'Serenity Now': The Annoyance Economy? We Cantstandya

Seinfeld was famously a show about “nothing”: a rental car counter that took the reservation but somehow didn’t have a car, an entire episode spent waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant, a soup line with rules nobody agreed to. The joke was that none of it really mattered.

Now, thirty years later, a whole business model has grown up around exactly that kind of friction. Today’s little indignities — that $20 “convenience fee,” the hour on hold with customer service, the health insurance paperwork designed to make you give up — do matter. We call it the Annoyance Economy, and it’s costing American families more than $165 billion in wasted time and money each year.

There was no greater student of the Annoyance Economy than George Costanza. So when Jason Alexander invited Project 2029’s Chad Maisel and Stanford economist Neale Mahoney onto his podcast, Really? No, Really?, it felt like home. They spent an hour with Jason and his co-host Peter Tilden on why so much of modern life is built to wear you down: why the unsubscribe button is buried, why pressing zero no longer gets you a human, why every airline and insurance company seems intent on making your day more irritating.

This isn’t trivial. It works out to more than $1,200 a year for the typical family — money out of the grocery budget and hours stolen from a weekend. But American politics has never quite caught on. We spend our time on the big fights, as we should, and then we yada yada right past the part of life that drives people crazy.

That’s why one of Project 2029’s early ideas was a plan to take on the Annoyance Economy. It reflects what we’re trying to do: put forward big, credible ideas on the biggest challenges we face, and bring the problems that never make it into the debate onto the front burner. As we laid out in Newsweek: we need bold plans on housing, health care, and AI – and Project 2029 will be delivering them. But we also need to say out loud that it shouldn’t take four calls to fix a routine billing error.

There are signs the Annoyance Economy is catching on. It’s been picked up by the New York Times, USA Today, Fortune, and NPR’s Planet Money, among others. And last week we wrote for The States Forum on the part of this that doesn’t require waiting for Washington: states have the authority to ban junk fees, establish click-to-cancel rules, and cut down the insurance paperwork.

The difference between a TV show and our present day is that nobody wrote these scenes to be funny. Rather, they were designed, intentionally, by companies who profit from them. That’s not nothing–it’s a whole business model, and it’s past time we do something about it.

Check out the conversation here. Giddyup!

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