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| TABLE OF CONTENTS |
| WELCOME TO EFFICOLOGY |
| INTRODUCTION |
| OVERALL APPRECIATION |
| THE GIFT OF NATURE |
| THE GIFT OF ENERGY |
| THE GIFT OF TIME |
| THE GIFT OF RELATIONSHIPS |
| CONCLUDING REMARKS |
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Download Entire Book in Word Format Zipped file is 643 KB |
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Thomas Princen, The Logic of Sufficiency, MIT Press, 2005. ISBN 0262162326 Page 88 The problem with efficiency as a numerical ratio is that there is no formula, no rule, no general principle for choosing. The choice of a ratio can be quite arbitrary - or, as we will see, strategic. Consequently, the very act of choosing a ratio determines value and the distribution of value. I may claim my farm is efficient because I get more bushels per acre. But my neighbor claims she is more efficient because she spends less on machines per acre. I’m highlighting the value of production volume; she’s highlighting the value of minimizing capital costs. It is impossible to say which of us is doing better. I may like filling my silos to the brim each year; she may like extracting another year’s life from her grandparents’ old tractor. Both of us may be terribly efficient, given what we value. But without further specification, neither of us can claim to be more efficient than the other. Even if my neighbor and I both claimed our choices were means to, say, maximum profits, the efficiency ratios themselves are incommensurable. I’m measuring volume of grain, she’s measuring a machine’s usefulness. Page 89 Efficiency ratios are thus neither self-evident nor is their increase unambiguously “good.” No third party can set an unambiguously precise and comparable measure. Every choice of a ratio reflects a choice of values, a politics. And those values do not just separate along the familiar divides of modern and traditional, new and old, fast and slow, as this farming hypothetical might suggest. They separate along divides of time frame - short term and commercially meaningful versus long term and ecologically meaningful – and cost displacement – the ability to externalize the costs of production and consumption in time and space. Page 90 And yet, in modern society, efficiency is equated with all that is good. And not just good for a few but, the rhetoric has it, good for all: joint gains, gains from trade, win-win, all boats rise, jobs aplenty. The discrepancy between the ambiguity of value distribution and the definitiveness of rhetorical claims can in part be explained by a failure to specify ratios, as well as a failure to be explicit about what is left out of those ratios. Page 91 A pure efficiency exists only on paper. In the real world, some people gain as others remain the same or lose. Those others may be one’s neighbors or fellow citizens. But with increasing environmental criticality, risk export, and responsibility evasion (chapter 2), they are people downstream and downwind or on the other side of the globe, or they are future generations…. Efficiencies thus have a “simplification bias.” A simple, two-element ratio of concrete measures is preferred. Numbers that express lumens per kilowatt, grain per acre, and shoes per worker catch our attention. Scientist and lay citizen alike can understand and work with a ratio that is simple and concrete. The language of efficiency becomes universal when simple measurables are on the table. Immeasurables are for the clergy and the philosopher, sometimes the environmentalist. Page 101 So in my decision to adopt the technology, I can’t know ex ante whether the narrow efficiency gain for me will be offset by the broader efficiency gains (or, better, the access gains) of others. Once dependent on the medium, however, I have little choice. Today’s efficiency is tomorrow’s dependency. Page 119 Efficiency claims, for all the history or lack of history, are indeed political claims. They may be dressed up in the language of science and technology and progress, and thus have an apolitical appearance. But appearing apolitical is a political act. A way of avoiding awkward trade-offs. It is a way of advancing a narrow agenda (increased return on investment, a new building, a changed curriculum) by appearing to advocate a broad agenda. And that broad agenda is palatable, indeed attractive, not because it represents the painstaking process of finding common ground among people of diverse interests and values, nor even because matters have been reduced to a common denominator such as money. Rather, it is attractive because everyone sees a gain. Efficiencies wash away the divisiveness so consensus can settle out. Environmentalists, industrialists and politicians can fight tooth and nail about the value of a wetland or the importance of biodiversity. But, with efficiency, they can all come together: the environmentalist sees nature preserved when a housing developer agrees not to build on every acre. The developer sees lower costs because excavation and utility hookups can be consolidated when houses are clustered. Local officials see the same tax revenues with fewer government services. It is easy to agree that the land should be protected, that climate change should be arrested, that pollution should be abated, that energy should be saved, that water should be cleaned. And it is easy to act to improve the environment if it appears that the efficiencies are just there for the taking, like hitherto undiscovered fruit waiting to be picked. It is quit another matter to spell out exactly where that fruit comes from, and what is forfeited by consuming it now and at this rate. It is quite another matter to reveal what happens downstream, downwind, to reveal who benefits and who loses, and to do so over an ecologically significant period of time. Page 120 A policy that promotes efficiencies – roadway for transport, electric bulbs for street lighting, administrative structures for medical care and retailing, recycling for waste management, and concentrated animals for intensified farming – promotes increased personal and social wealth in the here and now. It elevates monetary values as it depreciates values associated with the long term, with the security of ecological integrity and economic well-being. Efficiency is suspect in the first instance because the ratio is rarely made explicit. In the second, it is suspect because ratios perceived are rarely ratios realized, because ratios proposed for all are only for some, because efficiency claims lead to the shading and distancing of costs, to deferral of impact in time and space. Efficiency is suspect because the benefits are readily highlighted, and the costs are shaded and left for others to pick up.
Haber, Samuel Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890-1920, University of Chicago, 1964, 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,
Rizzo, Mario J. Time, Uncertainty, and Disequilibrium. New York: 1979. ISBN 0699026980, Page 72 Safe Energy Communication Council’s, Myth #6, Busters Fall 1990 Page 1 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 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’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
Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN 0262194929. Chapter 6, 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. |
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