Kerala Rising: From Exporting People to Exporting Ideas · Page 308 of 353

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS
future, and carries deep cultural prestige; sorting
your rubbish is a chore. People may log an action for
points and change nothing about the habits that
actually matter, producing a beautiful dashboard
above a street that is exactly as dirty as before. If
that happens, the framework will have
manufactured the appearance of civic change while
delivering none, which is worse than doing nothing,
because it would let a government claim a victory it
has not won. This is the failure the book should fear
most, and no clever mechanism design fully rules it
out.
Gaming may outpace verification
Any system that hands out rewards for
photographed actions invites people to defeat it, and
they are inventive. Staged photos, recycled images,
coordinated logging by a few households dressed up
as many, collusion between citizens and the local
Reward Partners who benefit from traffic, all of
these are predictable, and some will work faster
than the verification can be hardened against them.
The book treats fraud as a controllable engineering
problem. A critic would say fraud is an adversarial
arms race the institution may lose, or may only win
by spending so much on policing that the economic
case, the cheap verification that is the whole point,
quietly collapses.
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