Speaker 3
was three unlined pages, and i got to the end and clicked finish. And i
Speaker 2
sent an email to the person who had been pestering me to fill out the damned form and
Speaker 3
said, i'm done. Nd
Speaker 2
the next day, i get an email from her saying, no, you're not done, isy.
Speaker 3
What do you meansays, well,
Speaker 2
actually, when you click finish, you have to then go back to the first page and press submit. Now to me, finish kind of means you're done. So this version is not evil. This is just pure incompetence. Now,
Speaker 1
how much of this do you attribute to what you economists call the principal agent problem, that the people who are making the decision or the rule or whatever, are not the ones who would benefit or be hurt by it? I
Speaker 2
am not sure. I think the much bigger problem
Speaker 3
is what we call curse of knowledge, which
Speaker 2
is the idea that once u o know something, it's hard for you to put yourself into the position of someone who doesn't. It's hard to explain. And people who write code, first
Speaker 3
of all, are doing it on the next generation computers super fast,
Speaker 3
they know how everything works. The
Speaker 1
home mortgage market, as you write nudge, is highly decentralized and competitive. And therefore, if one reads what economists generally say about centralization and competition, you'd think that there'd be incentive to make mortgage information transparent and user friendly. But as anyone who's ever gotten a mortgage knows, the process is not transparent and user friend so this is a case where there's tons of sludge. A lot of people make poor decisions. Why has a decentralized and competitive market not solved a problem like that? I mean, the synic in me just says, the lobby is better than the regulators.