home for christmas and my mom was in the four corners where I Grew up And it took three hours to watch an hour and a half movie on wi-fi So the fact that we don't have a conversation right now that is a premise that Access to a digital Knowledge network that is shared is the very first step. It's primary We can't have anything else unless much less the blockchain, which is a lovely idea for estonia It's not going to work in the united states until we are we're all online equally It's again 21st century democracy. That's the first step access To the conversation itself One thing I'd add I I think what we in terms of Keeping government up to speed one thing our our fellows serve to do is Help government help congress help members know what they don't know And so we're at a place right now Congress has 12,000 staff I found five that have any formal technical training. It's now seven because two of our fellows have gotten higher Congress does not know what it what it doesn't know. Here's a here's a great example one of our fellows In all of the investigations into russian interference in the election No one had thought to reach out to the voting machine manufacturers To understand their cyber security practices That's a pretty big gap and so one of our fellows launched an investigation into You know what wrote a letter What are what are your security practices? Have you have you seen interference? So we need to at least get to a place where government knows what it doesn't know That's a complicated question an important question I think checks and balances deliberation are critical, of course, you want a thoughtful democracy not just rapid democracy On the other hand Since the rest of the A lot of activities are moving very very fast including obviously the it industry and so forth And and what what's going to be the role of ai a decade from now How many things are going to be decided by algorithms as against people sitting around a table arguing about them and so What so I I simply think the government cannot not speed up with respect to its information platform That doesn't mean it has to speed up with respect to its deliberation And certainly does not have to speed up with respect to the importance of checks and balances and and so forth But if the information platform is kind of always Out of date and and my answer on that is that the decadal census that Apportions the population Can safely go to every 10 years as it has been You can wait that long for a population shift to decide which gets to you know, you're you're only moving A very small number of seats after any given census. Anyway, it's not something that dramatic Although it matters however The other data sets the the the american community survey health statistics Employment statistics and so forth if if you have to wait four or five six seven years for question answers to the To a policy issue that is rooted in that data set. That's just too long Uh, and so I I think you can not I don't want to be pollinantish about this But I do think you I technically we can speed up and so when congress is having a discussion about financial policy Everybody In somebody says well, I you know, I was told the last time I got a haircut by my barber that he's pulled out of the Stock market and what's that mean and then you're going to punch a button and these many barbers pulled out of the You know in the last 24 hours, you know, I mean You simply got a force into the system the capacity to painlessly Get access to granular data where it matters Um, and then I think you change the nature of the delivery process You don't have to you can still say it's going to take us a long time to figure out whether no child left behind Is really working the way we thought it was working it took it took a number of years We had actually destroyed an awful lot of you know of our public education system in the process But we did we did figure it out teach to the test was enormously damaging thing to our public education system But we had to we had to watch that unfold But not to know what's happening and not to know it's unfolding Is is just a Huge, you know, the military wouldn't tolerate Waiting around to sort of figure out how well its weapons are going to work and what kinds of weapons It's going to need and so forth and we simply cannot let that be true in domestic policy either Yeah, and I know the military, um, I worked at the state department, but dealt a lot with the military You know Moore's law is I think 18 months and the military procurement Processes well, it's not it's not 18 months And I know secretary Carter in particular spent a lot of time in the valley Speeding up that and developing labs within the military and it seems to me Some of what goes on in the military in that sense that that expeditionary nature of seeking knowledge ought to occur In the rest of government and it's not the question the rest of government doesn't want to do it The rest of government doesn't have the the power or funding or capacity to do that I might push back on that. I think that there there is The I've been to a defense innovation board meeting it is an incredible set of of experts and There's there's political will from the top to do that I mean Ash Carter and Jim Mattis have made that a priority part of this is prioritizing Investing in learning and investing in an institution itself and until we as citizens hold our institutions to account to do that Um, it may not happen defenses, you know defenses Everybody can rally around defense, but it's it's an incredible set of people that they have working on I would also just add that Just to build on what Travis just said like right now knowledge doesn't have a competitive political constituency It doesn't compete with what I like to call the talking points industrial complex There's a lot of money in this town that scales anger and malevolence And now we've got foreign actors involved and we need to see our democracy as a defense issue If you look in the world and I study other Parliamentary systems and legislative assemblies Some of the most advanced digital democracies are taiwan and estonia Why because they've got big Scary neighbors breathing down their necks and they've They look at that their grid, you know in estonia has been taken down by russia in 2007 So they see this as this is critical infrastructure of democracy and in our country It's more complicated because there's nothing as powerful as the u.s. Congress The u.s. Congress is the it's it's a unique creature in the world of representative assemblies. It's the most wealthy. It's the most Potentially participatory. It's not a parliamentary system. I would argue that having The sort of a top-down system Forced onto it is one of the reasons it's shutting down But um, all of these communities certainly I was a national security staff person on on the hill for almost a decade Um, the people I needed to show up at the right time and place never were there. They would be sending me a They would be sending me a 400 page dissertation on a nuclear disposition or and the other side was Showing me a video of protesters chaining themselves to a reactor And and so we've got this chance now to make the operational level of knowledge very effective And to have a curated Sort of method that's going to happen in communities and states. It's it's local Where are the surge teams that match members committee assignments? For example, where are the process facilitators? They're doing this in in the nordic countries people with process skills We need them desperately right now because the town hall model is not only obsolete Members are being shot at we've lost two in eight years two members of congress have been shot at and terribly wounded in public That's a game changer for an open system. It's a game changer for democracy So all these people that have all these special skills in this sort of new broadly conceived vision of labor For the 21st century We need them to show up and sort of inventory their own skills differently But but also understand that It's not a lack of information for policy makers. It's a curated very, you know that mimics and and produces information that's for the purposes Of this and a lot of it's going to happen outside of this process I would argue on the top before things are introduced in the formative process of ideas and sharing Let me ask one final question the panel before we open to the questions from the audience Which is Several people said there's there's not necessarily constituency for this issue as important as it is and we're stuck in the Governing environment for better or for worse that we are with the existing Well, uh plus polarization and all that What are the one thing um that you know people in this audience Can or ought to push whether it's their members of congress or in any other way To push this issue or to become involved in this issue. What are what are practical steps people can take? I wrote down a couple. Um, everybody in this room is probably from somewhere else and not dc Um, so I would start there with your family and friends and just a couple of things that members and staff have told me themselves that they would love is uh know your member not just uh Sort of what their major issues are again that's coming directly from the party usually and that information is coming from donors But what does your member love and give them a chance to talk about the stuff that That they don't get to do in congress because congress as an institution is quite anti democratic in its processes now Members don't get to participate in their own Workflow in a meaningful way People talk about regular order It's going to be a huge change when we have a turnover where most Staff and members don't have a memory of the deliberative process itself One of the things I looked at is is um something called docket days is an example instead of a town hall Have it have a day that the community organizes That lets the member come and talk about a piece of legislation here She introduced but never went anywhere that was stuck in committee Let that member talk about what they love Because that builds a relationship and it lets the member be a leader in a way that they're not getting to on capitol hill When you're only getting to do 50 of your hearings when most rules are closed I mean look at the bills in the last six months the No open deliberation hardly any hearings at least there was a conference committee on the tax bill That's um, that's atrocious For a country that considers itself the world's leading democracy But I would also argue that the trust deficit is two ways Everybody you know doesn't like congress, but there's a lot of reasons why members of congress don't trust The public look at a facebook page on any members facebook page and look at their inability to have a meaningful discourse In the comment section That's sad that because those are the platforms people are using so become a trusted authenticated curator in your district That's one suggestion another one is micro media press lists Organize yourselves in your communities around your members institutional responsibilities. Those are committee assignments again Search capacity in in a crisis Let them go somewhere else besides the political parties and Fox and ms. NBC Or increasingly now even further extreme Talking points that have very loud constituencies So self organizing knowledge in districts to me is the most important thing and making yourself visible in a new way I One thing I say to our fellows. We've got one in the back here. Um, it's a bookie who who's uh I'm gonna be starting next week on the hill. Um is If you work on the issues that are already polarized, we will have failed you um net neutrality Really important issue It's not gonna a fellow is not going to make an impact on that. I think that's true of Constituents as well Find the issues, especially if they relate to a member's Committee members really want to do good work for their constituencies But you have to find the issues that that aren't It's not tax reform. It's not russia. It's not health care They're really important issues that members want to work on and they're always looking for ideas Um, but they can't be the polarized one So I would I would to lower lies point think about the issues that matter But that aren't polarized and that are important in your community and then ask for a meeting members of congress Will most will usually take it. Um, if you're meeting with them in district or gc This has been very well said and and and I'm I'm with experts on the congressional process So I'm not going to try to add to that I would say that one of the themes that comes through to me in this conversation is Is curation? It's a different word from expertise We know experts really know some things that the rest of us don't know pilot knows how to take You know so forth and so on And we're glad If we fly And uh, but curation is something we can all do Uh, which is as best we can in conversations with whoever but including our congressman and the staff And each other and citizens and school teachers and so forth and so on is just try to help people think through Well, this is sorted through and figure out what is sound and what isn't sound Irrespective of the the directionality of the partisan point of view just I would just sort of say let's just have sound knowledge And then let the chips fall where they may I think the the unsoundness of what goes out there now Is pushed out there is is is a huge huge threat to our democracy. Obviously I'm sure the next panel will talk about that as well And we don't have time to go on to it now, but but curation is a different responsibility And all of us can somehow play that role if we ourselves are informed and and so that's Step one and step two is try to get other people informed by dealing with knowledge which has some sort of roots That are that are trustworthy Hey, wonderful. We're we're going to open up for questions When I worked in the obama campaign in 2008. I noticed the president did Boy girl boy girl boy girl. So we're going to adopt that except we're going to go ladies My name is Debra Leithman. Hi Lorelai My question is this and it's a bit of an observation as well I noticed the one gentleman stated that back in 1840 they put on the census Census the question of race and I would assume that that might relate to the fact that at that time Slays were counted as one quarter of a person in order to benefit the southern states so they could have more votes Now today we look at the census and my question really goes to how do we keep government From using technology in illicit ways So when I think about the census this new census people might get excited because it's going to be you know It's technological You're going to be able to do it over the internet But millions and millions and millions of americans do not have access to broadband They are in rural communities. They're in minority communities And the app that's being set up for the census is one that works best on a computer not on mobile Most lower income people don't have computers and access to broadband at home They have a mobile device. It will be very difficult for them to be counted And on top of that there is a new question sort of similar to the race question of 1840 And that question is they're now asking citizenship So that could certainly have a very chilling impact on the hispanic community So my question is yes technology can be good But how do we harness it in the hands of our government to not use it in a political manner that is oppressive to minorities and others There are two dimensions of that one of which is the citizenship question Although at a different level you may not pick this up yet But it's even worse than asking the question in terms of the quality of the census this time Historically, we've always allowed non-citizens to be enumerators. They live in neighborhoods. They speak the language They are trusted And the words now come out that we that the census bureau will not be able to use a non-citizens to Conduct the census in 2000 I can only say this is not the census bureau speaking the census bureau does not want that citizen question They're fighting it all day long every day. There's a network out there that's fighting it. It has not happened It's been proposed, but we have to see if we're able to fight that back We know it will damage the census in major ways. We just we have evidence to that It's not just made up. We really know what will happen in terms of drop-off Your more general question, of course, is equally important, which is about who's not on the grid The census bureau has one rule only Count everyone Only once in the right place Everyone every resident of this country on april first year ending in zero and they They only care about getting as close as possible to that accomplishment that very simple accomplishment As they can And I promise you there's going to be technological census in part. We have to see how well it's work We don't know how well it's going to work. It's also going to be administrative record census At least 20 or 30 of the population probably this year will be in 2000 will be counted out of administrative records That have been put together in health and education and irs and so forth is on in order to locate people They will not stop with that. They will knock on the doors of those communities If they get funded as of now we have to wait and see on that But but the census enormously underfunded It doesn't have a full time direct all kinds of things I could say about the current census and the details But I can promise you the census bureau itself Is deeply deeply committed to a quality piece of work And they will fight they will fight in the halls of congress They will fight in the halls of the white house as best they can They are finally a federal agency which takes its guidance from the secretary of commerce And in turn, uh, he takes guidance guidance reports the president So I can't tell you for sure what's going to play out But but don't imagine that the census bureau itself is not aware of who's not on the grid and how you count them and Include them and so forth. It really does want to count everyone Whatever their language is whatever by the way including of course the non documented We did a very good job counting the non documented in 2000 the census I was connected to because the catholic church helped us Enormous and they were the trusted voice that went into those communities that it's really important One more thing about the census now I'll quit You've got to appreciate that the fundamental census number Structures every piece of survey research Of any kind by the federal agencies or by the private sector by the pollsters for the next 10 years That is sorry, I gotta Come in Okay, okay, then I'll see. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, the every day every every survey that is conducted over the next 10 years After the 2000 will be off the degree to which that census is off So if you've under counted california and over counted wyomey that will be true for everything that happens That uses numbers and the number by the way was mentioned this morning a very large number of dollars at stake in the census 6 trillion between 2010 2020 and 2030 6 trillion dollars will be allocated on the basis of census numbers And they will be allocated in terms of where people got counted and if you don't count people that in neighborhood isn't going to get any Money or that city or that township or whatever so the stakes are enormously high Do we have do we have time for one quick question? One quick to this gentleman right here My name is eddie eiches and I spent the last More than half of my last 30 years in federal government as a union president for federal workers And I have a completely different take on your can government keep up with technology specifically We used to have permanent government employees who were at the top of their Top of the game in in it and especially it began Probably in the early 90s, but with the gores reinventing government a lot of them lost their jobs They were bought out and then we had contractors who had different set of loyalties working with the Federal employees and now it's much much worse Especially in domestic agencies. You just don't find any programmers or people who really understand the it So we need to bring back the positions and of course we also need to Bring back the incentives for federal to work in the federal workforce and make it a career That is getting at least on a theoretical level the best and the brightest as opposed to having like four different versions of furs making it more and more unlikely that Presidential management interns will ever stay beyond a certain period of time I would just say you're right. We have to start stop harming ourselves I mean something that everybody can do is if you hear someone trash talking government Ask them to also say something good about it. We all benefit from this system. Yes, it has its flaws But I as a staff person on the hill also Saw the privatization of expertise the privatization of knowledge Is a terrible Dilemma and the business plan of this city a large part of it is built on that Well said So that is uh the second panel. We're we're gonna thank our Panel Thank you, and we're gonna back up Sheila and Arthur for uh a final panel We're even gonna get rid of the ecstasy. Thank you So everyone has the formal titles On the on the piece of paper, but um, we're lucky to have two Tremendous experts on Really the discovery of invention innovation knowledge science with us to to round out the The program Our final topic is called The challenge of democratizing expertise. So I wanted to open with a question. That's more of an observation, which is I think one of the challenges with democratizing expertise is what you might call the sociology of expertise if you look at it And i'm a communications professional now expertise is often used not to connect with people but to cut off We give people fancy titles doctor professor on and on We literally place them on a stage With people lower than them opposing them who have to ask questions in formal ways We use jargon to distinguish ourselves How do we uh, shila brought up in the first comment that people were right to question Experts in park because of the failures of recent experts, but how does Am I being fair? How does that sociology contribute to to the dislike or the lack of democratization of expertise and what can we do about that? great question, um I mean, let me come at it from two angles. The first is If you look at people have written on the sociology of expertise. They actually were incredibly enthusiastic when 1980s 90s A series of studies began that began to look at citizen science at the way in which lay people Actually gather data and use it there was some early work on the way in which people who are especially passionate about birding Were in fact playing major contributing roles in studies Ecology environment around bird migration because there's no way for the experts to be everywhere And there's actually a great amount of data collection that people who are excited about this can contribute And so you had kind of systems develop to actually draw that data in now What's interesting is so yeah the people in sociology of science were very excited to see this because one of their criticisms for a long time was very much this Sharp division because when you look really carefully what experts do If you really peel it apart, right? It's day to day work processes that other people can readily learn and do It takes some time, perhaps But there's not actually some genetic predisposition to become an expert. There's no wall. That's insurmountable Now what's interesting? I've looked at and carefully for example at randomized controlled trials the ways in which we decide Pharmaceuticals are safe and efficacious And there's another example of an area where a group of concerted activists Around hiv aids in the 1980s Challenged the regulatory system and said we actually need to get drugs before you've run the full clinical trial And I won't say this was an easy adjustment But the system did adjust the fda did make it possible to kind of accept new kinds of information Into what counts as a definition of safety and efficacy To soften that boundary between testing and market so that people could get medicines We've gone to a far extreme on that now There are people who claim that any drug that's been invented They if they have a life-threatening disease have a constitutional right to take that drug And so now you've actually challenged the basis of knowledge because you're not going to be able to run effective clinical trials If the manufacturer is somehow obligated to provide the drug to anyone with that disease And so it's very interesting to see where this kind of spectrum lies And so yeah back to your point. I I don't think there's something particularly special about expertise Beyond a particular focus in many years spent on it and people engaging it at many levels So again, all right. Thanks for the question One of the responses is if you're going to Site sociology you got to get sociological all the way down or all the way across in some sense Most people when they go into their doctor's office look at the Certifications on the wall or they look at what the hospital's record is and yeah I mean there's so there are many places where we as citizens operating in society make Judgments about relative Degrees of expertise or not. So if those degrees didn't exist If there weren't a way of classifying The value of training Author's talking about how long someone has been in business if you want to go to a surgeon You typically want to find out how many of those kinds of operations that surgeon has done So there are lots of places where actually there's separation of people into categories that some people know more than others Is something we rely on that we go back to that and I think that You know ken was talking earlier about uninformed democracies I suspect that Democracies with no hierarchy totally flat democracies in which everybody is expected to know the same as everybody else Would not be feasible. Anyway, there was this thing called modernity that brought in Systems of specialization and you know, I give my students a very simple heuristic I mean they cross streets all the time in Cambridge mass. They do it illegally most of the time, but in any case There are these countdown monitors now at traffic lights and you know the one near my Intersection and nearest my office. There's 19 seconds and you know, we rely on those things That crossed one right here coming to new America I mean if it says 10 seconds you kind of accept that it's 10 seconds But how many of us bothered to think where those seconds came from who did the traffic modeling that led to the particular set of seconds and you know You go to the supermarket and you buy milk and you see non fat or 1 percent or 2 percent We're not carrying out our monitoring exercises. We're depending all the time on you know Somebody to have known somebody to have certified and so on and so forth and we'd be up the creek If we really wanted to be responsible all the way down for every piece of information so, you know, I think that one should displace the question and really Get to the sociology of trust rather than the sociology of expertise and for that I think one would need to have Kind of deep knowledge about why we place trust in one thing over another So circling back to the first panel. I think that there was a missing piece there was an indication in what David Bernhardt said about the right and the left and Polarization and of course polarization is a really problematic thing in the in the country now But it's also important to recognize that there are places where the right and the left come together in a sense That there is a left critique of expertise That is about illegitimacy that is not dissimilar to the right critique of expertise It's just that which experts are considered illegitimate may vary Depending on the issue, but if there's a fundamental agreement on certain things like Overclaiming is a bad thing or expert string out of the domain in which they're certified into sideways domains Or money Can distort regardless whether it's coming from a government agency or from a corporation And we need to understand whether money is doing that distorting or not Those are levels at which I think right and left could begin to talk together to restore Some of this missing trust that I think is quite foundational to the sociology of knowledge I view it my job to kick off the conversation. I see you nodding so I could continue I was agreeing with that so Um, then let me ask a follow-on question. Um, I I certainly agree with you on on the level of you know It's just be impossible to live in a world without expertise and without hierarchy and to some extent it seems to me on information We've almost mirrored the problem the food industry in a way We've gone from an environment and food of scarcity to now the question is abundance and obesity and information Quite similar. We've gone from a world where there was lack of information to one where everyone is non-stop bombarded by information And you get the equivalent of junk food, you know, fake news all this and the things that are good for you are not tasty Both in information and in food how do we Um, for lack of a better word How do we curate expertise? Better for citizens or how do they curate it for themselves? How do we think of a world? Where there is so much knowledge and so much expertise Out there that it's impossible to tell what is in fact truly expert Yes, I think that there are certain kinds of Um Things that people can be taught about expertise that are really the same things that they should be taught about democracy that that There are certain baseline questions You might ask about you know Is there something that multiple eyes have looked at or only one set of eyes have looked at on the whole? We tend to trust things that have been looked at by more than one person We can name it something fancy and call it peer review But it's really like two sets of eyes are better than one and we believe that all the time about all kinds of things I mean, why do we get second opinions before undergoing an expensive piece of surgery and you know So those kinds of things to some degree common-sensical, but we've elevated expertise to such a level as An icon and you know the kind of environment I work in is as guilty of doing that As any that we forget that there are rather common-sensical normative ideas here Moral ideas ethical commitments by which we Do that kind of curating anyway? A second set of things I think came out of that first set of discussions. I mean, I was really taken with that idea of the You know not checking the box about the previous incarceration Staters so I think as a very general proposition. We've learned over the years that For somebody to make the judgment that they should withhold information from the public at large doesn't usually work And misjudge is the intelligence of the people. I mean so that that particular policy Took one piece of information and said it is too dangerous to let the public understand this Now if in this same in the same audience we said well Look the gm companies are not wanting the gmo label to be put on Food you would probably get a very different right left packaging around that But you would get the but it's the same set of nerves that are jangled Why should somebody be making that judgment a curation judgment that we don't deserve to be told this information Because we're not mature enough or adult enough to deal with that I think that this trust business has to be Neutral and flow two ways that if you want trust in government government has to trust back in some sense Now that should not be a mindless trust. It has to go with Education and information in a certain sense you have to give criteria of analysis and judgment But I think that on the whole An idea of curation that says I make the choice for you what information I'm going to give you That doesn't work in all sorts of other places, especially not today when people have so many subsidiary ways of finding out information So one could go down the line. I mean no one can sort of lay out the sort of dangers of curation and the other thing that came up was in the context of Weather and how people have taken the weather data and done all kinds of things You find that all the time if it's a productive data set You don't you the first source don't have to worry about the curation all the way down People are entrepreneurial. They'll find uses They will curate for particular communities and make sense of the information in particular ways So in that sense you spur creativity in the society Be open and let people have added with the information and they will do their own curating for whatever those purposes are Admittedly we need feedback. We can come back and say is that for the good or for the bad? But that's a separate further on down the line issue And you know, the amazing thing is a lot of that is happening. So there's been this anxiety around the decline in deference to expertise Forever basically, but any particular area you scratch carefully historically You'll find a lot of contestation a lot of questions A lot of threats to the institutions that are supposed to be guarding and making Decisions in processes that are both transparent fair and democratic So each policy area you look at carefully you see that happening over and over But a particular concern from the 70s on right Americans no longer trust experts a huge one in the 70s around nuclear power The tons of contestation in question. Why don't Americans trust in nuclear power the way they should because we know as experts it's safe So that's been an ongoing process and as she was pointing to what has been changing So it's interesting to see what's different versus what's quite constant What's been changing is the generation of more information that people tinker with that they do things with So you look at chemical data So information about chemicals in the environment and in our bodies So tons of tests have been done that generate this information at incredibly low cost You can find out the 150 synthetic compounds that are in your body right now that didn't exist before 1910 because they hadn't been synthesized yet But what do you do with that information? Well, it turns out there's a ton of environmental NGOs who will tinker with it And begin to inform you now they may take you down a very A path that not everyone will agree with they may lead you to conclude that And there's a website I can show you that orange juice Is a chemical shit show as it says on that Website well, that's absurd mostly. It's a bunch of enzymes that have been added to increase the flavor and give the umami Sense out of orange juice as well That probably aren't in fact Harming your body But you know there's a lot of this play going on and you can actually now also use qr codes and find out Ingredients in things you want to buy that there certainly was no way of doing 10 or 20 years ago So we do see this broadening of access and it leads to a counter push I would say of concern from the side of either industry or government these institutions who say Well, if this continues down this path, no one will trust anything No one will buy anything people will go crazy if you want to test every chemical produced to the degree We test pharmaceuticals you're going to have to pay for a plastic container what you pay for prescription drug So we end up having to make some of these choices around safety that then relate right back to our institutional basis for making decisions and drawing on expertise Wonderful um, let me make this observation as ask a question. Um There's undoubtedly a skepticism of expertise around the country There's also a particular skepticism of this town Um, and there's to some degree. I think there's a conflation between the skepticism of expertise Which is a broader phenomenon and the skepticism of washington. Uh, some of washington is an expert Um, what would this I know new america has a an effort to to go into the rest of the country So to speak what would this conversation look like not in washington? And I say this as a graduate of the kennedy school that cambridge doesn't count Well, I'm not sure cambridge is the right place to go for your answer anyway Um, one of the kinds of things I do is look across countries, uh, this is not the only democracy and it's quite striking that for instance the paralyzing Debates we've had about abortion don't exist pretty much anywhere else. You know, even ireland is about to have a referendum, right? um, so Climate change the same sort of thing. It's not that you can't find climate skeptics all over western Europe but on the whole it hasn't fed into A paralytic politics of how do you respond? So why is that? I mean, what what is it that? I mean, it does kind of mark us as special in some way among democracies and and I think that One can plausibly argue that many other Democratic systems have worked out ways of combining the politics and the specialized knowledge In ways that we have actually not done. I mean, so as a very heterogeneous very Decentralized diverse society We've actually raised knowledge to a kind of pinnacle that the knowledge can't sustain I mean, we've made it truth or bust and you know, most of the time public knowledge is not in either the truth category Or the dead end category. It's somewhere in between We have said that We don't negotiate on knowledge. It's either true or untrue and a lot of the time. I mean, you know the climate Change advocates Are not saying look, there are weaknesses in what we know, but nevertheless the best Consensus possible is this and here are some persuasive reasons why this is the best consensus possible For whatever reason and you know, we could talk about this and much greater detail than we have Have time for other countries have been able to construct those things So I think that the failure of expertise and the failure of democracy Are happening side by side hand in hand in this country. We're not going to repair one without the other. We've got to repair both So let me add a slightly different angle to this Not disagreeing with what was just said, but we have been talking this entire afternoon about a particular kind of knowledge, which is a real abstract scientific knowledge And it gets very messy if you go into what's what's a technical knowledge. What's a making knowledge What's a mechanical knowledge? Because I don't want to claim these as absolute categories But one thing that clearly the united states has been a global leader in Is in enabling tinkerers makers. We've had the rise of a maker movement across the country We have people across the country who now see themselves as inventors in a very similar model to the late 19th century When we had an incredible diversity of invention We haven't Given people the same resources women and minorities do not patent at the same rates as white men And there's now a great deal of attention to that and that absence of that isn't really racism at the usp to And it isn't that the market Cares a lot about who the inventor was in terms of their skin color agenda when they're buying consumer products It's that the ideas don't get a chance to manifest physically and be turned into that So more resources need to go to that to support it But there is in fact a huge amount of activity in churn Around mechanical knowledge, even as everything seems to be digital and abstract Just a striking observation that Other countries are actively aiming to copy that what we've got going here in the us And I haven't figured out the connect between that mechanical The making movement and our politics around invention and innovation That's a wonderful observation even though a lot of the culture is around I mean if you think of the hipster movement around the physical Object, which is interesting. Um, so we're going to open up to questions Um, I think I'm on uh Lady if any Lady wants to you are both gentlemen any lady Otherwise we'll going once going twice. Okay, we'll go to that gentleman in the back I'm uh, Dan Stern with the housing assistance council. I was uh, I just been sort of thinking this over my head that one of the gaps that I see is that While there is a uh While while there's sort of a skepticism about big data, there's also a sort of an over reliance on it and I I anticipate that if we don't invest more in our data collection activity people are going to see those gaps more and more. So I wanted to know What you guys thought about sort of future investment in data if that's not clear I can expand but I For example, my boss is always very skeptical that A there's not a national study on rural workforce housing and or something like something that's a very niche issue that No one would have studied without a huge infusion of money but He's skeptical because He thinks there's big data everywhere So how do you overcome that sort of gap of people? People are being told there's all this information out there But it's not as targeted as they may think and How do how do you get that across the policy makers? Let's say I mean that's been a long-standing issue in america You know the origin of the national academies the national research council were very much around Well, we need to provide targeted focus studies that provide answers to policy because as we fund You know science and technology and engineering across the board We're not actually doing that to answer policy questions We tend to fund that based on what's the most interesting research questions in that particular subcategory of scientific work And that's been the strength of the peer review system of national funding for science through NIH NSF and others But it then also has never been answering Like that the question that somebody wants on the hill about a particular piece of legislation And I don't think simply having data Answers questions It may give you an additional resource if you frame your question properly and have The people to do the work, but absolutely i'm with you You're going to have to have focused studies every time and you really need to spend time knowing what question you're asking and why Yeah, I completely agree with that and you know data covers such a multitude of Territory I mean everything we're Doing at this moment could turn into data and the sort of modulation of my voice up and down Could be recorded as data and it could be used for speech recognition purposes or whatever So we do need to make choices We do need to decide what's important and what's unimportant and the census discussion We had in the last panel was Indicative of that and so the decadal census serves one set of purposes But the fact that it needs to achieve a certain degree of robustness and then the granularity doesn't necessarily come from only that But other things I think has a very broad general proposition people are not going to collect information unless they think it's important But again a kind of saving grace is that There are lots and lots of major actors in society capable of gathering information And so when Focus of worth This is something we want to know something about emerges people do jump on it So the whole citizen science movement in many places has been driven by a sense That the official data collection sources were not collecting the right kinds of information And then there are partnerings that also happen between citizens saying we want information about this and then Collection agencies that are capable of doing that it all goes back to sort of the aware democracy point You know, what does our democracy need to know well before that? I mean, you know, what does our democracy think it needs to do together? What is that collective enterprise if we sort those things out? Then I think a lot of the data questions become almost Secondary to that they follow as corollaries from the first set of things Yes, I think you know, we would both Share the view that the data isn't going to provide the answers And that the more data we generate isn't going to get us closer to where we want to go we have to have the right questions and the right research approach and We'll always end up with gaps that people will notice and say well that isn't reflecting my lived experience You have an abstraction. You have a clinical trial. You have this large end data But actually here's something that happened to me that matters a lot and that I would like the policy apparatus to respond to also So I think we have time for just one last question Thank you. I have a very happy experience with Smithsonian in UNESCO program My question is we talk about expertise democratization and so on Have you been involved in rebuilding communities? Cultural heritage natural heritage and engage them and how to engage them Whether war zones or just undeveloped or even United States. I think have you been involved to combine such an expertise to Engage them in innovation social innovation I know you have unique competence and content issues. So thank you So let me let me give a short answer. I mean Smithsonian is an enormous institution that has done all kinds of initiatives on that front The Lemelson Center that I'm the director of Operates something called spark lab, which is a hands-on invention space for kids Especially in the age six to twelve that really intends to Motivate them challenge them and get them to see themselves as inventors And we've built out a national network of sites in museums around the country And what's been really interesting is in these communities Seeing how they take what we what we offer them tweak it modify it and adjust it for their own community How they bring in local inventors to talk to kids in the space how they feature a different set of invention challenges That they know will resonate with that community. So one challenge clean plastic out of the ocean Well in some communities it was clean plastic out of a lake or clean plastic out of a river That's sort of a silly example, but you begin to see how you can calibrate what we think about Into that local that then kids absolutely grab on to so I mean that's a very small example out of the areas of Smithsonian Well your question was really directed to museums, but of course universities are in the business of creating and and informing communities as well and and i'm going back to the Point that Arthur made before about how in a society that prizes invention and rewards it so much There are gender gaps and ethnicity gaps So what does one do with something like that? And you know, I think that that again comes back to How different networks of institutions work together to bridge those ideas one of the thoughts I had was that The spheres of activity in which women often find themselves often involve a great deal of innovation Like the kitchen for instance, but major chefs tend to be men And you know, is there something going on about the sort of nature of the innovation and what's rewarded? And in any case, you don't get patents for recipes very easily So, you know, there's there's a question of what kinds of work we're valorizing and where we're seeing Invention as a phenomenon and what we're rewarding um, I'll just finish with the fact that you know, we don't treat someone like rolling as an Innovator or an inventor that arguably she did more to transform The imagination of an entire generation on you know, what's possible and what's thinkable Than Steve Jobs did but you know, we have to sort of encourage the capabilities and on a variety of of levels Wonderful. Um, so unfortunately we have to wrap it up, but I want to thank both our uh panels And also thank the audience Invigorating I certainly learned a lot. I'm really looking forward to the 2030 census after that discussion And thank you Sheila for helping us pull this all together