-: So, I created Human Dynamics group
because I was very frustrated
with the way institutions work,
with the way government works, with the way companies work.
They just don't seem to work very well.
And I came to the opinion that one of the key reasons
is we don't understand the dynamics of society,
of how people work together.
And if we understood ourselves better
and how we work as groups,
then we could do a better job of it all.
So what I did is we founded a new branch of science
called Computational Social Science,
which is now huge and in hundreds of laboratories.
And what it is, is it's using big data,
things like census data, but richer,
to be able to understand unseen patterns in human behavior.
My very first job was counting beavers from outer space.
Turns out beavers make lakes
and you can see the lakes from outer space,
which means you can count the beavers.
And that sort of indirect indicators
of what's going on within living beings
is something that we've been able to do with people,
to ask about social cohesion, about trust,
about efficiency, about fairness, inclusiveness.
There are the indicators that we typically don't look at,
we don't understand, that tell us a real story
about how we're doing.
The notion of understanding society to make systems better
applies to all of the different areas of human life.
For instance, in health, we worked during the pandemic
to help people understand how to manage the pandemic better.
But we've also worked for mental health
to have mental health services better.
We've been extremely successful in helping infants
and young mothers with their health,
all by sort of understanding the dynamics
of the situation better so that we can add
little bits of information, little bits of help,
at just the right time.
We also work with transportation systems.
Usually, people think about this
as making it more efficient.
But, you know, the opportunity that communities have
depends on their transportation.
If they can't get to work,
if they can't look for jobs very easily,
if their kids can't get to schools very easily, they suffer.
And so, there's a human cost to where we put the roads,
what we do with public transportation,
and what we're doing is we're integrating those human costs
into planning for the transportation that we ought to have.
So transportation ought to be for everybody
to make society better, not just for getting the people
in the cars to work faster.
A third thing is, what do you build where?
Where does society invest?
So one of the problems is, of course,
people tend to go to the rich areas to invest
because that seems to be the easiest thing to do,
but that leaves all the poor communities underinvested in.
And so, we help people invest in those communities
more efficiently, more reliably,
so that they can get to the party, also.
So students and other people join our group and support us
because they're interested in building a better world.
And what we do is we provide them with the tools
and the insights to do that.
Everyone wants to feel like they're having an impact
on the world and joining the team
gives them a way to do that.