Using 'default' options to improve governance

A year ago Lena Groeger, a journalist, developer, and designer at ProPublica, wrote two fascinating pieces titled “Too Human (Not) to Fail and Set It and Forget It: How Default Settings Rule the World”. Her first piece argued that smart design can keep you from scr**ing up. Imagine a coffee grinder that works only when the lid is on. “Even if you wanted to, you could NOT chop your fingers on the blade, because the ‘on’ switch for the grinder is triggered by closing the lid (as opposed to a normal blender, which leaves its blades easily accessible to stray fingers),” writes Groeger. Or fire doors that stay unlocked in an emergency. This concept has a lot of names, she says, but none is more delightful than the Japanese name for it, poka-yoke, which literally, “avoiding mistakes”. 

Extending this idea, her second article argues that in many ways we act by default (without even knowing it). “Defaults are the settings that come out of the box, the selections you make on your computer by hitting enter, the assumptions that people make unless you object, the options easily available to you because you haven’t changed them.” Human nature is to live with whatever defaults they have been set on. Examples include default temperature in the fridge, some default settings on cellphones, or default choice of browser (in 2002 Google did a $50-million deal with AOL to be the default search engine. The rest is history.) At a more general level, default settings can be used to improve social behaviour such as saving more.

A promising area of applying default settings is using them to improve governance. Governance has many dimensions. One of the most important ones is to reduce friction between the government and us, the citizens. What if the default setting inside the government is such that approvals of various kinds get auto generated, if the department concerned does not object to an application for approval within a time period? What if the pension of a retired employee gets auto deposited in the pensioner’s account a few days after retirement, with the onus remaining on the department to raise any objection within a few specific days? Or compensation/government dues of different kinds are automatically triggered if the department concerned does not raise an objection.  Or, if the department has not acted on a valid reply which was given in response to an objection. This will benefit thousands of voiceless and faceless people waiting for years to get their pension or compensation or other dues because of someone somewhere is sitting on their files. I can think of many others. Here is one that fits the season — every citizen gets a rebate from municipal or road tax if a satellite survey establishes that potholes occupy more than a certain percentage road space of the main arteries.

What I am suggesting here is quite different from “nudge” — using behaviorial cues to get people to do socially useful stuff. In a piece published here in late January 2016, titled Policymaking for the Lazy, Selfish and Vain I had argued that humans are essentially lazy (we do not want to spend time and effort to learn something new), vain (the explosive growth of social media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc., owe their success to our vanity), and selfish (we quickly calculate what is our immediate return from a new idea and whether it will offer a higher return than the cost or time we are asked to spend on it.) Policymaking can be more effective if these human traits can be used positively — save more, stop littering, recycle more, go out and vote, and so on. This is what the UK did with a “nudge unit” housed inside the Prime Minister’s Office. I noticed a few months after my piece, coincidentally, the NITI Aayog announced that a nudge unit would be set up in India.

But nudge is to get people to do things that are socially desirable. I am talking of getting the government to do pro-citizen stuff through embedded default options. People are lazy, vain, and selfish everywhere and all governments can use best nudge practices to goad them. But governance quality varies wildly. West European and North American countries deliver better governance than Asian, African, and South American ones. In the latter, the state is unresponsive, extortive, and often cruel. Since PM Narendra Modi is showing no interest in living up to his pre-campaign promise of “minimum government”, it’s time for default options to force governance to be pro-citizen as nudge makes the citizen do social good. Also, since the interface between the government and citizens is mainly in cities (corporations), towns (municipalities), and villages (zilla parishads and panchayats), the experimentation must be done in the states, not (ironically) in a building that was once called Yojana Bhawan.
 

The writer is the editor of www.moneylife.in

Twitter: @Moneylifers