Nobody defends this in a room. Nobody signs off on it. It happens in the space between a decision and its consequences, which is the space where most institutional damage occurs.
I have sat through many board discussions on capital allocation. I have never once seen a board paper on attention allocation.
Every other input is priced, argued over, and defended by someone whose name is on it. Capital has a cost of capital. Space has a rent. Staff have salaries that a person has to justify. The hours an institution takes from the people it serves, in forms and queues and repeat submissions and documents that prove what a prior document already proved, are taken at zero recorded cost.
Which should be surprising.
In every other part of an enterprise, we take it as settled that an unpriced resource will be overused. It is the oldest result in the discipline. Yet the one resource an institution draws freely from the public, without a meter, has been quietly assumed to be consumed responsibly.
It isn't.
And the wasted time turns out to be the smaller half of the problem.
What the absence does
The real cost is what an unmeasured burden does to an institution's judgment about people.
When a benefit goes unclaimed, when a form comes back incomplete, when someone eligible fails to enrol, the institution has to explain the result to itself. It has exactly one set of numbers with which to do so. That set contains no entry for what was asked. So the explanation assembles itself out of whatever is left on the ledger, which is the applicant.
An incomplete form becomes carelessness. A missed deadline becomes disorganisation.
None of this requires anyone in the building to hold the public in contempt. It requires only that the accounts be incomplete in one particular direction, and that intelligent people do what intelligent people always do, which is reason carefully from the evidence available to them.
An organisation that does not measure the burden it imposes will reliably attribute the consequences of that burden to the character of the people bearing it.
The rest is arithmetic.
The arithmetic
The US tax authority once wrote to people who had already filed a return and already been told they were owed a credit they had not claimed. Complex materials cut take-up by six percentage points. A longer worksheet cut it by four. Simply showing people the amount of money involved raised it by eight.
Nothing about those people changed between one version of the letter and another. Only the asking changed.
Across 51 field experiments, the interventions that actually move money are the ones that reduce what is demanded of the applicant. And the government's own accounting puts unclaimed authorised benefits above $140 billion a year, against paperwork running to roughly 10.5 billion hours.
Money authorised and not delivered is an accounting fact. It requires no theory of the mind.
That matters more than it appears, because the theory of the mind is contested. The scarcity research that began with Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao in 2013 has spent years in a replication dispute. The claims about attention and distorted trade-offs have largely held. The stronger claim, that poverty measurably reduces cognitive capacity, remains unsettled.
None of that touched the arithmetic. It damaged the argument anyway, because the argument had been made in the wrong currency.
Where this actually lives
Everything above concerns public institutions. Nothing in the mechanism is specific to them.
A board approves a new internal reporting requirement. Two hours a week, four hundred people. Forty thousand hours a year.
The paper that goes to that board will carry the software licence and the salary of the analyst who reads the output. It will not carry the forty thousand hours. There is no field on the form for it, no committee that owns it, and no individual whose performance is measured against it.
Eighteen months later, the same board is asking why execution has slowed, why the strong people in operating roles are leaving faster than the strong people in corporate roles, why a strategy everyone endorsed produced so little movement. Nothing available to that board can connect any of it back to the decision. So it reaches for the explanation that is available, which usually concerns the calibre of management.
The same conversation is happening one level down, about the level below that.
Regulators impose on boards. Boards impose on management. Management imposes on the operating line. The operating line imposes on the customer. At every step the party issuing the demand books the benefit while the party receiving it absorbs the cost, and at every step the resulting failure gets read as a fact about the people one rung lower.
Nobody in that chain is behaving unreasonably. Each request, on its own, is modest and defensible and would survive any challenge you put to it. The burden is created entirely by the aggregate, and the aggregate is the one thing no participant is positioned to see.
Which is also why the standard remedies disappoint so consistently. Financial literacy programmes, compliance training, onboarding modules, change management workshops. Every one of them answers the problem by adding to the account it was meant to relieve. Attending the session is itself a claim on the time the person did not have.
We keep prescribing more asking as the cure for too much asking.
The wider lesson
There is something here about how arguments get built.
The case for simpler systems could always have rested on arithmetic. It was made from psychology instead, because psychology carried more authority in the room. Findings about the mind persuade in a way that a spreadsheet does not.
The price of borrowing that authority is that you inherit its error bars. When the finding wobbled, the argument wobbled with it, though nothing underneath had moved.
Most positions worth holding have a durable support and a persuasive support. They are rarely the same support. We lead with the persuasive one, and find out much later that we staked everything on the weaker of the two.
The test
There is an exercise available to any institution that wants it.
Take what you ask of the people you serve. Price it at their own hourly earnings. Carry it on the income statement for a single quarter.
Nothing about the organisation would change.
Only what it believes about the people it serves.
Institutions measure the cost of answering with real precision. They almost never measure the cost of asking.
You will be asked for something tomorrow. A form, a verification, a document you have already provided once. Somebody decided that was worth your time, and made that decision without ever knowing what your time cost, because nothing in their system was built to tell them.
The question worth carrying is how many of the things we believe about people were arrived at the same way, by counting one side of an exchange, and filing the remainder under character.
Sources: Bhargava and Manoli, American Economic Review (2015). Meta-analysis of take-up field experiments, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (2026). US Office of Management and Budget, Information Collection Budget and Tackling the Time Tax. Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao, Science (2013), and the PNAS replication exchange (2021 to 2023).
