Convenience has a massive effect on your behavior. You rarely shop in your favorite store, eat in your favorite restaurant, or visit your favorite place. Why not? Because doing so is typically inconvenient. They’re too far away, or not open at the right hours, so you settle for second-best or third-best or tenth-best. You usually don’t switch your cell phone company, your streaming service, or your credit card just because a better option comes along. Why not? Because switching is not convenient. Students even pass up financial aid because they don’t feel like filling out the paperwork. Why not? You guessed it: Because paperwork is inconvenient.
In politics, however, almost no one talks about convenience. When governments mandate extra privacy or safety or consumer protection, crowds cheer and pundits sing. From now on, you’ll be clicking a few extra boxes a day. From now on, you’ll have to stand ten feet away from the next person at the pharmacy. From now on, you’ll have to sign your name and initials twenty times on a mortgage contract. Privately, almost everyone thinks each of these is a pain in the neck. Yet almost no one goes on TV and self-righteously objects, “These high-minded ideals are going to be awfully inconvenient.”
What’s going on? The Panglossian explanation is that there’s almost no political resistance to the inconvenience of extra privacy, safety, and consumer protection because these benefits are clearly worth the loss of convenience. Yet that’s hard to reconcile with the enormous effect of convenience on our actual behavior. Furthermore, we routinely complain about inconvenience one-on-one, or with trusted friends. When people are speaking off the record, I’ve heard at least a hundred times as many complaints about inconvenience as I’ve heard about lack of privacy, safety, or consumer protection.
How can we explain this chasm between daily life and political rhetoric? By appealing to Social Desirability Bias. Quick version: When the truth sounds bad, people respond with lip service – especially where there’s a sizable audience. People occasionally voice ugly truths one-on-one, or with trusted friends. Normally, however, they sugarcoat. If “what sounds good” conflicts with “what works well,” we usually respond with hypocrisy; we say what sounds good, then do what works well.
In politics, alas, words rule. From the viewpoint of any individual voter, elections are surveys. As a result, demagogues run the world. They gain power by swearing fealty to lofty ideals, not weighing costs and benefits. And when lofty ideals imply serious inconvenience – as they sadly do – the demagogues impose serious inconvenience.
Why doesn’t a rival politician gain power by promising to make convenience great again? Because “convenience” sounds petty and ignoble. People love convenience. They happily sacrifice other values for convenience. But they don’t want to acknowledge this fact – or affiliate with those who do.
My favorite Dead Kennedys album is called “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death.” The music is great, but the message is not. The band heaps scorn on our wicked First World society for placing immense weight on the superficial consumerist value of convenience.
The reality, however, is more complicated. Yes, we long for a convenient world. A little inconvenience can ruin your entire day. No one, however, will ever go to the barricades for convenience. In fact, we’re ashamed to admit how much convenience matters for our quality of life. The market mercifully sells us the convenience we want without judging us. Government, in contrast, takes us at our word – and robs us of precious convenience bit by bit, day by day.
READER COMMENTS
Charlie
Jan 14 2021 at 10:50am
What about politicians who argue for “fewer regulations”? Can’t those words act as a proxy for more convenience?
Fazal Majid
Jan 14 2021 at 12:52pm
Yes, convenience matters, as does the power of defaults. That is precisely why the EU or California are changing the defaults, so that privacy-invading behavior by websites incurs a convenience cost that will cause a number of users to flee, thus providing an incentive to stop the practice, or why gun-control advocates want registration paperwork and cooling-off periods. It is also why companies that try to bury the “Reject everything” button and not give it the same prominence as the convenient “Accept everything” one are going to be fined for noncompliance. It is why cigarettes are kept behind the counter with age verification.
In short, governments are not the simpletons libertarians and economists make them out to be, and inconvenience is just a Pigovian tax on behavior that is frowned upon, but an outright ban is not deemed advisable.
robc
Jan 14 2021 at 2:59pm
In other words,
Simon
Jan 14 2021 at 1:34pm
Convenience is often like a donut. Great in the moment, not so much 20 years later when your waistline has expanded and you’re pre diabetic.
I think the real reason we don’t typically rail against inconvenience is that most of us are aware it’s often a faustian bargain.
Filling out the form now is inconvenient yes, but being evicted from your student residence a couple of months down the line will be far more inconvenient.
Yes, if it’s possible to get the same outcome with less inconvenience, that’s great and we should go for it.
Convenience / inconvenience in themselves however can’t be considered as good or bad, it all depends upon the context.
Student of Liberty
Jan 21 2021 at 3:53am
In my experience with several European and Asian countries, “less inconvenience” is not on the agenda of any government who loves regulation. Cases of relatively convenient encounters with the administration exist but they are rare and usually not in Europe (except Switzerland but they are out of the EU). I am not familiar with the US on that.
Phil H
Jan 14 2021 at 7:46pm
There’s an interaction between caring about something and convenience. When you care about something, convenience almost ceases to matter. In fact, convenience can almost be a negative. People like going through a process to get something they care about. It reinforces how important the thing is to them (and broadcasts it to others). But convenience is pretty decisive when you make choices about all those things that you don’t care about. And that’s most things – the modern world is massively complex, and we’re all forced to deal with stuff that we don’t care about/find distasteful all the time.
But decisions are made by those who show up, so how issue X works gets decided by people who do care about issue X. To take an imaginary example: People who care about road safety don’t mind driving 10mph slower, and they’re the ones who turn up to vote. Obviously this imposes a convenience cost on the rest of us.
So, social desirability may play a role, but other processes help to produce the same outcome, too.
Thomas Hutcheson
Jan 15 2021 at 5:41am
Let me suggest an alternative. When people gripe about inconvenience they are just providing data points about features of a policy. When they fail to then adduce inconvenience as a reason to oppose the policy, they are just being policy analysts, not coming up with ways to achieve policy goals, of which they presumably approve, with less inconvenience.
Everybody hates taking off their shoes at TSA check points, but few connect that with decentralizing airport security to airports that could come up with better tradeoffs between security and convenience.
Weir
Jan 17 2021 at 10:40pm
There’s a famous quote from one British PM: “If people want a sense of purpose, they should get it from their archbishops. They should not hope to receive it from their politicians.”
But that’s going back to 1963.
If you’ve been cloistered for years in a university and never set foot inside a church then there’s a good chance you believe, fervently, and with intolerant zeal, in the pronouncements of someone like Jeremy Corbyn instead.
Liam
Jan 20 2021 at 12:04am
Bryan, you might be familiar with this old Scott Alexander screed from 2009, but I will leave it here anyway: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences
Comments are closed.