Appreciating Natural Gifts

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Appreciating Religion

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Appreciating Business

Haber, Samuel  Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890-1920, University of Chicago, 1964,

From the introduction and Page 74

We are often told that Americans love efficiency.  In fact, we are told this so often that some serious students of American character have come to see such statements as commonplaces deadening our understanding of America and Americans rather than enlivening it.  Yet if we give these commonplaces specificity, if we look closely at Americans professing the love of efficiency (and to a lesser extent acting upon it), we may come away from such study with a better understanding of our country and our ways.

The progressive era is almost made to order for the study of Americans in love with efficiency.  For the progressive era gave rise to an efficiency craze—a secular Great Awakening, an outpouring of ideas and emotions in which a gospel of efficiency was preached without embarrassment to businessmen, workers, doctors, housewives, and teachers, and yes, preached even to preachers.  Men as disparate as William Jennings Bryan and Walter Lippmann discoursed enthusiastically on efficiency.  Efficient and good came closer to meaning the same thing in these years than in any other period of American history.

If we sift through the vast literature of efficiency that the progressive era produced, we can discover at least four principal ways in which the word efficiency was used.  First of all, it described a personal attribute.  An efficient person was an effective person, and that characterization brought with it a long shadow of latent associations and predispositions; a turning toward hard work and away from feeling, toward discipline and away from sympathy, toward masculinity and away from femininity.  Second, the word signified the energy output-input ratio of a machine.  This was a more recent use than that describing a trait of character.  (However, mechanical efficiency may have added coloring to personal efficiency; the machine does, but does not feel.)  The concept of mechanical efficiency developed out of the application of the laws of thermodynamics to the technology of the steam engine in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and soon it became a central concept of engineering.

The machine whose efficiency the engineer calculated, however, was often owned by a business enterprise interested in profit.  Commercial efficiency, the output-input ratio of dollars, was a third meaning common to the progressive era, and a meaning which engineers who were concerned with the delicate adjustment of material means to ends could not ignore.  Finally, efficiency not only signified a personal quality, a relationship between materials, and a relationship between investment and revenue, but, most important, it signified a relationship between men.  Efficiency meant social harmony and the leadership of the “competent.”  Progressives often called this social efficiency.  And it is this meaning that has particular importance for the understanding of the progressive era....  The efficiency craze, which began with the Easter Rate Case in 1910, receded by 1915 and disappeared with America’s entry into the war.  Efficiency as morality, the most widespread and easily acceptable form, was quickest to evaporate.  Efficiency as a series of profit-making stunts was soon discredited.  Efficiency as a technique of industrial management and as a form of social control found a small but steadfast following and had more lasting effects.

Pruger, Robert.  Efficiency and the Social Services.  New York: 1991  ISBN 1560241136,

Page 176

Scratch below the surface of the term, “efficiency,” and it turns out to be a very murky, ambiguous idea that is thrown about with such reckless abandon that it can mean virtually anything anyone wants it to mean; getting more work done; cost-cutting; rooting out waste; cost-effectiveness; a favorable ratio of benefits to costs; output productivity; distribution and even rationing; and perhaps more.  This not what science and rationality are made of.

Rizzo, Mario J.  Time, Uncertainty, and Disequilibrium.  New York: 1979.  ISBN 0699026980, Page 72

Efficiency is a concept that has no meaning apart from the model that happens to be in use.  Efficiency is always relative to the objectives and subject to the constraints specified in a theoretical framework.

Safe Energy Communication Council’s,  Myth #6, Busters Fall 1990 Page 1

Energy efficiency is the fastest-growing, most abundant, least polluting and lowest-cost energy resource available in the United States today.  In fact, the Department of Energy calculates that energy efficiency and conservation now supply more of our energy services than any other single source, at a lower cost than building new power plants or extracting more fossil fuels.  Improving energy efficiency means instituting methods or technologies that use less energy to achieve the same results.  For instance, an efficient light bulb; a house designed for efficiency is warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than a drafty, inefficient one; an efficient automobile can travel the same distance using less gasoline; and an efficient motor can run equipment with less energy and do the same job.  While energy efficiency has saved us enormously on energy and money over the past two decades, further improvements can do much more.  According to independent analyses, America can reduce its total energy consumption by 20 to more than 50 percent.

President Bill Clinton, October 6, 1997 White House Conference on Climate Change, Georgetown University

We’ve worked far too hard to revitalize the American Dream to jeopardize our progress now.  Therefore, we must emphasize flexible market-based approaches.  We must work with business and industry to find the right ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  We must promote technologies that make energy production and consumption more efficient.

Emerson, Harrington. The Twelve Principles Of Efficiency  The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1919, Page 82

It is not either the right or the privilege of the Efficiency Engineer to set up ideals of morality, goodness, or beauty, or to assume that his ideal of purpose is superior; but he as a right to expect that some definite and tangible ideal will be set up so that at the start its possible incompatibility with one or more of the efficiency principles may be pointed out.

Schmidt, A. Allan, and James D. Shaffer.  “Marketing in Social Perspective” Agricultural Marketing Analysis,  edited by Vernon L. Sorenon. East Lansing, Michigan State University, 1964, Page 29

Economic theory provides a method of calculation positions of maximum efficiency or optimum advantage…. These calculations are valid, however, only within any given set of exchange system rules which defines the qualitative makeup of the inputs and outputs to be included.

Berry, Wendell.  “Back to the Land.”  The Amicus Journal Winter 1999, Page 37

In fact, the industrial economy’s most marketed commodity is satisfaction, and this commodity, which is repeatedly promised, bought, and paid for, is never delivered.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of Business Enterprise. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1978.  ISBN 087855690, Pages 8 and 18 cited in Knoedler, Janet T., “Veblen and technical efficiency.” Journal of Economic Issues, Dec97, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p1011, 16p

Veblen’s definition of technical efficiency was itself an engineering definition. It derived from his view of modern industry as a “[comprehensive] machine process” [Veblen 1988, 5] that was organized by means of pecuniary transactions to allow for careful management of the many interstitial adjustments that coordinated the various related branches of industry….  For Veblen, technical efficiency existed when interdependent mechanized production processes throughout the economy worked together “in an efficient manner, without idleness, waste, and hardship” to produce the maximum possible amount of output, using the most technologically sophisticated industrial techniques available.

Patten, Simon N.  The New Basis of Civilization New York:  1968.  Page 207

The men in whom energy is sapped, or who have been the victims of misfortune, are a class in which the normal race stimuli are failing to act.  The loaf of bread, the cigar, the theatre ticket held before men as regards to work remain inducements only until they have been consumed.  Zeal wanes as they are used up, and will not steadily flow again except from a fund of surplus energy that in its exit sharpens imagination and revives the drooping faculties.  Give rain and crops grow; give surplus energy and men become spontaneously efficient.

Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.  ISBN 0262194929.  Chapter 6, 

Page 336

Given the fact that efficiency has become a mantra of modern, globally competitive business whose goal is to make and sell more, the quest for better performance can be then seen, in Rudin’s (1999, “How Improved Efficiency Harms the Environment” at http://home.earthlink.net/~andrewrudin/article.html, p.1) disdainful view, as a justification “to consume our resources efficiently without limit.”  And he points out the distinction between relative and absolute savings noting that “our environment does not respond to miles per gallon; it responds to gallons” (Rudin 1999, p. 2).  So if we are to see any actual reductions in overall energy use we need to go beyond increased efficiency of energy conversions….

Page 337

Given the complexity of modern societies regulation would always have a role in energy conservation but the bulk of such savings should be preferably delivered by an enlightened public that chooses to change its behavior and modify its lifestyle.  Appeals for this shift have been made by many devoted conservationists.  The fact that “improved efficiency coincides with increased use of resources should be enough to make us think in non-business terms….  Using less energy is a matter of discipline, not fundable political correctness” (Rudin 1999, p 4).

Seen from this perspective calls for energy conservation are just a part of much broader appeals for moderation (if sacrifice may seem to strong a term), frugality, and cooperation for the sake of the common good that form moral foundations of every high civilization.  Being content with less or not requiring more in the first place are two precepts that have been a part of both Western and Eastern thought for millennia and that were explicitly voiced by teachers of moral systems as disparate as Christianity and Confucianism.  How kindred are these quotes from the Analects in Arthur Waley’s translation (Waley, A. The Analects of Confucius (Translation in Lunyu).  London: George Allen & Unwin) and from Luke (X11:22-34 King James version):

The Master said, He who seeks only coarse food to eat, water to drink and bent arm for pillow will without looking for it find happiness to boot.

Page 338

And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.  For the life is more than the food, and the body more than the raiment… make for yourselves purses which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not… for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

The two tenets have retained a high degree of moral approbation in affluent countries even as their devotion to religion has weakened considerably.  Of course, a mechanistic translation of some very effective past practices would not be the best way to proceed.  There is no need to call, for example, for an emulation of what was perhaps the best energy minimizing arrangement: medieval monastic orders where most of the food, and most of all clothes and simple wooden and metallic utensils were produced by artisanal labor, where nothing was packaged, everything was recycled and where the inmates had no personal possessions beyond their coarse clothes and a few simple utensils and were content with bleak cells, hard beds, copying of missals, and occasional a capella singing.

What is called for is a moderation of demand so that the affluent Western nations would reduce their extraordinarily high per capita energy consumption not by just 10% or 15% but by at least 25% - 35%.  Such reductions would call for nothing more than a return to levels the prevailed just a decade or no more than a generation ago.  How could one even use the term sacrifice in this connection?  Did we live so unbearably 10 or 30 years ago that the return to those consumption levels cannot be even publicly contemplated by serious policymakers because they feel, I fear correctly, that the public would find such a suggestion unthinkable and utterly unacceptable?

Page 339

After all, even cancerous cells stop growing once they have destroyed the invaded tissues. 

If we are to prevent the unbounded economic growth doing the same to the Earth’s environment then the preservation of the biosphere’s integrity must become a high purpose of human behavior.  Inevitably, this must entail some limits on human acquisitiveness in order to leave room for the perpetuation of other species, to maintain irreplaceable environmental services without whose provision there could be no evolution and no civilization, and to keep the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from rising so rapidly and to such an extent that the Earth would experience global tropospheric warming unmatched during the evolution of our species from ancestral hominids.