Tag: screen time

Public Policy: The SenKulkarni Household Edition

If you thought economics was hard, wait till you get to public policy.

Last week on Monday, I’d written about screen-time in the SenKulkarni household. If you’d like the TL;DR version here it is:

  1. We had a contest about who would have the least screentime between I, my wife and my daughter.
  2. Winner gets to choose what to do for Sunday lunch, while the loser has a horrific (personalized) punishment inflicted on them.
  3. I promised an update a week down the line.

And so here’s the update: we’ve learnt that designing interventions is tough.

  1. Our daughter simply parked her tablet in our car. Her personalized punishment was ugh vegetables in her lunchbox, and the thought filled her with such horror that she chose to forsake screen-time altogether. That’s the good news.
  2. The better news is that she finished one book, and got started on another. Since she’s not a bookworm, this is a particularly welcome development. (The Young Pandava series, if you’re curious.)
  3. My wife was trailing badly at the end of the first day, and she simply gave up and conceded defeat for the entire week. Lesson learnt.
  4. What lesson, you may ask. Well, if you design a policy, a very long time horizon probably won’t work. Seven daily contests might have been better than one weekly contest.
  5. Since she conceded defeat, she would have to live with our dog’s fur on her favorite sofa in the living room, for that was the punishment for her. She got around the issue by saying that she wouldn’t clean the sofa, but nor would she make tea in the morning.
  6. This is what comes of having two people who’ve been taught game theory in the same household. Pah. Designing incentives is tricky, folks!
  7. My screen-time went down by 20%, roughly speaking, this past week. But that’s not saying much, since it was pretty bad the week before. I simply had no incentive to reduce my screen-time once the contest was “over” after the first day.
  8. I’m not going to be in Pune for much of this week because of work, so we’ll get back to this contest with some tweaks next Monday.
  9. If, in the meantime, you have suggestions and tips, send ’em in.
  10. Navin tweeted about last week’s post, and got some fascinating responses. This one was my favorite:

11. Goodhart’s law is everywhere!

But in all seriousness, think about this:

This was a simple policy designed to get three people in one household to reduce their screen-times, and the first iteration has been a glorious failure. The next time you want to blame any government the world over for a poorly thought out public policy, do keep in mind that it is harder than it seems. Don’t get me wrong, blame ’em, make fun of ’em, and feel free to lament about how things never work around here.

But throw in a sprinkling of grudging respect for having tried at all in the first place 🙂

Incentives Matter, The SenKulkarni Household Edition

The other day, I, the wife, and the daughter were driving somewhere in the car. We stay near Baner Road in Pune, and with the ongoing Metro construction, and the top-notch condition of Pune’s roads, traffic was inching along at best.

And so I wondered how to pass the time.

I keep fiddling around with the home screen on my phone. The row of icons on the dock stays the same, the folders above it stays the same, but I like trying out different widgets every now and then. And one of the widgets that I had tried just that morning was a rather sobering one. It was the Digital Wellbeing widget.

Three hours isn’t, I suspect, all that bad. But that was on a Saturday. As you can see from the graph, Tuesday and Thursday were particularly bad days for me this past week – nearly six hours on both these days!

Now, in my defence, I read a fair bit on my phone. Feedly, Chrome and the Kindle app are all part of the six hours, so it isn’t quite as bad as all that. But, I must confess, I am being rather manipulative in my reporting. The biggest culprit is YouTube.

YouTube’s accursed algorithm has figured out that I like watching cricket, tennis and football videos, along with recipes. And so the damn thing will parade an endless list of videos for my viewing pleasure, and I will happily watch ’em all. And don’t even get me started on YouTube shorts.

My phone addiction, in other words, is a major problem, and my YouTube addiction is a rather large chunk of my phone addiction.

“So how about this”, I said by way of conversation in the car the other day. “How about we have a contest to see who has the highest amount of screentime between the three of us?”

“We can all check our stats, Monday through Saturday, both days included. The person who has the least amount of screentime can decide where we go to have lunch on Sunday afternoon.”

We’re big on celebratory Sunday meals in these parts. It’s usually either mutton at home, or pigging out at some suitably gourmandish restaurant. A lavish Sunday brunch, in other words.

This idea was met with wholehearted approval on part of the rest of the car’s population, and all would have been well if that’s where we had stopped.

But do I even deserve to call myself an economist if I don’t complicate a simple fun game?

Positive incentives are all well and good, but with the carrot should also come the stick. What about the person who has the most amount of screentime? What “punishment” should that person get?

And by the way, it’s not just because us economists don’t know when to stop. Negative incentives work better than positive ones (of course).

And so we spent a pleasant few minutes thinking about what punishment would work best for all three of us. And after some moments of mirth, this is what we have:

  1. If the daughter should end up having the most screen-time, she will have to take the most ugh vegetables ever in her school tiffin for three days running. Most ugh vegetables ever is an intensely subjective call, of course, and I’ll spare you the gory details. (We all agreed that karela would be taking things too far, if you were wondering).
  2. If the wife should end up having the most screen-time, we will remove a protective drape over her favorite piece of furniture in the living room. Said drape protects a particularly cozy sofa in our living room from being liberally festooned with our dog’s fur. I, the daughter and the dog are perfectly fine with fur on the sofa, but the wife isn’t. So for three long days, she can’t clean the sofa of all that fur, and nor can she cover it with a protective rug. Oh, the horror.
  3. And me? If it is me, then I have to make the first cup of chai in the morning, three days running. This is a horrific punishment, since I only take on a somewhat human form about ten minutes after the first cup of chai in the morning. And even that, my near and dear ones will tell you, isn’t a guarantee.

Phone calls are fine, they do not count towards screen time. Ordering groceries, ditto. But everything else does, and today onwards, we’re off to the races.

I’ll let you know come next Monday who won, promise.

But half a day into the contest, here’s where we stand:

  1. My daughter doesn’t even have her tablet with her. She’s kept it in our car, rather than at home.
  2. I’m at 19 minutes for the day (of which 11 minutes have been on the phone, so 8 in all)
  3. The wife was at 20 as of three hours ago.

God help that sofa.