Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka

Author:Jennifer Pahlka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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ALL THIS STACKS the deck in favor of those who already hold the most cards, which is why this moment in the evolution of government is meaningful to so many. The digital world has made things easier in so many other aspects of our lives that its potential to help with public services is tantalizingly clear.

I remember the two times I’ve refinanced my home mortgage. The first time, the application process took weeks of collecting documents, filling out forms, waiting to hear back about my options, choosing among them, and waiting again. It culminated in a multihour meeting for which a closing agent came to my house and walked me through signing a mound of papers half a foot high. The second time, just a few years later, I got curious about interest rates one night when I should have been going to sleep. I popped open my laptop and went to my bank’s website. I clicked here and there, and before I knew it I had submitted an application. Most of the screens I clicked through simply displayed what the bank already knew about me and my house (which was a lot) and asked me to confirm that the information was correct. Two weeks later, I signed some documents electronically and the deal was done.

It’s tempting to assume that simple, easy-to-use services are just solving simpler problems. Sometimes that’s true. But mortgages aren’t simple. Lending is a highly regulated business and banks must be sure to comply with hundreds of laws. Behind the scenes, a digital team at my bank had worked hard to make a complicated process easy for me.13 The internet made it possible to take various kinds of data input burdens off me, the user, and to present the choices I had to make in a way that was easy to understand. The bank also managed to do its part ethically, without hiding important information that I needed to know. Legal compliance was certainly an enormous part of that design process. But the lawyers would have played a supporting role. The competency that led the way was digital service design. In government, the roles are usually reversed. If a digital design competency even exists, it is too often in service of the lawyers, instead of the user.

It’s not surprising that I had access to a streamlined process (and therefore a smaller mortgage payment): the benefits of digital transformation have largely gone to the middle and upper classes. And had I had to endure the longer, more complicated refinancing routine a second time, I probably would have persisted through it. But many people with less free time and more stress do not persist in getting past such hurdles, even when there’s a benefit to them on the other end. The people most likely to pay the cost of outsize administrative burdens are often those who need help the most. Those who care about equity, then, must be all the more on guard against the kind of thinking that puts technical nuances of law ahead of what makes sense to a person.

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