Paperwork burdens, “sludge,” reduces access to important licenses, programs, & benefits; its defenses turn out to be more attractive in principle than in practice; a form of cost-benefit analysis is essential

Sunstein, Cass R., Sludge and Ordeals (November 20, 2018). Duke Law Journal, Forthcoming. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3288192

Abstract: In 2015, the United States government imposed 9.78 billion hours of paperwork burdens on the American people. Many of these hours are best categorized as “sludge,” reducing access to important licenses, programs, and benefits. Because of the sheer costs of sludge, rational people are effectively denied life-changing goods and services; the problem is compounded by the existence of behavioral biases, including inertia, present bias, and unrealistic optimism. In principle, a serious deregulatory effort should be undertaken to reduce sludge, through automatic enrollment, greatly simplified forms, and reminders. At the same time, sludge can promote legitimate goals. First, it can protect program integrity, which means that policymakers might have to make difficult tradeoffs between (1) granting benefits to people who are not entitled to them and (2) denying benefits to people who are entitled to them. Second, it can overcome impulsivity, recklessness, and self-control problems. Third, it can prevent intrusions on privacy. Fourth, it can serve as a rationing device, ensuring that benefits go to people who most need them. In most cases, these defenses of sludge turn out to be more attractive in principle than in practice. For sludge, a form of cost-benefit analysis is essential, and it will often argue in favor of a neglected form of deregulation: sludge reduction. Various suggestions are offered for new action by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the Paperwork Reduction Act; for courts; and for Congress.

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My comment:

This was the most cited legal and constitutional scholar in the US, almost as much as the next two guys combined (between 2009 and 2013)... It is difficult to overstate how harmful has been the kind of theories Mr Sunstein supported in his work for the previous federal president, justifying in many occasions laws and regulations of great cost with abandon. Partially compensating this, he acknowledges in a paper devoted for the first time to law/regulations costs and how unfair they are, that:

1  the costs of paperwork are enormous; 2  rational people are effectively denied life-changing goods and services; 3  the problem is compounded by the existence of behavioral biases, including inertia, present bias, and unrealistic optimism; 4  defenses of paperwork burden are specious (are more attractive in principle (!) than in practice); 5  a form of cost-benefit analysis is essential, and 6   analysis will often argue in favor of paperwork burden reduction, "neglected form of deregulation."

Welcome to sanity, all of you guys that most of the time payed so little attention to regulation costs and the rights of the people, and how our cognitive defects, our biases, make lots of regulatory actions not only unworkable, but damaging in big ways.