Taking advantage of complexity

Powerful interests use complexity to hide their anti-social behaviour:

Since 2013, ProPublica has exposed how Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and other companies have resisted efforts to make tax preparation easier and less costly, including lobbying to ban the IRS from offering free, simple tax filing and deceiving customers who should qualify for the Free File product. Source

The evidence indicates that low-income Americans are not taking full advantage of government programs for a much more banal reason: we’ve made it hard and confusing. People very simply often don’t know about aid designated for them or are burdened by the application process. When it comes to increasing enrollment in social programs, the most successful behavioral adjustments have been those that simply raised awareness and cut through red tape and hassle. The High Cost of Being Poor, Matthew Desmond, New York Review of Books, 20 April

One of the advantages of the Social Policy Bond concept is its transparency. Policymakers would have to explicit about their intentions. So, for example, if they want to shovel billions of dollars from taxpayers and consumers to a small group of wealthy landowners who have devastated the environment, and helped impoverish developing countries, they would have to say so openly, instead of, as at present, waving their arms and mumbling about 'food security', 'saving the family farm', 'looking after the countryside', and relying on people's inevitably limited attention span. Likewise, as with poverty alleviation, it's not enough to put in place a few programmes with impressive-sounding titles that might be well meaning, but access to which is difficult for those without an abundance of time and energy; which is to say: those who need them most. Lack of transparency also allows politicians and bureaucrats to avoid accountability: if there are no explicit, verifiable goals, then success or failure are a matter of spin.