Nudging me, nudging you

More self-service gov't, this time from the Isles. Self-service not for the citizen but for the government folks who do the serving.

After we were forced to step in and provide Germans with a how to guide to nepotism, we decided to look for other examples of how to establish a good self-service operation.

Our bar was high: it had to be outside of straight-up nepotism and outside of simple privatization. Anybody can sell of a state asset for peanuts, no, we were looking for a creative way to screw citizens.

The British "nudge unit" has the potential to open a new sector of self-service. The unit is officially called "The Behavioural Insight team". It was created by British Prime Minister David Cameron as a cabinet level outfit in 2010 to help people "make better choices".

The genius of it is that they are not resource intensive (no messy hardware, no vehicle fleet, no tangible goods) but use the talking sciences, to be specific, a psychometric test. The online test asked users to give graded answers to questions [we DID NOT make this up] such as "I never go out of my way to visit museums" and "I have not created anything of beauty in the last year".

You, dear reader, can see that such questions are obviously perfect for finding out "your strengths", as the government said.

In a second twist of genius, the nudgers got themselves a captive audience, namely, job seekers registered with the government EDD (jobcentre). To nudge the unemployed into taking the survey, they would get a letter threatening benefit cuts if they did not fill out the questionnaire.

The unit was such a success that the government announced it would be spun off into a private company. 

There was a last minute glitch when the developers of the test, Ohio based VIA institute told the nudge unit that they were using a "bad" version of the test, a shortened old version that had failed the scientific evaluation.
This was swiftly remedied when the VIA institute contacted the office of the Prime Minister. No emails of the new arrangements have been leaked, but it probably went something like this: you idiots need to stop using that version and lay off the threats to the unemployed for a while so we can privatize that thing and then get back to business.

And so it was done.

George Orwell would smile and agree that the nudge unit works. It was clearly a better choice for the unemployed to do the online test than lose their meager benefits.