Mental Mutilation, Part 3: The Government Doesn’t Get It
It’s true. I don’t want the government involved in providing education. It does not deserve the opportunity. When made, this declaration often rankles my conversational partners.
Yet, in comparing the hundred year progress of the major industries of our lives to progress in education, what greater indictment can be made?
I’m not quite done with incentive. Let’s leave education for a little while as we examine incentive just a little more in another area.
The Department of Motor Vehicles.
I’m going to give you a moment to let the chill run back out of your bones.
The DMV is a perfect example of an essential government service that fails to serve its users. In most regions of the United States, the opportunity to own or at least operate an automobile is a crucial part of being a productive individual. In order to enjoy these opportunity, a citizen must first pass through the gateway of the DMV.
You don’t need an inventory of the ways the DMV sucks at is mission. But just for the record: the lines are long. The service is often very slow. The facilities are rarely comfortable and are often in impressive states of disrepair. The staff are frequently unpleasant if not altogether assholes. Your chances of accomplishing a task at the DMV in less than two hours? Almost non-existent.
The cause, and our recurring theme, is incentive.
Everyone wants or needs to drive, so encouraging users to spend time at the DMV with pleasant facilities and efficient service is unnecessary. Paychecks are drawn through taxation and other compulsory fees, so being unpleasant to customers has no bearing on a clerk’s chances at having a job next year. You can draw dozens of cause/effect relationships, but the result is always the same: incentive is divorced from decision making. The DMV sucks because it has no reason not to.
When I lived in the state of New Mexico, that state began a fascinating project that draws my point into perfect focus.
New Mexico privatized their customer-facing DMV operations. What happened when incentive reconnected to the world of the DMV?
Customers were guaranteed in-and-out service within 15 minutes. The private offices were comfortable and clean. Clerks were friendly and genuinely interested in helping. Perhaps most telling, enormous signs plastered the walls sharing customer service phone numbers and encouraging anyone who felt even the slightest bit disappointed with the service to call and seek redress. In exchange for all this, customers paid a nominal “convenience fee.”
This was a shocking difference and well worth the money when compared to the government-managed alternatives.
So now I’m going to ask you. You really want the same guys who brought you the DMV to go to work on the brains of our children?