Be free, ignore your sunk costs

When a soccer team loses a match we tend to say ‘the team lost’. But how come it’s rarely the team but mostly the coach who gets fired when several important matches are lost in a row? Probably because it’s easier to put the blame on a third person – a facilitator –than to change the team itself. Especially when the team has players that we consider to be good and worthy of a second, third or fourth chance.

There’s actually a good reason for changing the coach: a new coach is “fresh” and not biased by past investments and habits that led the team to underperform. This is why governing boards of badly performing companies tend to privilege the replacement of their CEOs rather than take the risk (and the pain) of reforming the companies themselves. Daniel Kahneman explains this decision in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. ‘The members of the board, he writes, do not necessarily believe that the new CEO is more competent than the one she replaces.’ But they do know that she does not carry the same commitment to past investments and is therefore better able to ignore the sunk costs of these past investments in evaluating current opportunities.

This analysis is just one of the many keys to success and, more importantly, to happiness. If you are looking for this happiness, try to be your own “new CEO” who is unhindered by the ‘sunk-cost fallacy’. You might experience two types of pleasures: first the pleasure (and excitement!) of detecting what keeps you from seeing the new, and then the pleasure of actually seeing and doing the new. It often doesn’t have to take much to avoid the sunk-cost fallacy which keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, unpromising research projects and unfulfilling lives they don’t have to live.

Les Pays-Bas et l’UNESCO : une histoire d’eau

Tout comme son paysage, la contribution des Pays-Bas à l’UNESCO se caractérise fortement par le thème de l’eau, à commencer par les sites néerlandais inscrits au patrimoine mondial de l’UNESCO. Six des neuf sites constituent un témoignage unique de la façon dont l’homme a mené son combat contre l’eau ou, parfois, contre l’ennemi.

D’abord, il a fallu aider Dieu pour créer les Pays-Bas, comme le dit un vieux dicton néerlandais. Pour ce faire, le Néerlandais a créé la série désormais mondialement célèbre des moulins de Kinderdijk-Elshout. Ces moulins drainaient en permanence le polder Alblasserwaard, situé sous le niveau de l’eau comme un tiers des Pays-Bas.

Ensuite, cette méthode a été remplacée par des stations de pompage à vapeur telle que la station de D.F. Wouda, baptisée du nom de l’ingénieur qui l’a conçu. Cette station de pompage, toujours en fonction aujourd’hui, a été inscrite sur la liste du patrimoine mondial, car elle est la plus grande et la plus puissante installation à vapeur à des fins hydrauliques jamais construite.

Il en va de même pour l’élégant système de canaux concentriques qui a fait connaître Amsterdam dans le monde entier comme « la Venise du Nord ». Ce site exceptionnel du patrimoine mondial est né, lui aussi, de l’idée de transformer des terres marécageuses en terres habitables, cette fois-ci en les drainant par des canaux en arcs concentriques et en remblayant les espaces intermédiaires.

Cette tension permanente entre l’homme et l’eau qui caractérise le paysage néerlandais, a aussi été utilisée pour attaquer et chasser les armées ennemies. En témoigne la ligne de défense d’Amsterdam construite au XIXème siècle, composée de 45 forts équipés d’artillerie. Ce réseau agissait de concert avec des inondations temporaires déclenchées à partir des polders et d’un système complexe de canaux et d’écluses. Il est le seul exemple existant d’une fortification continue reposant sur le principe de la maîtrise de l’eau. La première mise en œuvre de ce principe remonte au XVIème siècle, avec la construction du Oude Hollandse Waterlinie, lors de la lutte pour l’indépendance vis-à-vis de l’Espagne.

L’eau ne caractérise pas seulement la contribution néerlandaise au secteur de la culture, mais aussi au secteur des sciences. Premièrement, les Pays-Bas hébergent et cofinancent le centre de catégorie 1 UNESCO-IHE à Delft, le plus grand institut de recherche et d’enseignement en hydrologie au monde. Depuis sa création en 1957, l’Institut a constitué un réseau de plus de 15.000 anciens étudiants, parmi lesquels l’actuel Roi des Pays-Bas, S.M. Willem-Alexander.

Deuxièmement, les Pays-Bas hébergent un centre de catégorie 2 dans le domaine de l’eau, à savoir l’International Groundwater Resources Assessment Center (IGRAC). Ce centre a pour objectif de faciliter la gestion durable des eaux souterraines, en fournissant aux pays concernés l’assistance scientifique nécessaire pour les mesurer et les gérer. Cette mission favorise la stabilité et le maintien de la paix, car souvent ces précieuses ressources sont fragiles et partagées par plusieurs pays.

Troisièmement, les Pays-Bas sont membres du Conseil intergouvernemental du Programme hydrologique international (PHI). Les 36 pays membres de ce conseil travaillent actuellement à la mise en œuvre d’un agenda scientifique appelé « PHI VIII », pour faire face ensemble aux défis liés à l’eau tels que la sécheresse, la pollution et les inondations.

D’autres priorités des Pays-Bas à l’UNESCO sont les droits de l’homme, en particulier les droits des femmes, les droits des personnes lesbiennes, gaies, bisexuelles et transgenres (LGBT) et la liberté de l’expression. En novembre 2013, le Ministre de l’Education, de la Culture et des Sciences, Mme Jet Bussemaker, a signé un accord avec l’UNESCO pour soutenir la lutte contre le harcèlement homophobe à l’école. Les Pays-Bas ont également financé des projets en Tunisie pour promouvoir l’inclusion de filles dans le processus décisionnel démocratique, et pour la protection des journalistes. Ce dernier thème est aussi fortement appuyé par les Pays-Bas en tant que membre du Conseil intergouvernemental du Programme international pour le développement de la Communication. Car non seulement, sans les journalistes, la liberté de la presse n’existerait pas, mais aussi parce que la liberté de la presse est une niche dans le mandat de l’UNESCO qui lui donne une responsabilité importante dans le système des Nations unies.

Le rôle des Pays-Bas au sein de l’UNESCO est devenu plus important en novembre 2013, lorsqu’ils ont été élus au Conseil exécutif en qualité de vice-président du groupe électoral I (groupe des Etats d’Europe occidentale et autres (GEOA)). Le gouvernement néerlandais prend cette responsabilité très à cœur, notamment en soutenant activement la réforme que la Directrice générale Irina Bokova a engagée depuis 2010. Cette réforme est le fruit de la mise en œuvre des cinq recommandations de l’évaluation externe indépendante de l’UNESCO en 2010, que les Pays-Bas ont cofinancée.

Le but de cette évaluation consistait à déterminer le chemin que l’UNESCO devait suivre pour renforcer son rôle au sein de l’architecture des Nations unies. Cet examen critique était important pour le gouvernement néerlandais, car c’est en relevant ses propres défis que l’UNESCO sera le plus à même d’aider la communauté internationale à relever les défis mondiaux dans le domaine de l’Education, de la Culture, des Sciences, de l’Information et de la Communication. Cette ambition exigera des choix forts et une ferme volonté de se concentrer sur les points forts de l’organisation. En tant que Vice-Président du Conseil Exécutif, les Pays-Bas sont plus que jamais à l’écoute des Etats membres pour élaborer ces points forts ensemble. Car l’effrayante complexité des défis qui nous guettent ne sera pas maîtrisée tant que nous ne mettons pas tout en œuvre pour libérer le potentiel de création et de coopération que recèle encore l’esprit de l’homme.

Aldous and Julian Huxley about progress, risks and human values

Many of us worry about the future. We wonder where the combination of technological progress, economic growth and increasing scarcity will lead us. So did two famous British brothers: the writer Aldous Huxley and his brother Julian, evolutionary biologist. First Aldous depicted how the world would derail in Brave New World (1932). Then Julian started building a better world when he became the first Director-General of UNESCO in 1946. What can we still learn from their writings today?

Aldous Huxley: over-rationalized Brave New World

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley offers a frightening vision of the future. He wrote it after the Industrial Revolution and World War I had deeply changed the world, and imagined how far this transformation would take human society. He imagined a future in which mankind, thanks to Science and Reason, had finally managed to take control over the world and itself.

This Brave New World came at the prize of humanity losing its soul. The reader discovers a dehumanized world based on the principles of Henry Ford’s assembly line: mass production, homogeneity, predictability and unlimited consumption of disposable consumer goods to satisfy society’s material needs. The “good” news seems that yesterday’s war torn world had been replaced by a stable global society unified under a “World State”. But the sad news was that in this global rationalized world there was no room for human dignity and desire for diversity. Over-rationalization had taken its toll to a point where Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984 would have had nothing left to watch because the human desire for innovation and self-realization had completely dried up. You might think that it is not possible to dehumanize a society to such an extent. In Brave New World however even the best hidden bit of humanity was put to sleep by the official state drug soma, that had been developed to eliminate the need of religion and personal desire for anything outside the World State.

Julian Huxley: scientific humanism to secure human values

Although Aldous’s Brave New World did not come true entirely, dehumanization nevertheless took its terrible toll during World War II which prompted the creation of United Nations. 14 years after his brother published his novel, Julian Huxley became the first Director General of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). His responsibility was to determine how UNESCO could prevent another holocaust by preventing critical thinking from being put to sleep again by propaganda. Julian understood that a peaceful society could not be – like Brave New World – based on purely rational arrangements, but had to be founded “upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind”.

To build this human solidarity, he had to avoid the skylla and charybdis of “exaggerated individualism” and “the philosophy of Facism in which the State is regarded as embodying the highest values”. To reconcile these extremes, he wrote, UNESCO must focus on the progress of humanity with a method he called “scientific evolutionary humanism”. The scientific experimental method of trial and error, he believed, was the best method for “embarking man upon new possibilities”. His reliance on science was so strong that at some point his thoughts strangely echoed the Nazi philosophy: “in the not very remote future the problem of improving the average quality of human beings is likely to become urgent; and this can only be accomplished by applying the findings of a truly scientific eugenics.”

UNESCO’s emphasis on human values

His approach was nevertheless profoundly humanistic. Firstly his desire for human progress was firmly based on the need to use science and “the discussion method” to elaborate and establish human values on a global scale. A good example of this is UNESCO’s report on the philosophical principles of the “rights of man”, which contributed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Secondly, Julian Huxley was aware of the risks of uncontrolled and unquestioned scientific progress. He therefore urged UNESCO to study the ethical considerations of science and technology beyond purely economic considerations, which the organization still does today.

The role of culture and art

Like his brother Aldous, Julian Huxley was afraid that exaggerated economic growth would cut society off from human values. He emphasized the central role of culture and art for controlling this risk when he writes about the consequences of industrialization: “In conjunction with laisser-faire and capitalist economic systems [industrialization] has not only created a great deal of ugliness (much of it preventable), but has turned men away from the consideration of beauty and art, and of their significance and value in life – partly by its insistence on money values, partly by the fascination exerted on the young mind by the products of mechanical invention”. Art, he continues, is “the spearhead of [society’s] perception, the pioneer of new modes of vision and expression. (…) For most people art alone can effectively express the intangibles, and add the driving force of emotion to the cold facts of information”. He was especially concerned by the declining diversity of traditions and traditional knowledge, the pillars of society which he observed “being undermined or wholly destroyed by the impact of Western civilization, with its commercialism and individualism”.

Diversity and emotion as stronghold against dehumanization

What the dystopia Brave New World and the utopia in Julian Huxley’s philosophy for UNESCO both emphasize is the human desire for diversity as stronghold against dehumanization and alienation. Julian’s plea for a global “pool” of traditions, ideas and knowledge must not be seen as a standardization of contents itself, but as the globalization of access to contents like through the internet today. In the same way, his plea for a “world government” was not meant to eliminate nations or communities of interests like in the World State in Brave New World. It was rather meant to encourage cross-pollination at a time where, Julian wrote, “the scaffolding and the mechanisms for world unification have become available”.

Reconnecting with our emotional and moral appreciation

The writings of both brothers leave us a legacy which confronts us with the need to reconnect with our emotional and moral appreciation of the world around us. It’s clear that both philosophy and art are crucial in this endeavor as they stimulate the general process of enlarging the conceptual and emotional capacity of mankind. Of course we all have our experience of the world around us and of the future we are heading for, don’t we? But how well are we equipped to interpret this experience? Are we doing okay? Are the political and social structures we evolve in really fit to ensure our happiness in the next few decades? And what is a good life after all?

To address this complexity we need art, philosophy and social sciences in general. Art is needed because it can “express, as no other medium can do, the spirit of a society, its ideas and purposes, its traditions and its hopes.” Art also requires education: to support art production, but foremost to appreciate art. Because “to expect to be moved and enriched by Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua without some preparatory effort, is like expecting a man with flabby untrained muscles to enjoy and to derive immediate benefit from a twenty-five mile walk in the mountains”.

Conclusion: a balanced understanding, control and enjoyment

Julian Huxley's philosophy for UNESCO was never accepted by UNESCO's Member States. Member States considered that UNESCO's constitution was sufficient as a guideline, probably because they were not ready to accept some sort of Vatican for scientific humanism. As a consequence, Julian limited his term as a Director-General to two years. Nevertheless we can still draw inspiration from his philosophy and the principle on which he based it: “the world is potentially one, and human needs are the same in every part of it – to understand it, to control it and to enjoy it”.

This understanding, control and enjoyment can be improved by sharing it between small and big communities of interest. To prioritize quality over quantity, the challenge is to understand, control and enjoy in a balanced way. This means, as Charles Eisenstein puts it, to stop playing and messing around with earth’s gifts like children do with their toys. I don’t know what Eisenstein exactly means when he says that we need to put earth’s gifts “to their purpose”, but I think we should engage the debate on what this purpose is and start elaborating on its consequences. Maybe gratitude, as a natural response to earth’s gifts, can indeed be a useful guideline.
 

Based also on Van Helden, Andries (2001) Een halve eeuw UNESCO (Half a century of UNESCO), Dutch National UNESCO Commission

 

My twitter bio explained: The question of your life in five C’s

This is my twitter bio:

“How to use human creativity, communication, cooperation, coordination and some courage to achieve a more peaceful and sustainable world?”

Many times colleagues and even communication specialists advised me to make it more professional, but I just couldn’t change it. I nevertheless felt I had to do at least something. That something is my twitter bio explained here below.

If you imagine your life as an answer to a question, what would this question of your life be? It would probably be a rather general question, like “what difference can I make?”, “what is my passion?”, or “what can my family be proud of when they think of me?”. Despite their generality, these questions strongly interfere with the meaning of your life. Because if you consider your life as the answer to a question, it becomes some sort of accomplishment of a mission. But what can that mission be, besides being yourself?

There are probably several missions to be accomplished and your challenge is to tune into them, like you tune an old radio until the sound becomes clear and you like the music. Part of this tuning process is also to find out who is assigning that mission to your life. Is it yourself? Your family? History? Noone? For me, it doesn’t really matter where the mission comes from, as long as I can agree with it and it makes me dance.

Something else you need to figure out is: can your life be a bad answer? I don’t think so, but nevertheless I feel more comfortable if I check once in a while if my life is still okay enough as a ‘rolling answer’ to the question of my life. It’s a fun exercise to do. It’s like opening all your life’s windows and airing it out completely. After you’ve aired it all out you’ll find some interesting questions and answers, free from the dust under which old habits and preconceptions had hidden them.

The last time I did this exercise I thought of things that are important to me, like living in peace and in a sustainable way (not for me alone, but for everyone). So the question of my life would necessarily have to do with achieving these goals. Then I thought about my possible contribution to them. It seemed to me that this contribution starts with consciousness and the Creativity that emanates from it, the first “C” of the question of my life. Next step: what’s worth creativity if I keep it in my head? Answer: not much. So the “C” of Communication had to be key to my question too. This communication about creative ideas should of course also be meaningful and effective. In other words, these ideas should go beyond my computer screen and lead to Cooperation. Obviously, cooperation calls for Coordination, otherwise it might lead to anarchy.

These four “C’s” seemed like a good basis for a good question of my life. But it still sounded too hollow and easy, so I needed some further tuning. I wondered: how do you get good ideas across and actually start the change you want? Well, mostly it takes you to leave your comfort zone and show some Courage. This is the “C” I like the most, because it’s what often is missing the most. Together, these five “C’s” compose the question of my life: “How to use human creativity, communication, cooperation, coordination and some courage to achieve a more peaceful and sustainable world?” Almost a year after I chose this question it still resonates perfectly with me, like a powerful melody that doesn’t wear off. So I continue to make sure my life will be the answer to this question, or the dance to this melody.

Open-mindedness rose like a phoenix with Conchita Wurst

Already days before Conchita Wurst won the Eurovision Song Contest last night, there were petitions circulating for the singer to be removed from the competition. The reason: the singer, a 25 year old man from Austria, performs dressed like a drag queen wearing a dress and a sporting a beard. This combination of typical female and male attributes on one single person apparently causes uneasiness.

This uneasiness stems from a deeply rooted and specific type of fear of “what’s different from us” (xenophobia). Conchita Wurst is different from most of us because she doesn’t fit into the basic sexual categories in terms of which we perceive and interpret our world. These categories are: can we have babies together and perpetuate our DNA (category 1) or not (category 2)? The combination of a beautiful female appearance with a beard instantly blurs this basic dividing line thereby causing some uneasiness.

Don’t get me wrong: this doesn’t mean that we perceive every person, young or old, as a potential partner for sex to start a family. These are just basic perceptual categories that help our psyche quickly understand the world around it, just like it spontaneously perceives trees and pianos as things “my body cannot move” and books and laptops as “things my body can move”. In other words: there is nothing wrong with or immoral about these perceptual reflexes, nor with the uneasiness they cause when they don’t “work”.

The problems start when this uneasiness is translated into homophobic laws. This is the case in some countries in Eastern Europe, from which come 80 per cent of the autograph requests Conchita receives. These laws are the official face of homophobia, which is just as gruesome as the unofficial face of homophobia which I discovered in the French newspapers in April last year. We will continue to see gruesome faces like this if laws like this continue to violate the commitment made by all members of the United Nations to promote and encourage “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”.

Conchita confidently says she has an elephant skin and that for her “everything happens for a bigger reason”. Whatever its reason may be, her artistic victory is also a victory of Europe’s open-mindedness. I wish she continues to “Rise Like a Phoenix” for LBGT rights, strengthened by her positivism and 25 years of life experience she sang about in her winning autobiographic song:

Waking in the rubble

Walking over glass
Neighbors say we’re trouble
Well that time has passed

World Social Science Report 2013: mankind as the blind spot of the sustainability agenda

Since the Dutch Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen marked a new era by labeling it “Anthropocene”, it’s no longer nature but mankind who holds sway over our planet. So to get a grip on the extreme changes our planet is undergoing we should turn our focus from Mother Nature to her “unfaithful” and culture driven human competitor. UNESCO’s five yearly World Social Science Report 2013 gives an overview of how the social sciences can be of help.

Its diagnosis is in line with earlier findings of the Social Scientific Council of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences. In 2011 this Council noted that “despite the prominent international position of the Dutch Social Sciences, its recent findings are poorly used”. This leads, the Council ads, to a lack of “insight in processes that determine the public support and the behavioral response of the individual citizen”. This situation will backfire now that we are confronted with climate change, which is the theme of the World Social Science Report 2013. Because climate change forces society more than ever to adapt itself and therefore to find ways, via scientific research, to prepare the individual behavior and society for this change.

The trend is that we need to become more aware of the complexity of the climate change issue, and also of the fact that all stakeholders need to work better together. To simplify: climate change is not a specific problem for the climatologist, but a cross-cutting condition that confronts society and citizens with fundamental choices. The trend however is also that we don’t really address these choices. We prefer to invest in technological “solutions” that leave the core of the problem untouched. For example we try to reduce CO2 emissions by setting up an emission trading scheme, or by burning biomass instead of coal. But in the meantime we’re still following the wrong recipe: a man made and perpetuated unsustainable development model that is deeply rooted in certain ideas about what progress is. One of these ideas is that progress is measured by the gross domestic product of a country, even if this product has (very) harmful social or ecological consequences. A good alternative for this is the Inclusive Wealth Index, that doesn’t have this blind spot.

The added value of social sciences is that they can help policy makers and scientists to better identify unsustainable development models. Useful questions for research in this regard are for example where and how such models manifest itself in individual or collective behavior. Once these models become “visible” in behavior patterns, the policy maker can start designing ways to influence these patterns to make them more sustainable. Example: a lot of research in social sciences concentrates on high-frequency & low-impact behavior (refusing plastic bags in the supermarket). Good policy however might benefit more from research focusing on low-frequency & high-impact behavior, like buying a car or insulating your home. Because these forms of behavior make unsustainability visible on a more significant scale, thus offering interesting opportunities for policy makers.

The challenge is to find out next how these opportunities can be used to actually influence behavior. Because although there is a lot of knowledge available about the relation between human behavior and climate change, we lack knowledge about how this behavior can be changed. Without this specific knowledge we will not be able to shift individuals and societies to the new sustainable world. An example: research shows that it is counterproductive to inform citizens about the negative consequences of certain frequent behavior (heavy water consumption). Why? Because during the evolution human beings became imitators to increase their chances of survival as members of the herd. Once this fact is established, policy can be adapted in such a way that it does not go against but rather with the human nature of imitator. One way to do this is to print a happy or unhappy face on water and energy bills, indicating how economical you are in comparison to your neighbors. Success is guaranteed, with thanks to the social sciences.

These little tricks are a good start, but will not be sufficient for a fast and more fundamental transformation of society. Such a transformation requires that the sustainability issue be analyzed in a broader and more integrated way. Take for instance the following key question: how can people be motivated to move from polluting infrastructures and habits like the car and the habit of systematically using it to alternative and less polluting infrastructures systems and habits? To find out, social sciences (from economics, law and political sciences to urbanism, geography and psychology) will first have to leave their tunnels and link their research themes to the cross-cutting theme of climate change. Example: if a legal specialist limits himself to traditional legal issues, this will hamper the development of a legal perspective on climate change and consequently also the debate about it. Secondly, there are many potential synergies with natural sciences that deserve attention from researchers. Think for instance of the geopolitical aspects of biodiversity research, because of the value of CO2 absorbing forests in climate negotiations. Or think of seabed research, because of the pharmaceutical resources and fossil fuels it contains. Thirdly, inter-disciplinarity will not happen without institutional reforms. Because traditional research and promotion practices keep many research areas closed for other research themes. And the practice of project related financing often favors mono-disciplinary research. Fourthly, the effect of sustainability research is often limited because its findings do not reach policy makers and the right audience, or not in the right form. This situation could improve if research institutes use media and communication experts more systematically. These experts can provide the missing “translation” from research to policy, for example by confronting policy makers more often with certain research findings. Finally, we could be more efficient in forecasting (un)sustainable developments if we don’t generate our forecasts by extrapolating existing datasets to the future (like the IPCC Assessment Report, the OECD Environmental Outlook, etc.). Because if Henry T. Ford had forecasted on the basis of available statistics what his future clients would ask for, the outcome would have been: “a faster horse”. Instead the combustion engine and the automobile quickly revolutionized the world, driven by the carbon intensive infrastructures and habits associated with them.

Although we would not have been able to foresee the automobile and the Arab Spring transforming societies, Riel Miller of UNESCO argues that we can strengthen our capacity to anticipate the future. To do this, he explains, we should not limit ourselves to approaching the future’s uncertainty with the current statistical and deterministic tools and methods. Instead, we should use this uncertainty as a source of inspiration to open up our thinking about the future with concepts like discontinuity, openness, globalization and big data. These concepts help to open our view of the future, first by identifying the anticipatory assumptions underlying our thinking and then by suspending them. Miller puts this in practice by inviting policy makers, scientists and other stakeholders around a table with regard to a relevant theme. He then asks them on the basis of which implicit ideas about the future they think and act today. This exercise exposes all kinds of causal assumptions that the participants quickly learn to recognize as limited. Finally they can help each other to correct these assumptions by integrating new and unexpected insights, thereby enabling themselves to improve their forecasts. In a similar way, social scientists can help society to reveal the assumptions of individual and collective thinking and behavior. This knowledge is needed “to find ways to embrace the wonder of unknowability [and not remain] stubbornly insistent on taking an exclusively probabilistic and arrogantly colonizing view of the future”.

My comments

• Many social sciences are seen as “soft” in the sense that they deal with matters that seem to lack any serious, economical relevance (history, psychological phenomena, primitive societies, etc.). Their (economical) relevance would become more visible if we would involve historians, psychologists and ethnologists more in the study of complex issues like climate change. We could start with ethicists, whose sharp analyses of responsibilities are anxiously kept outside the doors of the political climate debate.
  
•  The social sciences often feel undervalued as just a sort of interface tasked to translate findings of natural sciences into societal consequences. It is however too negative to suppose that the social sciences lose their “independence” by devoting themselves to a better dialogue between producers and users of knowledge (e.g. science and politics). On the contrary, as sciences of society in their own right they are best equipped to determine how societies organize themselves and consequently which scientific knowledge is most useful for that society. These analyses of usefulness are not a threat but an opportunity for the social sciences as they can show how broad and complete their understanding of society is. So they shouldn’t be afraid to help take away the criticism of policy makers that science is a source of “pieces of information” of which it is rarely clear “what should be done with it”.
• The elephants in the room are barely mentioned: demographic growth (in 2013 even China slightly loosened its one child policy) and religion. Religious engineering could be a promising research topic, as it could help to make the Arab world – despite its oil interests –more interested in sustainability issues. More generally, we could use knowledge about how religion works, and probably also about religion as an ally or communication channel, if we wish to prepare the international community for the 5^th recommendation of the Post 2015 High Level Panel: “[establish] a new spirit of solidarity [based on] a common understanding of our shared humanity, underpinning mutual respect and mutual benefit in a shrinking world”.

Literature:

https://www.knaw.nl/nl/actueel/publicaties/kwetsbaarheid-en-veerkracht-van-maatschappelijke-systemen/@@download/pdf_file/20111018.pdf

https://www.knaw.nl/nl/actueel/publicaties/tussen-onderzoek-en-samenleving/@@download/pdf_file/20121002.pdf

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139104/kenneth-neil-cukier-and-viktor-mayer-schoenberger/the-rise-of-big-data?cid=soc-facebook-in-essays-the_rise_and_fall_of_the_failed_state_paradigm-122413

http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/social-issues-migration-health/world-social-science-report-2013_9789264203419-en#page2

http://www.post2015hlp.org/the-report/

http://qz.com/176430/the-bank-of-england-has-confirmed-that-economic-forecasting-is-basically-impossible/#176430/the-bank-of-england-has-confirmed-that-economic-forecasting-is-basically-impossible/

https://www.wiltonpark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP1311-Report.pdf