This piece originally appeared in Commonplace.
Imagine you’re on an automated phone line, selecting options on a phone tree as you struggle to navigate an opaque menu in an effort to connect to the person who can resolve the reason you called. Such struggle and tedium just to connect to a human is a quintessential American consumer experience. No one enjoys the process, but it hardly seems like the end of the world.
But these types of opaque systems also exist in the public sector, on larger scales, and with far more damaging consequences. For example, the project permitting process—what allows companies to build anything—is filled with laws whose application prolongs projects to no end. New projects can be endlessly delayed by endangered animals that don’t even exist. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a mandatory system of environmental review, can delay new builds for years and subject would-be builders to thousands of pages in paperwork with little to no explanation. New York City’s recent environmental review for congestion pricing involved years of work and thousands of pages to be reviewed.
What connects the automated phone tree to NEPA? Both of them are what Dan Davies would call accountability sinks; mechanisms that siphon accountability out of systems, leaving outsiders struggling to discover the responsible parties when those systems fail. In The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind, Dan Davies undertakes a journey to figure out how decision-making systems have created a world of unintended consequences and how attempts to simplify complex systems instead led those systems to go haywire.
Continue reading in Commonplace.
