Adam Baïz looks at Innovation and Society: How to design new public policy instruments.
Consolidating scientific excellence and making progress on the challenges facing society through research are strategic objectives for MINES ParisTech. As the leading school in France in terms of the volume of partnership research, MINES ParisTech, which is resolutely innovative, has a very wide range of disciplines with 18 research centres divided into 5 teaching and research departments.
To reflect this dynamic, MINES ParisTech invites you to discover the portrait of a talented doctoral student and his or her career path. Meeting with Adam Baïz, PSL doctoral student at the CSG, Centre de Gestion Scientifique MINES ParisTech.
A path of excellence and a spontaneous commitment to public policies
Born in Lille in 1989, a brilliant student, Adam Baïz is a graduate of the École polytechnique (class of 2009). After specialising in economic and social sciences at Sciences Po and ENSAE (École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique), he decided to join the civil service in 2013. By joining INSEE, he is fulfilling his desire to jointly serve the State and to contribute to the design, implementation and evaluation of policies of general interest.
Within the Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition, he first devoted three years to the macroeconomic and sectoral evaluation of the energy transition (evolution of the energy mix, housing renovation, etc.). Since 2016, he has been heading the "Studies and Statistics" division in order to consolidate and develop sustainable development indicators relating to energy, transport, biodiversity and housing.
At the end of a rich associative life, focused on the organization of debates and the creation of improvisation shows, he became passionate about teaching, and in his free time created, at Sciences Po, a variety of projects course around the number and the political decision.
A thesis to "invent an infinite number of public policy instruments".
During his first job, he discovered the Energy Saving Certificates (CEE): by combining market mechanisms, subsidies and penalties, this energy management system requires the State to oblige the main energy vendors (EDF, Total, etc.) to encourage their customers to do work to reduce energy consumption. This discovery led him to develop an intuition: beyond the handful of canonical instruments such as taxes, awareness raising or obligations, there are an infinite number of other instruments just waiting to be invented.
Thus, one day a week, he joins the Centre de Gestion Scientifique MINES ParisTech, a laboratory that takes a multidisciplinary approach to innovation, in the framework of a thesis entitled "Innovation of public policy instruments: development of a combinatorial design method around an algorithmic language", under the supervision of Michel Nakhlawhich it will support by the end of 2018.
New instruments to meet tomorrow's challenges
By crossing management science, economics, political science and algorithmics, it develops the idea that each public policy instrument interacts with actors in a causal chain of its own. For example, VAT comes back to the idea that "if you buy a baguette, then the state forces the baker to charge you a surcharge proportional to its price. »
Designing new public policy instruments then means drawing new chains of causality, or modifying the actors and actions that make it up. "But beware of false good ideas! ». In addition, it develops an evaluation method to rule out ideas that would not be feasible in practice.
Innovation in public policy instruments is crucial because it increases the chances of responding to the variety and complexity of challenges facing society.
Adam Baïz hopes that his thesis can stimulate this innovation, within the framework of democratic deliberation, and around a rigorous and pragmatic method.
Adam Baïz - National Final MT180 edition 2018 "My thesis in 180 seconds".
