Indians optimize for control while Americans optimize for convenience

When designing any system, there is a trade-off between convenience and security. Indians tend to optimize for security and control - our instinct is to lock down everything, while Americans tend to choose convenience.

I made this point in my blog post on why India's election system won't work in the US. The design choices that make our EVMs appropriate for India won't work in the US, as that nation expects much more convenience in its voting systems. India enthusiastically adopted chip and PIN cards (to the extent that it adopted cards at all) while Americans balked at the minor additional inconvenience of having to enter PINs.

Such examples are dime a dozen. Why does this difference exist? The first level answer is culture.

Culture

In our office cafeteria, there is a tea stall. One of the varieties it serves is ginger tea, which is pre-made and poured into a drum with a tap. To serve tea, one just needs to open tap and fill the cup. Making the other varieties of tea requires effort and skill on the part of the service staff. If we could make ginger tea self serve, it would free up the attendant’s capacity. When I suggested it, the objection was that people may just take it without paying. I pointed out that firstly, the optimization would free up the person’s time to keep an eye on the drum, and secondly, this is an office cafeteria, and ginger tea theft is unlikely to be a significant issue.

My guess is that this was an obvious optimization that the cafeteria vendor didn't think of because of the Indian cultural preference for optimizing for control. Culture is both an explanation and a non-explanation. When we say that X happens because there is a culture of X happening, it is a restatement of the problem rather than an explanation of it. We should ask why a culture of X exists. But the culture of X can continue even while the underlying reasons that resulted in the culture have gone away or weakened.

So we optimize for control as we have a culture of doing so, and Americans optimize for convenience as they have a culture of doing so, but how have our respective cultures come about?

My two explanations are, firstly, abundance and secondly, rule of law.

Abundance

Optimizing for convenience requires you to tolerate some waste. For example, offering free returns may be a good business strategy as it encourages more sales, but it is also somewhat wasteful. It is one thing for your head to the do the calculations of the cost of this waste versus the benefit of extra sales and profits and conclude that the trade-off is worth it. It is another thing to get your heart to accept the results of this calculation. The task gets easier when you have a mindset of abundance, which comes from living in a society with actual abundance. As evidence for this argument, consider that Indians not only enthusiastically adopted the culture of easy returns, but also introduced cash on delivery when it was good business to do so. Yes, perhaps foreign companies introduced easy returns to India, but CoD was introduced by Flipkart, a very Indian company. When objective conditions changed - in this case, when there was abundance (perhaps fuelled by VC money) we began optimizing for convenience rather than control.

Rule of Law

Optimizing for convenience will give scope for fraud and abuse. If you have the assurance that the fraudsters will be caught, you will be less inclined to spend too much on preventing fraud from happening and more inclined to allow convenience even if it results in some fraud. That explains why merchants were reluctant to adopt chip and PIN in the US, and also why customers expect and get easy card chargebacks when they dispute a transaction, even when the transaction occurred due to their carelessness - merchants find it profitable to refund customers rather than piss them off. Yes some people will take advantage of it and commit fraud, but effective law enforcement means that it will deter people enough so that this is not common.

As evidence for what happens when law enforcement breaks down, consider this news item. San Francisco has made petty thefts a misdemeanour with no jail time, and police are now reluctant to pursue them. As a result, petty theft has become an everyday occurrence, and some supermarkets have taken to keeping their items under lock and key. When the underlying causes break down, the culture changes quite quickly.

Culture Again

The underlying reasons are important, but they do their work through culture. There was a time when Indian software engineers visiting the US for short periods shared tips among themselves on how to abuse Walmart’s no-questions return policy - buy a pressure cooker, use it for less than 3 months, return it and get a full refund. I believe that as a result, Walmart’s return policies have gotten less liberal (I am not sure - I haven’t checked).

Now, while I am sure that when Walmart formulated its return policy it budgeted for some loss due to abuse, why didn’t such flagrant abuse take place earlier? I think that culture played a role - a culture of abundance probably meant that people didn’t really think of abusing it, till the thought occurred to people from another culture where gaming the system was the norm. (For a counterpoint, see the San Francisco case above, where the culture seems to have broken down quite quickly)

Another example - in Hyderabad, the traffic police have made a hobby of blocking off right turns as soon as they see some traffic through them. In saner jurisdictions, it would be possible to manage the traffic by installing a traffic light, but here, no one stops at traffic lights. So the city tries to manage traffic by blocking off the right turn, thereby making it less convenient, as they now have to take a U further ahead, and motorists and riders react by travelling on the wrong side, adding to the chaos.

To solve this, one is tempted to say that the traffic police should “enforce the rules strictly”, but it’s not as simple as that. It is not practical, or even possible to follow many of the rules that exist on paper. That is because the rules have been formulated without any thought to how they will be actually followed. The infrastructure needs to be designed in a way that the rules can be followed - how would you enforce lane discipline unless lane markings exist? The way to find out whether the rules are enforceable is to try to enforce them, get feedback (and pushback) and refine them. Increase in control has to go hand in hand with improvement in convenience.

But even the most easy-to-follow rules are impossible to enforce unless there is a culture of following them. In a law-abiding society, those who violate the rules are treated with contempt. There is a social norm that those people are monsters who endanger society, and ordinary people assist the police by reporting violations. How do we get there from a society where those who follow the rules are treated as idiots? In such a society, you will need much greater law enforcement capacity than a law-abiding one. You need a period of consistently and fairly enforcing the rules before you get a culture where abiding by the law is so ingrained in the psyche that you no longer need active enforcement.