The Annoyance Economy

by Greg Rosalsky

Imagine no more annoying robocalls. No more spam texts. No more hidden fees. No more jumping through hoops to cancel subscriptions or file an insurance claim.

A group of Democratic policy veterans believes that daily annoyances like these have become a real economic problem. They even have a name for it: “the annoyance economy.” Taking it on is one plank in a broader governing agenda they're assembling for a future Democratic president. They're calling it “Project 2029.”

Sound familiar?

If you followed politics at all in 2024, you probably heard about Project 2025. Released by The Heritage Foundation, it laid out a conservative policy blueprint for a second Trump administration. Democrats attacked the project nonstop as extreme, and Trump distanced himself from it on the campaign trail. But what had looked like an election liability became a governing asset: The Trump administration came into office with a ready-to-go policy agenda and quickly began pursuing many of Project 2025’s proposals.

Kent Nishimura / Getty Images

That experience apparently left an impression on the other side of the aisle. Project 2029 aims to give a future Democratic president a similarly ready-to-go governing blueprint. And I recently learned that a former classmate of mine, Chad Maisel, is the executive director of the effort, so I called him up. Maisel previously served as a special assistant to President Biden on the White House Domestic Policy Council.

“I think the lesson from Project 2025,” Maisel says, “is just the importance of preparation.” He wants a future Democratic president to “have a bookshelf full of really bold, transformational ideas” that are ready to be deployed on their first day in office.

Project 2029 is still in its early stages. They’ll be releasing proposals on a rolling basis over the next year or so. Much of what they’ve previewed so far is what you’d probably expect from Democrats in today’s economy: ideas to lower child care costs, make health care and housing more affordable, reduce energy bills, protect kids online.

But the Project 2029 proposal that immediately caught our attention was the one to take on the annoyance economy.

The annoyance economy is a catch-all term referring to a slew of frustrating business practices that waste our time and money. Think hidden fees that appear only at checkout. Jumping through hoops to cancel a subscription. Mind-numbing insurance paperwork to get your health insurer to pay a claim. Waiting on hold for an hour. Robocalls. Spam texts. Feckless AI phone agents who make you miss even the rudest human support agents.

Maisel has been developing policies to take on business practices like these with Neale Mahoney, a Stanford economist who directs the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (Mahoney appeared in a Planet Money episode, “The Subscription Trap,” about the rise of the subscription-based business model and the shady ways companies make it hard for consumers to cancel them).

Together, Maisel and Mahoney estimate that the annoyance economy costs American families “at least $165 billion” worth of time and money every year.

They believe that these daily annoyances have become such a big deal that they’re an important policy concern for a future president, and that a campaign to end these practices will prove to be a political winner.

Peter Dazeley / Getty Images

The Economics of Everyday Hassles

The idea to take on the annoyance economy didn’t begin with Project 2029. It began a few years ago, back in the Biden White House.

Maisel was then at the Domestic Policy Council, and Mahoney was at the National Economic Council.

They worked together on a federal rule targeting junk fees, where companies advertise one price but then tack on mandatory charges later in the transaction. That work helped lead to, in 2024, the Federal Trade Commission implementing a rule that banned junk fees for hotels, vacation rentals, and live events.

The initiative to take on junk fees proved to be popular. President Biden even devoted a sizable chunk of his 2024 State of the Union Address to his administration's campaign against junk fees.

“And so we started kind of poking around on other issues that we thought would similarly strike a chord with Americans and really take on problems that people are suffering through quietly in their daily lives, but that never seem to be acknowledged by people in power,” Maisel says.

That work led to President Biden’s “Time is Money” initiative, a slew of proposed federal rules and regulations to end headache-causing business practices and save Americans time and money. This initiative was unveiled in the late summer of 2024 (you can read the Planet Money newsletter’s coverage of it back then).

Most of the proposals in the Time is Money initiative never ended up taking effect. Maisel blames the short length of time between the unveiling of the initiative and President Biden leaving office — and fierce opposition from affected industries.

“American companies derive big profits from these painful interactions — and fight to protect them,” Maisel and Mahoney write in a new policy brief about the annoyance economy. “The airline industry spent millions of dollars opposing a new rule that would have entitled passengers to cash refunds for significant delays (the Trump administration scrapped the rule in November 2025). Telecom industry groups sued to block the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) proposed “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required companies to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up.”

In their new proposal, Maisel and Mahoney call for a series of rules and regulations aimed at making our daily interactions with companies less frustrating.

They propose. for example, creating a standardized claims system to make it easier for Americans to file insurance claims online. They also want to end the widespread use of “prior authorization” — when insurance companies require patients to receive company approval before getting certain tests, prescriptions, and procedures. “It should be replaced with independent clinical bodies that have no financial stake in denial decisions and would review only a narrow list of high-abuse services,” they write.

Maisel and Mahoney also propose that the government crack down on scam, marketing, and robo- calls; end a loophole that has allowed an onslaught of political fundraising texts; implement “click-to-cancel rules,” which make it easy to cancel subscriptions; restore the ability to press zero to talk to a customer agent; and expand rules against junk fees, among other ideas.

Their Case For Government Intervention

But wait a second! Why do we need to get the government involved in a lot of this? If companies annoy customers, why don’t customers just… take their business elsewhere? Then, boom, maybe the market would fix this issue itself.

That’s pretty much what the textbook model of the free market would predict. In it, consumers have plenty of information about products and services — and plenty of shopping choices. If a company uses shady or annoying business practices, they can just leave. Don’t companies have strong incentives not to annoy consumers?

Maisel and Mahoney point to at least three reasons why real-world markets behave differently than old-school economics would predict.

The first is a lack of vigorous competition in many industries. “We're seeing heightened concentration in some of these industries and folks really don't have that many choices,” Maisel says.

The second is a lack of information. When people are shopping for a health insurance plan or a bank account, they often don’t know what they’re gonna get. It’s hard to know beforehand what, for example, the experience of canceling a subscription will be, or how easy an insurer makes it to file a claim.

The last — and perhaps the most interesting — reason comes from behavioral economics. Consumers have cognitive biases that can sometimes encourage companies to pursue annoying practices. Mahoney says, for example, many consumers tend to be myopic — being laser-focused on things like the upfront sticker price of a good or service, but not thinking about the overall cost and experience of dealing with a company.

Psychological quirks like these can create what Maisel refers to as a race to the bottom. Mahoney explored this dynamic in an academic paper about junk fees. In 2014, the ticket reseller StubHub began displaying the full price of tickets upfront in response to consumer complaints about them taking on extra charges. But customers apparently didn’t reward StubHub for its efforts. Stubhub’s competitors “did not follow StubHub’s switch to all-in, up-front pricing, and StubHub lost significant market share to rivals who continued to offer lower up-front prices and back-end additional fees,” Mahoney writes. “In fall 2015, StubHub concluded it had no choice and reverted to a model of showing the lower base price and adding back-end fees at check-out.”

There is now an FTC rule against using deceptive fees when selling tickets for live events. And, in April, the FTC announced that StubHub would refund $10 million to consumers to settle allegations that it violated that rule.

Another potential ingredient in whether a company annoys customers is its business model. Mahoney says the annoyance economy tends to be less of a problem in sectors with lots of repeat transactions, and companies have to earn the same customer’s business again and again. Take Amazon. It makes returns relatively easy, probably because "that's gonna give somebody confidence to make additional purchases there." If Amazon made returns painful, customers would learn that through repeated interactions with the company, and they might decide to shop somewhere else. Amazon has an incentive to play the long game and make their customer experience feel frictionless.

But many areas of the economy don’t involve a lot of repeat transactions. Health insurance is a good example. Hopefully you won’t have to discover what it’s like to get a life-threatening disease that requires expensive treatment, Mahoney says. But if you do, that is often a once-in-lifetime thing, not something many consumers will encounter until it’s too late.

Whether you agree with their proposed solutions or not, Maisel and Mahoney are making an unusual economic argument: that everyday hassles in the private sector aren't just annoyances — they're a real economic cost. And, Maisel says, he believes they also carry a civic cost, leaving people with less time, less trust, and less energy to participate in their communities.

Of course, that argument doesn't stop at the private sector. Anyone who's spent an afternoon at the DMV or trying to navigate a building permit office knows the public sector has its own annoyance economy.

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