Get the latest tech news
That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose
Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.”
In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. Rather than mere inefficiencies, the authors argue, a number of these obstacles are deliberate policy tools that discourage participation in programs such as Medicaid, keep people from voting, and limit access to social welfare.
Or read this on Hacker News
