The Culture of Complicating Everything

At the entrance to almost any office building in Colombia, a notebook is waiting. A person arriving with a laptop must stop, write down the brand, the serial number, their name and the time, and only then can they move on toward the elevator. Nobody believes that this record protects anything, neither those who demand it nor those who comply with it, and yet it is repeated in companies, public agencies, universities and clinics across the country, every day, with an almost religious obedience. The ritual has no owner, nobody audits it and nobody remembers who decided it, yet nobody dares to abolish it, because eliminating a control looks like a personal risk, whereas keeping it costs nothing to the person who keeps it. That small notebook sums up, in one square meter of reception area, a deep trait of Colombian society: the conviction that what is difficult is, for that very reason, what is right.

This trait is cultural before it is legal. It is learned in offices, in schools and in families, and it is passed on without anyone putting it forward as a doctrine. That set of rules, formal ones such as laws and procedures and informal ones such as customs and the expectations people have of one another, is what development economics calls institutions. To speak of institutions is not to speak of buildings or agencies, but of the rules of the game that a society establishes to organize its coexistence and its economic activity, and that its members build and sustain every day. Whoever adds a requirement, a signature or a form usually believes, sincerely, that they are protecting someone. They were taught that difficulty equals seriousness and that control equals responsibility. Incentives back this up as well, because nobody is blamed for having added a requirement, but one is blamed if something slipped through for lack of it. Each decision, seen from the desk where it is made, looks reasonable and even prudent. The problem appears when the whole is considered, which is precisely what nobody is in charge of considering.

Mobility offers an example of how this logic operates. Colombia ranks very low in international comparisons of road and transport quality, and the State's usual response to that shortcoming is to restrict. Those who travel by car face circulation limits, those who travel by motorcycle face new demands, and those who bet on electric mobility find that burdens and obstacles are being discussed for it too. Lowering the speed limit on a deteriorated road is cheap and fast, whereas rebuilding it takes years, budget and political capital. For that reason the easy tool prevails again and again, and the underlying deficit, which is the lack of infrastructure and of quality public transport systems, is never resolved. Restriction stops being a complement to public works and becomes their substitute.

Security follows the same pattern. When crime is committed from motorcycles, it is simpler to regulate all motorcyclists than to dismantle the gangs that commit the crimes. The former are visible, registered and easy to fine, whereas the latter demand intelligence work, investigation and persistence. The result is that the burden falls on the honest majority, who work and get around by motorcycle, while the real problem remains almost untouched. The measure produces the feeling of doing something, and that feeling is usually enough for the policy to be considered accomplished.

The same happens with permits and taxes. To extend a home or open a small business, one must go through a succession of procedures, many of them with no clear relation to the common good, which often ask in physical form for information that already exists in digital form. Each requirement has its explanation and its defender, and none seems serious on its own. Taxes work similarly, because the stacking of levies along a single supply chain makes the final product far more expensive than any individual rate suggests. What is paid, moreover, is measured not only in money: it is measured in time, in paperwork, in lawyers and in private substitutes for what the State does not deliver, such as private security or prepaid health plans. The citizen ends up paying twice, once for the service not received and again for the one that must be obtained on one's own.

One only needs to imagine a person who decides to start a business to see how these barriers add up. That person must incorporate the company and meet its formal obligations, which consumes months. They must find premises and the permits to operate them. They must pay taxes that their customers will also pay in the final price. They must transport their product over roads in poor condition, with restrictions on every mode of transport, and must trust that it will arrive at its destination without falling victim to the insecurity that the State fails to control. None of those obstacles, taken in isolation, is insurmountable. The sum is. The country that results from multiplying that experience by millions of people is one where many projects are never born, where many agreements are never closed and where many teams never get to work together. And because those projects are invisible, nobody counts them or campaigns on their behalf.

This phenomenon is not merely an impression of those who suffer it, since the evidence is abundant and consistent. The reports of the Consejo Privado de Competitividad have documented for years the weight of red tape and transaction costs on the country's productivity. OECD comparisons place Colombia behind its members in several relevant dimensions. And the work of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who have studied the Colombian case with particular attention, offers the framework for understanding the root of the problem: institutions, that is, the rules a society gives itself, are extractive when they make it hard for ordinary people to invest, build and keep the fruits of their effort, and inclusive when they make exactly the opposite possible. A State that charges a lot, delivers little and complicates everything it touches fits rigorously into the first category.

The countries that escaped poverty in recent decades show the contrast. Singapore, South Korea, Ireland and, more recently, Poland and Estonia left poverty behind and reached high income levels. Their strategies were different, but they share the fact that opening a business, paying taxes or enforcing a contract became cheap, fast and predictable. Ireland is an especially illustrative case, since it went from being one of the poorest economies in Western Europe to ranking among the richest after opening its economy and making investment and entrepreneurship easier from the late 1980s onward. In them taxes are simple to understand and to pay, and the State concentrates its energy on making people's lives easier. Even in the Nordic economies, which levy high taxes, the difference lies in the design: simple systems, hard to evade and backed by services that citizens can see and use. There the citizen feels that the exchange is fair and therefore cooperates, whereas in Colombia the burden comes accompanied by friction and the friction feeds distrust, which in turn justifies new controls, in a vicious circle.

Hence the conclusion is uncomfortable, because it does not allow a convenient culprit. It would be easy to attribute everything to an elite that benefits from complexity, and in part that is true, since those who have lawyers and contacts absorb friction better than newcomers, so that complexity protects the established. But the full explanation is broader, because institutions are rules that society establishes and reproduces in its daily life, and not a matter reserved to the State. The habit of complicating is practiced by the official who designs the rule, the adviser who recommends it, the manager who demands one more procedure and the guard who jots down the serial number of the laptop. Each one believes that their contribution is small and that the benefit outweighs the cost, and that belief, repeated by millions of people, is what sustains underdevelopment. It is similar to what happens with an overfished lake, where each fisherman thinks one more net changes nothing, and the sum of all the nets ends up emptying it.

That is why the first step is to recognize the problem, in the same way as with any addiction, which is not overcome as long as the person suffering from it does not admit that it exists and that it does harm. As long as every Colombian remains convinced that the friction they generate is insignificant, nothing will change. Recognizing it also means resisting the temptation to justify each particular case with a reasonable exception, because that permanent justification is what keeps the habit alive. Each rule can be defended on its own, and that is precisely the trap: what must be assessed is the cumulative effect of all of them on the life of a person trying to work, start a business or simply move around their city.

The way out therefore requires changing what society understands by good government and good management. A short procedure, a clear rule and a service that works should be seen as signs of quality and not as a lack of rigor. In practice, this means that someone must have the explicit task of measuring the total cost of rules, that every new requirement must replace an earlier one and that useless controls, beginning with the notebook at the reception desk, must be removable without the person who decides it bearing the risk of doing so. It also means that those in positions of small authority, an official, a manager, a regulator, must ask of their own rules whether they really serve anyone. Change will not come from a single law or from a providential government. It will come, if it comes, from millions of small decisions taken in the opposite direction to the one taken today, and from the understanding that every Colombian, in their own corner, is part of both the problem and the solution.

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