Reducing Sludge: One Step at a Time

Electronic toll collection illustrates how a small amount of technology, such as cameras, can spare people hours of waiting in line. Time is money, as they say, and time is also time; officials should be working very hard to give people more of it. Unfortunately, governments can find such changes to be challenging. The jobs of toll booth collectors are reduced or eliminated, and their unions can be expected to oppose the change. Privacy advocates worry about those cameras. More generally, especially when compared to the private sector, governments are not well suited to disruption.

Consider Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings. Netflix is a repeat disrupter. When the company introduced the not-so-high-tech model of mailing physical DVDs to customers via the post office, they faced an entrenched market leader in Blockbuster video, which itself had disrupted the relatively new video rental industry that had begun mostly as one-off small businesses. Hastings and his cofounder tried to sell their start-up to Blockbuster for $50 million, but their offer was declined. At the time of the authors’ account, only one Blockbuster video store remained. Netflix disrupted the industry twice more, first by offering a streaming service and then by creating its own content. More generally, many of the largest companies in the world, such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tesla, are relatively new.

The only way something similar can happen in governments is by fighting and winning wars. Yes, the Cold War was “fought” mostly peaceably, and capitalism “defeated” communism. But within countries, even in the rare cases when new parties emerge and win, such as Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! in France, they inherit the entire governmental bureaucracy, and when it comes to sludge, even modest changes can be met with skepticism and resistance (especially, as Sunstein can attest, among lawyers, who sometimes insist that the law requires sludge). For people who are unwilling or unable to move to another country, the closest one can get to choosing one’s government is by picking the city or town in which one lives, but that town is just a part of the multilayer system above it. If the British or Italians or Dutch would rather have the government of Canada, New Zealand, or Switzerland they are out of luck. You cannot easily move from a sludge-pervaded country to one that is winning heroic battles against sludge.

All this means that progress on reducing sludge in government will likely be incremental. Sunstein held a position in the Obama administration in which he could take steps to reduce sludge. He did what he could; he wishes he had done much more. In the United States and elsewhere, too much sludge remains, and a lot can be done to reduce it. Shouldn’t we all get to work? Start with the sludge you create, for yourself and others?