Trash
Public policy is often seen as a clean, technocratic endeavor: design a smart rule, pass it through the proper legislative channels, and voilà—a better society emerges. In practice, though, implementing a new policy is anything but clean. Especially when a policy has never been tried before, the gap between theory and lived experience opens wide. After all, a policy doesn’t land on a spreadsheet—it lands on people. There are risks and consequential asymmetries.
The beauty of public policy lies in its ambition. It aims to improve collective life—cleaner air, safer streets, and more equitable systems. But new policies face the same fundamental challenge as experimental drugs: they’re unproven, and their side effects emerge only after the fact. Unlike product design, public policies have the potential to disrupt routines, shift power, create winners and losers, and challenge social equilibrium.
But designing a brand new policy is only half the battle. The real difficulty lies in implementation and execution. Policies don’t enter a vacuum—they arrive in communities filled with habits, resistance, and expectations. When a new policy rolls out, someone inevitably bears the brunt of its friction: the unintended consequences, operational gaps, and cultural misreadings. One of the thorniest questions in policymaking, then, becomes: who should that someone be?
Consider a provocative example: a policy proposal to remove all trash cans from a designated urban zone. On the surface, it seems counterintuitive—why eliminate infrastructure that supports cleanliness? The policy hinges on a subtle behavioral wager. If there is no option to dispose of waste publicly, perhaps people will produce less of it or carry it with them until they find a bin outside the zone. It’s a radical act of environmental design. By removing the option to litter, the policy attempts to reshape the habit of waste itself.
But the outcome depends entirely on human behavior. If residents internalize the ethic—if they choose to comply—the system might thrive. But if they reject the premise or find it inconvenient, the results could be worse than the original problem. Without bins, trash may end up on sidewalks, in gutters, or tossed into subway grates. The public realm risks becoming a dumping ground rather than a shared asset.
The paradox at the heart of policy experimentation: the same intervention can produce wildly different outcomes depending on where—and on whom—it lands. In high-trust communities, where social norms are strong and shared responsibility is the default, the absence of trash cans might indeed lead to tidier streets. In low-trust areas, where engagement with public goods is already weak, the same policy may invite chaos. Every policy embeds a theory of human behavior, and when that theory is wrong, it doesn’t just fail. It exposes how little we understand the very people we’re trying to serve.
Policies are not just rules; they are mirrors of our values. They reflect our assumptions about human nature, our expectations of each other, and the strength—or fragility—of our civic fabric. Removing trash cans might seem like a benign experiment, but it raises a deeper question: Can we engineer responsibility through design?
Ultimately, the success of any public policy depends not only on its performance but also on how the public perceives it.
