I have a new talk out, sort of. So far I have delivered it only in Italian (slides with notes), and it’s still work in progress. But getting there. It addresses the following question: can we reform government by making it more open and smart? If so, how?

I know. It sounds like something from a B-list TEDx event. You can almost picture some eager junior civil servant talking about “innovation” and “design” and “disruption”, the sort of disruption that does not destroy anyone’s job, civil rights, or democratic institutions. What could possibly go wrong?

It turns out to be much more difficult than that. Even talking about it is difficult. To even address the question, I had to ask myself: what is government? Why did it come into existence? Whhich evolutionary pressures now constrain its evolution? Doing so set me on a strange journey. I have been on it for about ten years now. It led me to uncover relevant stuff in many disciplines: history, economics, anthropology, networks science, sociology, math, philosophy, archaeology, experimental psychology, biology (lots of biology). It does not look like it’ll be over any time soon.

I still don’t know if and how we can make government more open and smarter. But I did get something in return for ten years of hard thinking: my brain is now rewired. I now look at administrative action in a perspective borrowed from complexity science. I draw most of my metaphors from biology. I have (somewhat) learned to look for emergence and self-organisation, and I can’t unsee it. I have become (somewhat) aware of my own psychological biases and cognitive limits. This transformation has been so profound that I can barely discuss with my former war buddies anymore.

And what I see is not cute. It’s strong stuff, inebriating and scary. So: last week I did this talk to open the School of Civic Technologies in Torino, and some students asked me for a reading list. Here it is, but don’t say you have not been warned. This is a red pill-blue pill situation. “There’s no turning back.”

So, here’s a barebones reading list in chronological order. If your interests center on public policy, start from the end. If you are more curious about complexity science, skip Ostrom, read Waldrop first and work your way up. Whatever you do, read Scott.

1. Elinor Ostrom, 1990, Governing the Commons. People can and do steward common resources over the long run, with no central control and no definition of property rights. Great example, solid theorizing.
2. Mitchell Waldrop, 1992, Complexity: the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. Still the best account of the story of the Santa Fe Institute in the early days. Functions as an introduction to the main intuitions behind complexity science.
3. James Scott, 1998, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Essential reading. It shows how statecraft and legibility are tightly coupled. Casts a dark light on the emphasis on “evidence based”  and “data driven” when the guy speaking these words is also the guy with the gun.
4. David Graeber, 2011, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. A long-term history of money and debt (it turns out they are the same thing). The book is very rich, and most of its value is not in its main thesis. For my purposes, the main teaching lies in the incredible value brought to the table by disciplines apparently quite far removed from policy issues – and, conversely, of the intellectual danger of not being interdisciplinary.
5. Duncan Watts, 2011, Everything is obvious (when you know the answer). One of my favourite networks scientists sets out an ambitious (but achievable) research plan for the social sciences. Its take on what constitutes “data” and “evidence”, and of their limits, are typical of complexity science. Vanilla policy people tend to not understand data even minimally crunched.
6. David Colander and Roland Kupers, 2014, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy:
   Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up. An account of what public policies would look like if both the government and the governed knew complexity science, and were prepared to take it seriously. Review, in English and Italian.
7. Beth Noveck, 2015, Smart Citizens, Smarter State. An authoritative take on why open government is failing. My favourite part is the treatment of how government became professionalized (and therefore exclusionary) in the USA. Review, in English and Italian.