The Fallacy of Efficiency

I spend most of my time enmeshed in a bureaucratic structure that grew out of a feudal guild system – that’s just the reality of college. Students don’t see the works behind the scuffed and rumpled surface, don’t really get a sense for all of the reports, updates, social niceties and maneuvering that’s just really necessary to make the whole thing work – and add on to that the fact that they are all, generally, bright young people that think that they’re setting out to change the world (some of them, possibly, may actually be right about that), and you have quite the mix. At the end of the day, I have to hear a lot about efficiency: such-and-such policy is more efficient, this-or-that new procedure is more efficient, if we all did this, then the result would be higher efficiency.

G.K. Chesterton wrote “The Fallacy of Success” in 1915, attacking the idea that one can – in general terms – be a success. I largely agree with what he wrote there; to this, I would like to add that it seems to me that it is generally impossible for anything to, in general, be more efficient. What is largely meant by this is that a certain segment of the people involved will have to expend fewer resources – chief among them time or money – and so they find it preferable and attach a generalized term to it.

I would probably disagree with Chesterton about a great deal, but I can at least acknowledge that he was an intelligent thinker and made more than a fair share of good points.

What this belies, however, is the fact that oftentimes this simply indicates that the burden is shifted elsewhere. Much of the labor-saving that various administrative organs achieve is done so by foisting the costs somewhere else and making externalities of them – either at the cost of faculty members, lower administrators, or the students. If we look outside of the academic world, I largely suspect that we’ll find the same thing.

Consider, for a moment, that other august feudal holdover, the criminal organization: greater efficiency for a racketeer might simply turn from fraud to leg-breaking. After all, it’s far easier crack a kneecap that convince someone to give you their money with a smile; and if you can get away with using bald intimidation instead of physical force, all the better.

What I’m getting at, here, is simply that efficiency always has an object. It always applies to something else, and it has become reified into something that it is not: a virtue to always be striven for, instead of a description.

Fundamentally, I think a big part of this is the internalization and treatment-as-gospel of the “stingy nature” idea that Bookchin brings up in The Ecology of Freedom, commented upon in my close read here. If the world is – as Billy Corgan so aptly put it – a vampire, trying to suck us all dry, then it would behoove us to try to lessen the out-flow. Of course, this is putting things exactly backwards: it is contemporary society that seeks to place its horizon of extraction wherever something exists to be exploited. What efficiency means in this context is not reducing the harm of the extraction, but putting in less work to get a greater payout.

Of course, this payout is only of a particular kind: note how an increase in efficiency never means spending more time with your loved ones or reading more books that make you happy or getting more sleep.

Interesting fact: the better this thing runs, the worse life gets.

This, of course, dovetails with the Jevons Paradox, which can be boiled down to the fact that increased efficiency leads to greater, not lesser consumption: because when we live in a world that prizes maximum output, it never makes sense to do any less than everything. In such a situation, efficiency means something very different from how it’s normally construed: it means great output, greater cost, and greater waste. For the people whose tasks have been made more efficient, it means either a higher work load or (for those who have been made redundant) destitution.

This paradox leads to something else – a situation I tend to think of as the “Vespasian Dilemma”. To quote from Suetonius’s The Lives of the Caesars:

To a mechanical engineer, who promised to transport some heavy columns to the Capitol at small expense, he gave no mean reward for his invention, but refused to make use of it, saying: “You must let me feed my poor commons.”

Which smacks of paternalism, but is certainly a relatively enlightened view for the time: if we accept that people must work to eat, then it behooves us to make sure that there is work for them to do. Personally, I’m not completely sold on this, but it’s the headspace in which many people operate, and it’s exactly the one that leads to the exterminist conclusion that animates Kate North’s book 84k (reviewed by me here).

Now, like all dystopias, 84k is fundamentally a satire of the time in which the author is living, and the UK has been a failed state for several decades now (some of my favorite podcasters describe it as a “country with sick building syndrome”), and the austerity-driven managed decline of the UK is exactly what North is satirizing, however, it would be eminently possible to write a parallel, American version of the same story – perhaps it would have some key differences, but it would still be a portrait of a society suffering from the same maladies.

In short: a society dying of a mania for efficiency.

The big idea in 84k is to imagine a society in which people who were deemed superfluous are treated as if they are superfluous, and – while we cannot take the predictions of a science fiction book to be exactly what will happen in the future – I do think it’s telling that the primary threat that management levels against recalcitrant workers is that they will be automated out of a job.

This is, of course, one of the threats my own field is under: after all, if a Large Language Model can handle all of our writing, why do we need English teachers to teach people to write and interpret text (as an aside: I’m still not convinced that a trained professional who’s actually paying attention can be fooled by an LLM – I don’t know, all of the examples of text have been curated, and a lot of very important, very stupid people seem to think it will reshape the world; meanwhile self-driving cars still can’t avoid hitting children, which is probably the first thing they should be programmed to do.)

But is an automatic system in question more efficient for the worker? Are the fast food cashiers who lose their work to automated kiosks the beneficiaries of automation? If they didn’t need their work to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs, then no. Of course, this is just the latest wound in a death by a thousand cuts: none of these workers can actually support themselves on the wage of just one job – if one works full time at a job that pays minimum wage, then one cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment, much less all of sundry other costs of staying alive.

And you can’t out-compete the machine — we have a whole folk legend about that.

The immiseration of these workers who are lowest on the hierarchy of esteem is the product of seeking greater and greater efficiency: whether this is the result of a regime of labor that demands twelve hours of work in the course of six time-clock hours or as a result of an automated kiosk isn’t important. It is precisely the striving towards a more efficient way of doing business that is the cause; and whether those workers are the laborers sweltering in the back-of-house in a restaurant or underpaid adjuncts trying to provide an education to college students is equally unimportant. It’s the same headsman’s axe they are made to bow beneath.

As a result of this, the only sensible option is to radically deemphasize discussions of efficiency in all of our discussions so long as we are not free to choose the wants and needs that we seek to fulfill.

So long as we define efficiency the way that we are, it will remain malignantly useless. The repeated invocation of efficiency as a desirable trait is simply the repetition of the catechism that you can starve your way to being full, you can exhaust your way to being rested, and you can die your way to a long and happy life. It is, ultimately, a thought-stopping cliché, a term that can tbe invoked the way that “this is America” or “they hate us for our freedom” was invoked in the years after September 11th. Empty phrases that stop the conversation as soon as they’re invoked.

As a thought-stopping cliché, its purpose is to end conversation and prevent real consideration of what might be done differently or thought of differently. You can’t argue with it: it’s efficiency. If you do, the terrorists win. Like all thought-stopping clichés, it is, fundamentally, meaningless when evoked, because it does not point to something that is actually worth considering in most contexts. likewise, it’s nearly useless to try to argue against it: efficiency is canonized as self-evidently good and beneficial, so discussion stops.

The downside is, though, that it doesn’t make you right:

In short, managerial diktats about efficiency should be responded to with skepticism, and I would caution you to invoke ideas of efficiency carefully and consciously: not as an article of faith, but only in response to actual problems that can be addressed by it.

And frankly, most can’t be.

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