People dedicated to consumer protection, economic growth, workers’ rights, environmental protection, sex equality, voting rights, poverty reduction, mental health, immigrants’ rights, visa reform, racial justice, and small businesses and start-ups do not march under colorful banners containing the words, “Sludge Reduction Now!” But in light of their own goals, they might want to start doing exactly that.
Sludge infringes on human dignity. It makes people feel that their time does not matter. In extreme cases, it makes people feel that their lives do not matter. True, it is a stretch to see sludge reduction as a complement to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—but it is not all that much of a stretch.
Sludge works as a penalty; it makes everything worse. For both rational actors and those who display behavioral biases (such as inertia and present bias), sludge frustrates enjoyment of constitutional rights and prevents access to important benefits. Sludge imposes a kind of tax. If governments require 11.4 billion hours of paperwork annually, they are imposing a cost equivalent to about $308 billion. Any such monetary figure greatly understates the actual impact of sludge, economic and psychological. Sludge compromises the most fundamental rights; it can also cost lives.
All over the world, nations should be making an aggressive, across-the-board attack on sludge—for jobs, for education, for voting, for licenses, for permits, for health. Such an effort would call for reductions at the level of program design, including radical simplification of existing requirements and (even better) use of default options to cut learning and compliance costs. Automatic enrollment can drive sludge down to zero and have very large effects for that reason. Where automatic enrollment is not possible or desirable, officials might use an assortment of tools: simplification and plain language; frequent reminders; online, telephone, or in-person help; and welcoming messages to reduce psychological costs.
Both public and private institutions need Sludge Audits—an evidence-based approach to sludge, including an effort to weigh its benefits against its costs and a careful assessment of its distributional effects. Is sludge really helping to reduce fraud? By how much? Under permit programs, how many people are refused? Under benefit programs, what are the take-up rates? How do they vary across populations, including the most vulnerable? Are there harmful effects on the elderly, people with disabilities, women, and people of color? What are the compliance costs, in terms of time and money?
To be sure, the answers to these questions will not always be self-evident. If sludge discourages exercise of the abortion right, people will disagree about whether that is a benefit or a cost. If sludge reduces access to a program designed to help the unemployed, some people will be outraged, and other people will think it is fine or even good; perhaps the sludge is designed to improve targeting or to ensure appropriate work incentives. To know whether sludge causes losses or gains, we will sometimes run into intense disagreements about values. But in many cases, such disagreements are uninteresting and irrelevant, and once we investigate the problem, we will see that sludge is not worth the candle.
Recall the war on sludge in 2020 in connection with the coronavirus pandemic. Almost everyone approved of that war. It saved a lot of lives. With respect to sludge, we may not need a war, but we need plenty of battles. In the future, removal of sludge should be a high priority, and for one simple reason: sludge does far more harm than good.
Time is the most precious commodity that human beings have. Let’s find ways to give them more of it.