us think the social contract is broken
we see it when Trump and and breaks it
are voted for and we also see it when we
look at those pictures with environment
being deteriorated and the the wealth
and income inequality increasing to
historic high levels for the first time
in many generations people are less
optimistic than their parents about
their near futures and we might blame
corporations or the wealthiest people
about this but I think we have to look
at ourselves and how do we govern our
our society and be more bold in taking
action my story and why do I care about
this briefly because I want to talk to
you about an idea rather than my bio but
I grew up here in Istanbul and when I
was 16 I went to us for a year and I was
studying hard in a privileged high
school here and then there all of a
sudden I saw that people weren’t
studying as much and they were really
enjoying and the the parents there they
had also a pretty good lifestyle and it
was fun
and then I came back and I realized that
life here is a lot more demanding you
have to prepare for university
examinations so and so I thought okay
why is this so so different how can we
do this better so I picked engineering
degree I went to Balaji I thought
Engineers fix world’s problems but I
found out soon after that engineers are
trying to maximize shareholder value and
not necessarily working on what’s most
important for society I thought you know
existing technology often is enough if
you have the right policies in place so
I work with McKinsey for a couple years
consulting company and I got introduced
to capitalism that was pretty useful and
thereafter I took a policy degree at
Berkeley where they do a lot of
fantastic policy studies and insights
however to my disappointment I found out
that a lot of those insights are also
not used in defining policy in the u.s.
the way we make politics is more about
who do we like to listen to
and petitions have to get reelected and
they have to say what people most people
like to hear and media would like to
cover what is more interesting to cover
so I decided to go yet another route
which is startups and Technology and try
to leverage technology to do social good
the first thing I did was a crowdfunding
platform that was in Denmark that took
me to Denmark so I live in Copenhagen
now for 11 years and after that I
decided to start a direct democracy
platform which was called we decide
after three years of making that work
which was very ambitious I decided to
change course I work with social finance
for couple years and then I started this
company you see me with one of our
bicycles it’s called donkey Republic
with about 5000 bikes it’s shared
bicycles across Europe and about 50
destinations so let’s get to the idea
I’d like to have you think about our
public goals as a platform what does
that mean that means that could we
define what these goals are such as
education health care free time and so
on and put a price tag on them we should
be able to do price tag on these goals
because we have giant public budgets and
if we are spending them on things we
value we must be also be measuring them
we’re often not but let’s assume that we
could if we do that and one when we do
that we can actually open markets to
serve these public goals that’s the idea
I’d like to pitch you good education
that’s a public good as we give it to
our kids that has a value what is that
price tag what is the value of public
space we all enjoy when there’s more
public space what is the value of one
additional are per week if we had to
spend less time in commuting or with
bureaucracy what value do we get out of
that
what about adjust this system that
actually works you can add other
examples consumer protection regulated
markets more trees
pollution and so on so I want to talk
about public goals those goals that we
have on the left-hand side and all these
services and goods that we are using
they actually have effects on these
public goals if you drive a car you’d
contribute to air pollution
if you drive a bicycle you’re not doing
that but we don’t have this feedback
loop of rewards and penalties really
coming back to to regulate these these
services and goods and I think we could
do a lot better than than what we’re
doing and internalize what economists
called these externalities so briefly
again I used to bike here in this town
was a sport that was fun and back in
80’s and 90’s and then in Copenhagen now
it’s my commute it’s 25 minutes to work
on a bicycle every day in his time of my
commute was one and a half hours that
was a bus ferry and another tram ride
and and my mom actually worked for 40
years where she had to and a lot of you
probably are still doing one and a half
hours each way to work so bicycles are
actually one of the great things that a
city can invest into because they have a
lot of social benefits and they can be
quite fast especially if they are
combined with rail network so this is
actually documented effects of bicycle
safe streets healthy people quick
mobility low noise levels low air
pollution but we don’t promote bicycles
we don’t pay cyclists for cycling we
don’t subsidize bicycles we don’t
subsidize bike sharing companies like
mine so we don’t have as many bicycle or
cyclists as we should have as a society
and that applies to a lot of other
things so why does that happen
this is Los Angeles in 1907 they had a
bike Highway one of the best cycling
infrastructure in the world back at that
time they also had a good tram
infrastructure actually and this is Los
Angeles today we assume that technology
will just do things better for us but
technology doesn’t just do that you have
to define what you want from technology
this is Copenhagen there’s a lot of high
tech stuff in Copenhagen while in Los
Angeles 80% of trips have
the car in Copenhagen is about 20% and
50% of all trips happen on bicycles most
engines have high obesity levels and
high violence and Copenhagen has the
happiest city in the world with low
obesity and violence
now we’re talking about autonomous or
driverless vehicles and we could have
streets looking like this where people
are sort of enjoying it or it could look
a bit more like this where you might
think it’s convenient or this is not the
picture you want the problem is that
when politicians debate to make policy
we don’t really look at those outcomes
we don’t compare how Los Angeles was
doing with violence and crime and linked
up to vehicles and decide to change that
we look at who we identify with and if
we can you know if you want to believe
that person so my point is can we act a
bit more like a technology company as a
society and gather a lot more data in a
transparent way linked those indicators
of Health employment happiness free time
everything that we care about
collectively and Link it to services and
goods make it into a platform where
people can contribute with new services
and get rewarded for it and if you’re
negating our social goals then you
should be pointing light penalized for
it if you did that I think there will be
a whole new breed of companies popping
up like our bike shake company maybe
some company will set up some public
parks or some new elderly services that
we haven’t heard of now you might say oh
this looks like some corporate social
responsibility but it’s a complete
different thing because these are now
business models that will be funded by
public income in a continuous way these
are not marketing gigs and I think
another thing we’re lacking in
government is talent we need to figure
out how to attract the people who work
for Google or for some marketing company
to actually use their you know skilled
brains to do public good maybe we could
get them to design regulation or to bid
to bet on or bid on regulation
futures how what public outcomes those
could create now these might sound like
for some of you some black mirror
episode or something really negative but
but I think we have to sort of take a
take a look at what what is possible so
why does a guy like me come up with
these crazy ideas it’s a combination of
co2 emissions we set up this
cap-and-trade system about a couple
decades ago and I thought that was
fascinating if you’re a company reducing
your emissions you could get rewarded
whereas if you don’t do that then you’ll
get penalized all the stuff I talked
about is put in practice in that one
dimension with co2 emissions then I
briefly worked with social impact bonds
and that’s been also quite inspiring
social impact bonds is when government
says hey here I have a problem I don’t
know how to solve I want to open this
problem to markets to solve it on my
behalf and it’s for this target group
and I will pay you companies a certain
amount of money for each improvement
that you do and one of these projects
the first project actually started a
decade ago in the UK was to reduce real
fans of ex-prisoners
so companies come up with services to
train these people the prisoners to get
a better life when they get out of
prison because apparently a lot of them
don’t have such good opportunities when
they get out and often they reoffend and
get back in
so they set aside a budget 10,000 or X
amount per person that actually
continues on the margin increased amount
of persons that continues a better life
the companies will receive that money
another project with homeless people if
they could be put to a home where they
would continue their lives that’s a
that’s a positive social outcome another
one with changing people’s lifestyle
habits and prevention of diabetes
another one with working with youth out
of employment or training that should
also getting them into a better
situation is also a positive social
outcome that we are willing to pay for
then another source of inspiration is
companies I’ve been working with
technology for for some years now and
there’s something subtle this is the of
you probably all know Facebook’s landing
page what you might not notice though is
that Facebook is running hundreds of
tests to improve their outcomes so
Facebook is a platform we are all
contributing with our content to that
platform and they are running these
tests to improve their outcomes the
outcomes are how many seconds that you
spend on the platform if you’re going to
click on their sponsored content if
you’re going to share more content or
create events and so on and so forth the
test they are running are changes in
their user interface or it might be that
they change their algorithms of what
you’re going to be shown or the
notifications patterns and those things
they track how are they changing the
outcomes that they care about and this
is something that a lot of technology
companies do it’s called a build measure
learn loop this loop you come up with
ideas you put them into a product you
have to have data to be actually to be
able to measure the impact of what
you’ve just done and then with that data
you can learn you can understand if that
created the outcome that you wanted or
not the faster you go through this loop
the faster you learn and what makes
Facebook and the biggest technology
companies grow so fast now they are the
top ten valued companies in the world is
because they go through this loop really
fast and we are very slow doing that in
public space so Facebook Google and
Apple are platforms born digital
but there’s another breed of companies
like Tesla Amazon Airbnb and they
brought previously offline industries
into online driving retail business and
hospitality these used to be offline
businesses but now that you can track
how each change in the policies are are
changing people’s behavior on these
platforms I think we could take our very
complex social welfare system as a
platform run tests collect data and do
what these tech companies do attract
top talent to improve a much better
situation you can’t talk about improving
society with basically not touching on
corporation’s role it seems here is
Apple very respectful company I use
Apple products with joy and they are
blamed with among other things tax
evasion and getting people to work in
really bad conditions but we’re missing
a point if you blame Apple and companies
for such things they’re not doing
something illegal and if we expect
companies to regulate themselves we are
too naive they are there to maximize
shareholder value so uber is not going
to go and stand for labor rights or
taxicabs jobs we have to do that as
society we live at a time where money is
less and less associated with social
value it seems if someone is rich we are
a bit you know wary what did you do to
make all that money you know who did you
screw up with and and we need healthy
regulations and regulations that
represent public interests to make money
represent social value again I’m gonna
end my talk with saying this is
controversial stuff on one hand I’m
saying open up all public goods to two
markets those who work with government
will probably say no this is crazy and
and all the free market is will say
regulate everything that’s also crazy
but we have to be brave we’re living in
a time where technology is moving fast
the every citizen is not doing better
and we have to be bolder braver and
getting out there and and challenging
how we do things Thanks