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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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Cook, Earl Ferguson, Man, Energy, Society, Freeman.: 1976 ISBN 071670725X, Page 203 Life in a high energy society is in sharp contrast to life in a low energy society. Family and community are subordinated to the state because most goods and services are produced outside the family and because the means of social control do not depend upon the family’s and community’s allocating status and inculcating behavior. All goods come from production units much larger than the family and for the most part outside the community. Services are performed by specialists, only the more common of whom will be found within the immediate community, and by consumer-operated power appliances. The centralization of mass production and the proliferation of service centers require extensive transportation and communication networks; the speeds at which bodies and goods are moved, and words and pictures transmitted, become important indicators of the vitality of a high energy society.
Jorge, Antonia. Competition, Cooperation, Efficiency, and Social Organization. New Jersey: 1978. ISBN 0838620264, Page 56 When we observe modern technology mixed with a “backward” human factor in an underdeveloped country, we know we must “modernize” the latter if we are to have a higher degree of economic efficiency. Unfortunately, our present knowledge is not sufficient to determine what efficiency values may be attached either to the performance of labor under various organizational alternatives or to the managerial and organizational forms that would result from the presence of different “spirits” in the human beings involved.
Steve Weinberg, “Mr. Bottomline,” On Earth Magazine, Spring 2003 Pages 34-5 Ralph Nader, Crashing the Party. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. ISBN 0312284330 Page 32Having lost key committee chairs and the Congress to the Republicans and Republicrats, some Washington-based environmental groups persuaded themselves that they could maneuver or outsmart polluting companies through private deals with them. One such deal, involving the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and their West Coast representative Ralph Cavanagh, resulted in California’s electricity deregulation fiasco. This idea was the brainstorm of John Bryson, CEO of the Southern California Edison Company and NDRC. The latter thought that competition in generating and distributing electricity would bring more conservation, more renewable energy on-line, and cheaper prices for consumers. Deregulation unanimously passed the California legislature in 1996 with very little public awareness or discussion. Our attempt in 1998 to repeal parts of this bad law by a statewide referendum - Proposition 9 - failed by a wide margin due to a $45 million television campaign by the utilities. Having given up on the prospect of regulation, California turned over regulatory power to the electric companies, their holding companies, and the large out-of-state power generators that have turned electricity into a speculative commodity. The harshest price consequences for consumers and taxpayers have resulted, shaking the state’s economy and increasing costs to business. Any regulatory authority to stem this crisis was given up in 1996 to corporate supremacy. Page 210It is difficult to recall major advances in fairness or living conditions in our country’s history that were not struggled over or wrenched from the avaricious grasp of the rulers by the ruled. I am not speaking of charity here. As I said repeatedly at rallies all over the country, a society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity. That night I kept coming back to the critical medium called word of mouth which, by the way, made this major outpouring of Bostonians and college students possible. “Replace some of the small talk with exciting political talk about the future of this country,” I urged at the rally. Page 313Complex, changing societies need more public or citizen time for a more just society if our private time is to be enjoyable, peaceful, safe, and productive. Each person has a contribution to make. It is sometimes useful to evoke a metaphor from the natural world. The great natural asset of our country which is the Mississippi River start with a drop of water in northern Minnesota. One drop joins with other drops to form a tiny rivulet that joins with other rivulets to form a brook, which together with other brooks makes a stream that with other streams makes a river, which together with other rivers swells the mighty Mississippi. So, too, is the case with millions of citizens, watering the life-expanding potential of a functioning democracy open to fresh ideas and replenishing initiatives. FIRST-STAGE GOALS FOR A BETTER AMERICA
Bizimana, Nsekuye. “Development and Breakdown in Rwanda.” The Myth of the Modern. Pages 124-5Applying the same economic criteria for judging development in Rwanda as in the West, the authorities in Kigali had reason to be pleased with the results attained up until the breakdown in 1994. In the rural areas the quality of housing had been improved from huts to stable houses, and primary hygiene practices had been instituted. Many industrial products (with negative effects that only became evident later) offered more comfort than the traditional way of life. More Rwandans were being educated at home and abroad, and the number of subjects taught at the national university had increased. In fact, Rwandans were proud in claiming that Kigali had become a little European island in Rwanda. The fact is, however, that from the point of view of human development, a sharp deterioration in the quality of life had taken place. The influx of every imaginable Western industrial product, from washing machines, hi-fi sets and video players to sweets and cars, led to an even greater admiration of the West. People wanted to acquire these fine things more than ever, but only a small portion of the population could afford them. The result of all this was the creation of an arrogant bourgeoisie, who believed in the principle that 'the more you have, the better you are.' Such powerful bourgeoisies formed a state within a state, thus controlling almost everything. This was similar to the dictatorship-of-capital seen in the West. The benefits of modernisation were rarely distributed equal. Thus those areas with fine modern installations despised the areas without. As a result, tension developed between different areas within the country. This is known as regionalism. In many African countries, regionalism corresponds to tribalism, because different tribes live in different regions. Money reigns and thus people go to any measure to acquire it. This striving after money inflicted serious damage upon our culture. Egoism gained ground. Nobody did anything unless he personally intended to gain from it. Little was shared and the spirit of solidarity amongst our people collapsed.
Description of video “Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh” The Video Project $19.95 (800) 4-PLANET by Liza Gross, Sierra Club magazine What happens when modern development encroaches upon an ancient culture high in the harsh Tibetan plateau of northern India? Not even Ladakhis—mostly Buddhists with deep spiritual ties to the earth can resist the onslaught of an increasingly global economy. This insightful case study based on Helena Norberg-Hodge’s book of the same title (published by Sierra Club Books in 1991), examines how development with its attendant seductive images of glamour and gadgets promising life free of hardship, destroys social and ecological bonds. Pollution, resource depletion, sprawl, breakdown of family and community, crime, growing economic disparity—all are crises in industrialized nations. While these problems are not the sole province of the West, Norberg-Hodge traces their appearance in Ladakh to Western national of progress. And because modernization has taken hold so rapidly here, the roots of these modern maladies, mostly obscured in the West, are easier to trace. “Development has systematically dismantled the local economy and self-reliance, and the first victim is the small farmer whose livelihood is completely undermined,” Norberg-Hodge tells us. Ldakhis are buying heavily subsidized wheat trucked in from the plains of India because it’s cheaper than grain grown minutes away in local villages. They are drifting away from a cooperative small-farm model, based on organic farming and renewable resources, toward dependence on chemical-intensive agriculture and imported goods and services. Once protected from food shortages and rationing by these close-knit communities, villagers are now at the mercy of market forces beyond their control and of roads that are impassable two-thirds of the year. Forced into competition for scarce, meaningless work that doesn’t pay enough to meet basic needs, they’ve become alienated from their neighbors. Broken community ties have led to escalating crime and homelessness, virtually unheard of 20 years ago. “There has been progress,” on Ladakli says, “but people are not as happy as they once were.” Respect for ecological limits is yielding to modern promises of uncontrolled economic growth and consumption, as this fragile high-desert ecosystem succumbs to the corollaries of modernization: garbage and human-waste-filled streets and waterways, chemical-fertilizer and pesticide-laden fields, increasing population and ethnic friction, and loss of respect for women and families. The film does not suggest that we renounce our wicked Western ways and head for the hills, but that we reestablish our ties to the earth, recognize its natural limitations by developing renewable energy sources and recycling waste, and resist globalization by supporting local cottage industries and small farmers. In the end, these rules to live by transcend cultural boundaries, and Norberg-Hodge eloquently shows us the way to follow them.
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities. Random House Trade; (February 1, 1970) ISBN: 039470584X Page 89 Today, only two cities in all of Britain remain economically vigorous and prosperous. One is London. The second is Birmingham. The others have stagnated one by one, much as Manchester did, like so many lights going out. British town planners, ironically, have regarded London and Birmingham as problems, because they are places in which much new work is added to old and thus cities that persist in growing. The British New Towns policy was specifically devised to discourage the growth of London and Birmingham and "drain it off." Birmingham's economy has remained alive and has kept up to date. Manchester's has not. Was Manchester, then, really efficient? It was indeed efficient and Birmingham was not. Manchester had acquired the efficiency of a company town. Birmingham had retained something different: a high rate of development work. Efficiency as it is commonly defined -and I do not propose to change its definition, which is clear and useful -is the ratio of work accomplished to energy supplied. We can speak of high or low rates of efficiency because, in any given instance, we have two relevant factors to measure: input of energy, and quantity and quality (value) of work accomplished. We can compare the measurements in one instance with measurements in other instances. Manchester turned out a great deal of cloth relative to the energy supplied by its workers and by those who served the needs of the workers in the city. But these particular measurements are not relevant when development work is wanted. A candy manufacturer, reminiscing to a New Yorker reporter about the first candy bar he developed as a shipping clerk in a candy factory, recalls, "I showed it to my boss and he was very happy. `How many of these can you make in a minute?' he asked me. `In a minute?' I said. `It took me four months to make this one!' " Suppose it had taken him eight months? Or two months? That measurement has nothing to do with the operating efficiency envisioned by his boss. Efficiency of operation, in any given case, is a sequel to earlier development work. Development work is a messy, time- and energy-consuming business of trial, error and failure. The only certainties in it are trial and error. Success is not a certainty. And even when the result is successful, it is often a surprise, not what was actually being sought. A low rate of efficiency in production work means that the person or organization doing the work is going about it ineptly. But the exorbitant amounts of energy and time and the high rates of failure in the process of developing new work do not mean the development work is being done ineptly. The inefficiency is built into the aim itself; it is inescapable. There is no systematic way to evade it. The president of DuPont, a company that has tried to systematize its development work to the highest degree possible, has told a Fortune reporter that only about one out of twenty of those research projects that the company decides to develop further after initial exploratory work turns out to be useful to the company. The fact that an organization engages in large-scale production, which is what makes a large organization large, and that it produces very efficiently too, does not mean that the efficiency spills over into development work. Indeed, development work is inherently so chancy that by the law of averages, chances of success are greatly improved if there is much duplication of effort. The U.S. Air Force's analytical organization, the Rand Corporation, having been assigned to study how waste could be eliminated in the processes of military development work, came to the conclusion that although duplication of effort was theoretically wasteful, it was not wasteful empirically. For one thing, the report said, different people brought different preconceptions to development work and there was no way of telling in advance which might prove fruitful or where it might lead. Eminence or reputation or even past success was not a reliable indicator. The report cited, as an illustration, the fact that in 1937 when the jet airplane engine had already been developed in Britain (largely in Birmingham, as it happens), a committee of distinguished aeronautical experts in the United States, to whom this event was not yet known, having studied the possibilities of jet propulsion, came to the conclusion that it was not practicable. It was their recommendation that attempts to develop jet propulsion he dropped. The Rand researchers said that they had found definite waste, and a lot of it, in the development work of the military establishments; it was the great waste of administrative man-hours and energy devoted to trying to eliminate duplicated effort. Just so, when Pasteur, that wise old man, begged for enlarged support of the biological sciences, he begged for multiplication of laboratories. Page 96 Is it not possible for the economy of a city to be highly efficient, and for the city also to excel at the development of new goods and services? No, it seems not. The conditions that promote development and the conditions that promote efficient production and distribution of already existing goods and services are not only different, in most ways they are diametrically opposed. Let us consider a few of them. Breakaways of workers-especially very able workers from existing organizations promote the development of new work as well as the creation of new organizations. But breakaways, are not good for the parent company; they undermine its efficiency. To the company or companies in control, one of the advantages of a company town is that breakaways are not feasible there. And in any settlement where breakaways are inhibited, by whatever means, the development rate must drop, although the efficiency of already well-established work is apt to climb. Page 98 Now consider for a moment the question of suppliers of bits and pieces of work to other producers. Many relatively small suppliers, much of whose work duplicates and overlaps, are indispensable to a high rate of development. But they are not efficient, neither in respect to their own work nor the operations of the producers who buy from them. Page 99 Consider also the conflict between development and efficiency as it applies to the work of investing development capital and supplying working capital. The most efficient way to invest capital (whether by government, by semipublic, or by private lenders and investors-it does not matter) is through a relatively few large investments and loans, not through many small ones. If small loans are made, it is most efficient to consolidate them, in effect, by making them only for purposes that have already become standardized and routinized. To put capital into the purchasing of enterprises that produce goods and services already developed is more efficient than to put it into development of new enterprises and new work. Also, it is efficient to invest development capital in a sure thing-if in new work, then in new work for which customers are guaranteed in advance. Page 101 It is most efficient for large construction firms to produce monotonous multiples of identical buildings; it is most efficient for architects to design multiples of identical buildings. Superblocks are more efficient than smaller blocks because there are fewer crossings and traffic can flow more efficiently; when there are fewer streets, utilities can be distributed more efficiently and of course the maintenance of streets costs less. Indeed, numerous small enterprises, just by existing, are in conflict with the economic efficiency of a city's large and well-established enterprises. Page 120 Earlier in this century, it was conventionally supposed by American philanthropists that poverty is caused by disease. Healthy people, it was reasoned, would be more productive, have more initiative, be more capable of helping themselves, than people in ill health. Poverty was analyzed as a vicious circle in which poverty leads to disease and disease reinforces poverty. Measures to combat disease turned out to be quite successful at combating disease, irrelevant for combating poverty. They helped lead to the situation that is now being diagnosed as a different vicious circle-poverty-overpopulation-poverty. To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development. It can be overcome only if the relevant economic processes are in motion. These processes are all rooted, if I am correct, in the development work that goes on in impractical cities where one kind of work leads inefficiently to another.
LYNCHED NEGRO Your downcast, harlequin, defenceless face
Claxton, Guy. Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. U.S.A.: 1997. ISBN 0880016221, Pages 4, 5 and 6 The individuals and societies of the West have rather lost touch with the value of contemplation. Only active thinking is regarded as productive. Sitting gazing absently at your office wall or out of the classroom window is not of value. Yet many of those whom our society admires as icons of creativity and wisdom have spent much of their time doing nothing. Einstein, it is said, would frequently be found in his office At Princeton staring into space. The Dalai Lama spends hours each day in meditation. Even that paragon of penetrating insight, Sherlock Holmes, is described by his creator as entering a meditative state 'with a dreaming vacant expression in his eyes'. There are a number of reasons why slow knowing has fallen into disuse. Partly it is due to our changing conception of, and attitude towards, time. In pre-seventeenth-century Europe a leisurely approach to thinking was much more common, and in other cultures it still is. A tribal meeting at a Maori marae can last for days, until everyone has had time to assimilate the issues, to have their say, and to form a consensus. However, the idea that time is plentiful is in many parts of the world now seen as laughably old-fashioned and self-indulgent. Swedish anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge has documented the way in which the introduction of Western culture has radically altered the pace of life in the traditional society of Ladakh, for example. Until ten years ago, a Ladakhi wedding lasting a fortnight. But their lifestyle rapidly altered following the introduction of some simple 'labour-savings' changes: tools, such as the Rotovator, to make ploughing quicker and easier; and some new crops and livestock, such as dairy cows. Compared to the traditional yak, cows yield more milk than a family needs, creating a surplus which can be turned into cheese and sold to bring in some extra cash. While there is no harm in taking life a little easier, in encouraging families to accumulate a little 'wealth', unfortunately this apparently benign aid package' also gave the Ladakhis a new view of time – as something in short supply. Instead of the Rotovators and the cows generating more leisure, they have in fact reduced it. People are now busier than they were: busy creating wealth -- and 'saving time'. Today a Ladakhi wedding lasts less than a day, just like an English one. Within the Western mindset, time becomes a commodity, and one inevitable consequence is the urge to 'think faster': to solve problems and make decisions quickly. Partly the decline of slow thinking is to do with the rise of what the American social critic Neil Postman has called 'technopoly' -- the widespread view that every ill is a problem which has a potential solution; solutions are provided by technological advances, which are generated by clear, purposeful, disciplined thinking; and the faster problems are solved, the better. Thus, as the Ladakhis have recently joined us in believing, time is an adversary over which technology can triumph. For Postman, technolopoly is based on the beliefs that the primary, if not the only goal of human labour and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by 'experts.' In such a culture, time spent exploring the question is only justified to the extent that it clearly leads towards a solution to the problem. To spend time dwelling on the question to see if it may lead to a deeper question seems inefficient, self-indulgent or perverse. In contemporary 'Western' society (which now effectively covers the globe), we seem to have generated an inner, psychological culture of speed, pressure and the need for control -- mirroring the outer culture of efficiency and productivity -- in which access to the slower modes of mind has been lost. People are in a hurry to know, to have answers, to plan and solve. We urgently want explanations: Theories of Everything, from marital mishaps to the origin of the universe. We want more data, more ideas; we want them faster; and we want them, with just a little thought, to tell us clearly what to do. We find ourselves in a culture which has lost sight (not least in its education system) of some fundamental distinctions, like those between being wise, being clever, having your 'wits' about you, and being merely well informed. We have been inadvertently trapped in a single mode of mind that is characterised by information-gathering, intellect and impatience, one that requires you to be explicit, articulate, purposeful and to show your reasoning. We are thus committed (and restricted) to those ways of knowing that can function in such a high-speed mental climate: predominantly those that use language (or other symbol systems) as a medium and deliberation as a method. As a culture we are, in consequence, very good at solving analytic and technological problems. The trouble is that we tend, increasingly, to treat all human predicaments as if they were of this type, including those for which such mental tools are inappropriate. We meet with cleverness, focus and deliberation those challenges that can only properly be handled with patience, intuition and relaxation. To tap into the leisurely ways of knowing, one must dare to wait. Knowing emerges from, and is a response to, not-knowing. Learning -- the process of coming to know -- emerges from uncertainty. Ambivalently, learning seeks to reduce uncertainty, by transmuting the strange into the familiar, but it also needs to tolerate uncertainty, as the seedbed in which ideas germinate and responses form. If either one of these two aspects of learning predominates, then the balance of the mind is disturbed. If the passive acceptance of not-knowing overwhelms the active search for meaning and control, then one may fall into fatalism and dependency. While if the need for certainty becomes intemperate, undermining the ability to tolerate confusion, then one may develop a vulnerability to demagoguery and dogma, liable to cling to options and beliefs that may not fit the bill, but which do assuage the anxiety.
Town asked to improve energy efficiency By DANIEL BARLOW Brattleboro Reformer Thursday, March 11, 2004BRATTLEBORO—Paul Cameron sees the $10,000 in funding he is asking for as more than just his group’s budget for the coming year—it’s an investment in the future of the community. Cameron, the head of the nonprofit group Brattleboro Climate Protection, is asking the Brattleboro Town Meeting Representatives on March 20 for the funding so that his group can continue working on a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in town. “I look at it as a moderate investment in Brattleboro’s future,” said Cameron on Wednesday. “The result will be lower taxes, cleaner air and an improved quality of life.” Part of an international movement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency, the local group is part of the Cities for Climate Protection campaign, an effort that has taken root in 550 local The group is also seeking to reduce emissions throughout town by 10 percent by 2010 and plans to launch a campaign later this year to sign up local businesses. Companies such as Fibermark and Putney Paper Co. have expressed interest, said Cameron. Under the current plan, reducing the town’s emissions and increasing buildings’ energy efficiency would mean no initial financial contribution, explained Cameron; instead the cost of the energy audit and retrofitting would be taken from the savings made by the alterations. The town currently spends more than $700,000 annually on energy and the town’s elementary schools spend approximately $135,000. It is estimated that around $84,000 will be saved each year if the town buildings and elementary schools reduce energy consumption by 10 percent, Cameron said. “That will save the taxpayers money,” said Cameron. “That is funds that can be used for other town services.” Among the accomplishments in 2002 was the conversion of some of the Windham Solid Waste District’s vehicles to biodiesel, the introduction of a biodiesel pump at the Fleming Oil Co. station in West Chesterfield, N.H., and hosting an energy-effecient workshop attended by representatives from approximately 40 Brattleboro businesses. In Burlington, a group similar to Brattleboro Climate Protection has been active since 1996, and city and state buildings in the area have signed up for the 10 percent challenge, said Debra Sachs, the director of that group. In the past few years, hundreds of households in Burlington have signed up for the challenge and recently 200 employees at IBM signed up and vowed to look at transportation alternatives to and from work to reduce vehicle emissions. “It’s amazing how it has really taken on a life of its own,” said Sachs.“We have a very transparent and transferable program that others can take and make their own.” Brattleboro Climate Protection has typically been funded through a combination of grants, private donations and town funds. In 2003 the town gave the group $8,500 and donations and grants gave the effort another boost of $12,000. Selectboard member and supporter of the climate group Pat DeAngelo said the effort is a “win-win” for the town’s finances and the town’s environment. “Let’s say the audit comes back and says it will cost $30,000 to implement the recommendations,” she said. “Well, that seems like a lot of money, but not once you factor in what the town will be saving each year by implementing it.” “Plus we are cleaning up our air and improving the health of everyone in town,” she added. The group will also continue to push biodiesel as a healthy alternative, coordinate more workshops and look for other opportunities to use wood-chip heating systems. If the $10,000 allocation is not approved at town meeting, the impact on the group’s efforts is not clear, said Cameron. The group’s efforts would likely look much different, he explained, if the funding support from the town did not get approved.
PRICELESS: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, The New Press, 270 pp., $25.95 reviewed by Osha Gray Davidson in OnEarth from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Spring 2004 A doctor, an architect, and an economist were sitting in a bar arguing over who had the most important profession. "Clearly, it's surgery," claimed the doctor. "After all, God created Eve by removing one of Adam's ribs." The architect disagreed, saying that her job was by far the most important. "Way before Adam and Eve, God built the heavens and the earth out of chaos," she insisted. The economist leaned back in his chair, smiled, and said quietly, "And who do you think created the chaos?" The joke, of course, is that economists claim to bring order to a chaotic world. But the humor seems more apt than amusing these days, with the Bush administration shredding decades of environmental laws, often justifying its actions with an economic strategy -- cost-benefit analysis -- that seems perfectly reasonable but is in truth fundamentally flawed. When the Bush administration announced in 2001 that it was appointing economist John Graham to head the little-known Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House bureaucracy that reviews regulations proposed by the various government agencies, it claimed that Graham would bring order to the way the federal government regulates everything from the amount of mercury a coal-burning power plant can release, to how many trees we should log from our national forests. But instead of order, Graham's obsession with cost-benefit analysis has brought more chaos -- and controversy. Among the bizarre concepts Graham has championed is the notion that older people are worth less than the young. According to this logic, if Regulation A would save the lives of 50 3-year-olds each year, at a fixed cost, that might be worth doing. But Regulation B, which would save the lives of 50 elderly citizens each year at the same cost, would get scratched. That's because by already having lived many years, the elderly have, in effect, used up much of their value to society. Graham's championing of this "life expectancy" approach (or "senior death discount," as critics call it) so outraged advocates for the elderly that last May, then-administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Christie Whitman was forced to assure the public that the agency wasn't basing any of its decisions on Graham's calculation that the lives of people past 70 are worth precisely 37.8 percent less than the lives of everyone else. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the underlying principle of cost-benefit. We all use it to make decisions every day. Let's say you want to buy a mountain bike, for example. You find a mid-priced one that you like, with good rear shocks. The salesperson, however, steers you toward a "state-of-the-art" model, with rear and front shocks, a superlight frame, and hydraulic disc brakes. Just one problem: It costs three times as much as the bike you selected. So you think about your dwindling bank balance and that looming mortgage payment. You consider that you're likely to use the bike only a couple of weekends a month. It'd be great to have the primo model, but, all things considered, you decide it makes more sense to go with the less expensive bike. What you just did in your head was a quick cost-benefit analysis. It's clearly reasonable and helpful when used properly, but problems arise and multiply when policy makers use it as their primary tool to evaluate proposed environmental and health policies, such as whether to put a limit on the pollutants that cause global warming. As Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling make clear in their important new book, Priceless, when cost-benefit analysis is misused, as it is in the Bush White House, it becomes, literally, a formula for disaster. "[This economic] theory gives us opaque and technical reasons to do the obviously wrong thing," they conclude. "Cost-benefit analysis promotes a deregulatory agenda under the cover of scientific objectivity." There are a number of reasons why this is so, and Ackerman (an economist at Tufts University) and Heinzerling (a law professor at Georgetown) do an excellent job of explaining the many deficiencies of cost-benefit, and they do it in clear, jargon-free prose -- no small feat when writing about economics. They point out that costs of regulations are easy to quantify, while benefits are not. It's one thing to put a price tag on the cost of new "scrubbers" to remove pollutants from smokestacks. But to do a cost-benefit analysis, you have to compare that cost to its purported benefit, and how do you decide how much clean air is worth? Scientists may be able to estimate how many lives will be saved by such a regulation, but economists then have to convert those lives into dollars -- a slippery business. And that's not all they have to do, because air pollution doesn't just kill people outright, it is also responsible for a variety of chronic ailments such as bronchitis and asthma. How will those be "monetized" (the economic term for fixing a dollar value to intangibles -- a necessary bit of jargon in this debate)? And what about something even more abstract, such as the psychological benefit to parents who live downwind from less-polluting smokestacks and who know that their children are not at increased risk for developing respiratory illnesses? What dollar figure do you put on that? In practice, what happens most often, as the authors point out, is that if economists can't monetize it, they ignore it. And many of the benefits of environmental regulations, from the sense of tranquility fostered by an open landscape to the biodiversity of a forest left unlogged, resist monetization. When forced into a narrow economic framework, Ackerman and Heinzerling argue, the benefits of environmental regulations will nearly always be understated. While costs are easy to translate into dollars, they are also easy to inflate. Consider the case of vinyl chloride, a chemical used in a variety of manufacturing processes and a known carcinogen. In 1974, the government proposed lowering the maximum daily amount that workers could be exposed to vinyl chloride from 200 parts per million (ppm) to one ppm. Industry executives howled that the new regulation would bankrupt them. Compliance, they maintained, could cost upward of $90 billion. The government adopted the rule anyway. A few years later, a study found that compliance had actually cost $278 million. Why? Because when forced to lower worker exposure, business did what it does best: It innovated, designing new technologies to lower costs. Decades later, regulation-phobic industries are still spending a lot of money trying to hamper the government's ability to effectively regulate them. Before going to work for the White House, John Graham founded and directed the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, its funding provided by large corporations, many of which have demonstrated a staunch antiregulatory agenda: General Motors, Union Carbide, Exxon, to name a few. It's hardly surprising, then, that a 1995 study coauthored by Graham purports to show how regulations -- when not subject to the scientific rigors of cost-benefit analysis -- can end up being wildly expensive and of meager benefit. Ackerman and Heinzerling take the study apart and instead demonstrate how Graham manipulated data to achieve the results he wanted. Judging by the regulations Graham cites, it's hard to imagine how the country remains solvent. Take one measure limiting the emissions of chloroform at paper mills. Graham's study showed that, for every year of human life saved, the regulation would cost industry a whopping $99 billion. What he fails to make clear is that the measure was never put into law. No government agency even advocated that it be put into law. Graham's analysis, and more significantly how it has been portrayed by antiregulatory conservatives, muddles the distinction among actual regulations, measures that were considered and rejected (precisely because they weren't cost-effective), and others -- like the $99 billion example above -- that were never seriously considered at all. On the surface, Graham's list suggests that government regulations are an undue burden on industries. But Ackerman and Heinzerling reveal that of the 10 most expensive regulations listed by Graham, nine were never enacted into law. This academic sleight of hand is troubling coming from a prestigious institution such as Harvard. But when such misrepresentations are the work of an individual who becomes a powerful government official -- one whose decisions affect the fate of Americans' health and the environment for generations to come -- it's downright scary. The most essential feature of cost-benefit analysis, at least when it's used to decide among public health and safety regulations, is also its most troublesome, and that is the belief that economists can accurately calculate the value of a human life. Proponents like John Graham defend this notion with near religious zeal, but are economists really able to produce such a number? Well, in 2002 the Bush administration said that for the purpose of cost-benefit studies, it would value each human life at $3.7 million. Yet, just two years earlier, the Clinton administration determined that a human life is worth $6.1 million -- a figure that's 65 percent higher. There are scores of economists out there, each pushing his own "life valuation" equation. Some say a human life is worth only $100,000; others say it's worth $12 million. The enormous range shows the absurdity of the exercise itself. But it's especially ironic that the conservative, "pro-life" Bush administration would choose a formula that dramatically devalues human life -- at least when it comes to regulating the polluting industries that have contributed large amounts to the president's campaign coffer. Environmentalists who play the dollar game may win those battles where the monetary benefits of what is being saved are easy to calculate, but they will eventually lose the war. By trying to determine the value of nature (in 1997, one group of eco-minded economists and scientists put a price tag of $33 trillion on the entire biosphere), they concede the premise of cost-benefit analysis: that everything has a price, and what doesn't have a price has no value. Ackerman and Heinzerling argue persuasively that values -- the nonmonetary kind -- are really what should be at the heart of crafting policies to protect our health, safety, and the environment. Ardent cost-benefit advocates such as Graham believe that they can reduce the complicated mechanics of democratic decision making to mathematical formulas. But, as the authors write, when it comes to these vital issues "there is no formula... For good decisions, public debate and participation are essential." The authors' alternative to the cost-benefit binge of the current administration is that we stop believing that there is a perfectly objective, scientific method out there that will essentially make our regulatory decisions for us, and instead embrace spirited public debate. Not a bad idea for a democracy. In their final chapter they offer some basic principles to guide the discussion -- "an attitude rather than an algorithm." If the authors are less successful in articulating these principles than they are in debunking cost-benefit, that's understandable and perhaps inevitable. After all, it is easier to pick apart algorithms than it is to delineate an attitude. The principles they offer are admirable (who could argue with the proposition that policies should "promote fairness"?), but they're a bit fuzzy, and we've heard them all before. That doesn't mean they're wrong -- just that they don't add anything particularly new to the debate. But this one small fault shouldn't detract from Ackerman and Heinzerling's very real achievement: Priceless exposes a little-known but significant and fatal flaw at the heart of the Bush administration's antiregulatory crusade.
Efficiency cannot be placed above equity, THE TIMES OF INDIA, FRIDAY, APRIL 02, 2004 COUNTERVIEW The case against reservations in the private sector does not stand up to scrutiny as it is based on a priori notions decontextualised from social reality. One such unquestioned virtue is 'efficiency', or the pursuit of profit through optimal utilisation of resources, both material and human. Human resources are considered to be most efficient when, in the employer's perception, they possess the qualifications to perform the specific tasks assigned to them. It is, however, far from realistic to assume that the 'best' persons are employed, since all forms of recruitment, public or private, suffer from arbitrariness and subjectivity. Therefore, a broader market comprising diverse cultures will recompense what is arguably lost by way of merit or efficiency. Corporates in the US pursue affirmative action more out of enlightened self-interest than altruism. Finally, private capital cannot be isolated from the public, just as the private sphere of the individual cannot be delinked from her social existence. The pursuit of a reservations-free domain seems just as illusory as that of a free market.
Myers, David G., Ph.D. “Does Economic Growth Improve Human Morale?” Newsletter from the Center for a New American Dream 1997 Page 3 As a young man fresh out of college, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal. My one-room house had no electricity, no heat, no indoor toilet, no running water. The local diet offered little variety and virtually no meat... Yet, although my living conditions in Nepal were a bit startling at first, the most salient feature of my experience was how quickly they came to seem normal. Within a matter of weeks, I lost all sense of impoverishment. Indeed, my monthly stipend was more than most others had in my village, and with it I experienced a feeling of prosperity that I have recaptured only in recent years. [Citing Robert H Frank: “The Empty Wealth of Nations,” Unpublished manuscript, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, 1996.]
Blumm, Michael. “The fallacies of free market environmentalism.” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Spring92, Vol. 15, Issue 2, p371, 19p The liberty of those who emit air pollutants, discharge water contaminants, or dispose of hazardous waste materials may well be increased. But those exposed to environmental degradation lose liberty. And the numbers of liberty-losers typically outnumber considerably the liberty-gainers. Whether aggregate liberty is gained from market transactions is difficult to ascertain, but it is clear that some of the liberty-losers pay enormous health costs…. Unfortunately, it is a fantastic myth. Markets persistently fail to produce the ecological and health information necessary to allocate efficiently environmental resources. By focusing exclusively on “willingness to pay,” markets assume the wisdom of current preferences and the fairness of existing wealth distribution. They also carve out a significant role for the judiciary, the least representative branch of government, to allocate environmental resources. For these reasons, markets cannot supplant government intervention to correct environmental market failure.
Goldsmith, Edward, et al. The Future of Progress. 1995. Page 11 The economic paradigm Page 12 The economic growth imperative compels businesses to constantly grow, to find new markets, resources, and areas of life to colonise. Products are made to wear out sooner than necessary. Marketing professionals use whatever means are available, including the creation of new 'needs', to stimulate consumer spending. Page 94 Development has brought not only tourism, but also Western and Indian films and, more recently, television. Together they provide overwhelming images of luxury and power. There are countless tools and magical gadgets. And there are machines -- machines to take pictures, machines to tell the time, machines to make fire, to travel from one place to another, to talk with someone far away. Machines can do everything for you; it's no wonder the tourists look so clean and have such soft, white hands. Media images focus on the rich, the beautiful, and the brave, whose lives are endless action and glamour. For young Ladakhis, the picture is irresistible. It is an overwhelmingly exciting version of an urban 'American Dream', with an emphasis on speed, youthfulness, super-cleanliness, beauty, fashion and competitiveness. Progress" is also stress: humans dominate nature, while technological change is embraced at all costs. In contrast to these utopian images from another culture, village life seems primitive, silly and inefficient. The one-dimensional view of modern life becomes a slap in the face. Young Ladakhis -- who are asked by their parents to choose a way of life that involves working in the fields and getting their hands dirty for very little or no money -- feel ashamed of their own culture. Traditional Ladakh seems absurd compared with the world of the tourists and film heroes. This same pattern is being repeated in rural areas all over the South, where millions of young people believe modern Western culture to be far superior to their own. This is not surprising: looking as they do from the outside, all they can see is the material side of the modern world – the side in which Western culture excels. They cannot so readily see the social or psychological dimensions – the stress, the loneliness, the fear of growing old. Nor can they see environmental decay, inflation, or unemployment. On the other hand, they know their own culture inside out, including all its limitations and imperfections.
Harrington Emerson, The Twelve Principles Of Efficiency The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1919, Page 376 Woman brings a baby into the world, but men organize a million grown babies into an army; a woman feeds her infant from her own breast, but men organize a commissariat department that encircles the world; woman teaches each separate human being to rise from all fours and walk like a man, but a von Moltke speaks the word and a million men tramp in time and measure; woman chews hides and greases them and smokes them into the softest leather, out of which she cuts and sews moccasins, but men take the hides of five continents and cut them into a million pairs of shoes a week; woman spins her single thread and weaves it into cloth men run their thousand spindles and weave their miles of fabrics; woman makes tepees, but men build hundred-story-high skyscrapers, housing 20,000 people; woman croons her lullaby to her restless baby, but men organize grand opera, develop the phonograph; woman whispers to her lover at the tryst, but men by speech to multitudes secure presidential nominations and pile up for the presidency a million votes more than the triumphantly elected Cleveland; men connect their offices with all the other business offices in the country and shout their affairs across the continent, or send their danger calls two-thousand miles through the air. Sarewitz, Daniel R. Frontiers of Illusion. 1996. ISBN 1566394155, Page 124The raison d’etre of both the basic research system and capitalism is the pursuit of growth of knowledge and insight in the one case, and of productivity and wealth in the other. And the key to growth in each case is the self-interested motivations of the individual—of individual scientists pursuing their curiosity and individual consumers maximizing their utility. The cumulative effect of all this selfish action is progress for all. But the analogy goes deeper, in that the rhetoric of both basic research and the free market is rooted in an efficiency ethic that gives primacy to magnitude of growth while viewing direction of growth as intrinsically unpredictable and thus outside the domain of government control. From this perspective it is the job of the government to encourage growth of the knowledge base and of the economy but not to try to influence the character of this growth in any way.
George Washington, First State of the Union Address, January 8, 1790 in New York City
Mission Statement of the Million Man March --www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/dec95albert.htm "We, the Black men and women, the organizations and persons participating in this historic Million Man March…concerned about increasing racism and the continuing commitment to white supremacy in this country; deteriorating social conditions, degradation of the environment and the impact of these on our community, the larger society, and the world…" "We begin our challenge to corporations by rejecting the widespread notion … that corporations have no social responsibility except to maximize profit within the rules of an open and competitive market… The weight of corporations in modern life is overwhelming and their commitment to maximizing profit and technological efficiency can and often does lead to tremendous social costs such as deteriorating and dangerous working conditions, massive layoffs, harmful products projected as beneficial, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, corporate relocation, and disinvestment in social structures and development
Zeldin, Theodore, Philosophical Anthropology: An Intimate History of Humanity, New York: 1994, ISBN 006017160X, Page 469 In ancient times, justice was blind, unable to recognize the humanity that is in everybody. In modern times it has been one-eyed, narrowly focused on the principle of impersonality, imposing the same rules on everybody so as to avoid nepotism and favouritism, but unable to notice what people feel when they are treated impersonally and coldly, however justly or efficiently. The impersonal monetary compensations of the welfare state have not been able to heal the wounds of unfairness, because nothing can compensate adequately for a wasted life, least of all when even in the USA, which has studied efficiency to its limits, it takes seven tax dollars to get one additional dollar of income into the hands of a poor person. Only with both eyes open is it possible to see that humans have always needed not just food and shelter, health and education, but also work that is not soul-destroying and relationships that do more than keep loneliness out, humans need to be recognized as persons.
Bruce Springsteen, CBS News, Interview on 60 Minutes, New York: 1996 Page 11 of the transcriptMr. Springsteen: In my opinion, it was the failed policies; you know, that the efficiency of the economy is not the most paramount thing. A country’s judged not by just its accomplishments, but by its compassion, the health and welfare of its citizens, you know. That’s the—that’s the core of its spirit.
Sclove, Richard, Democracy And Technology, New York: 1995. ISBN 089862861X, Page 48 What of the concern that strong democracy could be grossly inefficient—wasteful of time and hazardous to prosperity? As with competing forms of social organization, there are such risks. But this concern may also involve misconstruing the meaning of efficiency and the nature of strong democracy. An action is efficient if it accomplishes its end without the unnecessary expenditure of scarce resources. However, in a strong democracy social ends are not simply given. They must be formulated via a strong democratic process. Thus, rather than conceivably impairing economic efficiency, democracy is a precondition for legitimately specifying the ends with respect to which efficiency is defined.
Mark Twain, from Internet site Quoteland.com "We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
Gouyette, Claudine; Pestieau, Pierre “Efficiency of the Welfare State.” Kyklos, 1999, Vol. 52 Issue 4, p537, 17p, 5 charts, 3 graphs To better grasp our approach, consider two countries that are identical in all respects but for the way their welfare state operates. In the first country social spending is allocated towards the truly poor households, or towards those facing unexpected income losses; transfer programs as well as the production of social services are run efficiently in terms of costs and resource utilization. In the second country, the picture is totally different: the Matthew effect prevails; administrative costs are rather high and productive efficiency in social services is low. It is pretty clear that in aggregate terms, efficiency is greater in the first country than in the second one and our aggregate measure would reflect this difference (obviously, the assumption that these two countries are identical in all other respects is crucial)…. The welfare state consists of two types of programs: transfer programs such as welfare, social security, unemployment insurance, and production of services by hospitals, day care and schools. The issue of efficiency in transfer programs can be considered in two ways: whether transfers are made to the right people and whether the financial intermediation is cost efficient. Efficiency in the provision of services is expressed in terms of resource utilization: can we produce the same quantity and quality of services with less resources, or conversely, can we produce more and better services with the same amount of resources? The conclusion to draw from this survey is clear. First, one needs to fight the Matthew effect, and if this is not possible, make transfers transparent and universalistic. Second, one needs to keep administrative costs at their current level, while at the same time maintain the quality of services provided. Third, one needs to introduce competition and autonomy in the management of social services. With an energetic efficiency-enhancing approach, the welfare state can recoup its credibility and recover desperately needed resources.
Fermi, Rachel, Picturing The Bomb, New York, 1995: ISBN 0810937352, Page 1 Because they understood the energetics of nuclear fission—the enormous output of energy for such a small input of material—the physicists also understood almost immediately that this unexpected discovery would have major political consequences. One atomic bomb, probably not much bigger than an ordinary aerial bomb, certainly no bigger than a truck, could destroy a city.
Arthur M. Okun, Equality and Equity: The Big Tradeoff, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1975, Pages 6 and 10 Features of Rights An obvious feature of rights—in sharp contrast with economic assets—is that they are acquired and exercised without any monetary charge. Because citizens do not normally have to pay a price for using their rights, they lack the usual incentive to economize on exercising them.... Second, because rights are universally distributed, they do not invoke the economist’s principle of comparative advantage that tells people to specialize in the things they do particularly well. Everybody can get into the act, including some who are not talented actors.... A third characteristic of rights is that they are not distributed as incentives, or as rewards or penalties. Unlike the dollar prizes of the marketplace or the non-pecuniary honors and awards elsewhere, extra rights and duties are not used to channel behavior into socially constructive pursuits.... A century ago, that advocate of thoroughgoing laissez-faire, Herbert Spencer, opposed a host of universally distributed public services, resting his criticisms on several grounds, including disincentive effects.... Fourth, the distribution of rights stresses equality even at the expense of equity and freedom. When people differ in capabilities, interests and preferences, identical treatment is not equitable treatment, at least by some standards. That most important principle—that rights cannot be bought or sold—is the final characteristic on my list. The owner may not trade a right away to another individual either for extra helpings of other rights or for money or goods.... The Reasons for Rights Why then does society establish these inefficient rights? The justifications for rights take three routes—libertarian, pluralistic, and humanistic. Liberty To the advocate of laissez-faire, many rights protect the individual against he encroachment of the state, and thus convey benefits that far outweigh any cost of economic inefficiency.... The traditional rationale for public interference with market exchange and for the public provision of services rests on so-called “externalities,” which involve the interests of third parties. Environmental regulations are necessary because the pollution of the air and the water by one individual harms innocent bystanders. Pluralism Rights can then be viewed as a protection against the market domination that would arise if everything could be bought on sold for money. Everyone but an economist knows without asking why money shouldn’t buy some things.... Society refuses to turn itself into a giant vending machine that delivers anything and everything for the proper number of coins. HumanismThese rights that are obtained without a quid pro quo recognize the worth of every citizen in the society. They go along with membership in the club. They then become the hallmarks of affiliation, a part of human dignity, and take on added significance for that reason. Because they are entitlements and not handouts, people can accept them freely without feeling like freeloaders. Norgard, Jorgen S. Declining Efficiency in the Economy. Denmark: 1996. ISSN 13964038, Page 281 The only way economic growth can continue in a society where people’s economic wants are already rather satisfied is to provide satisfaction in a more inefficient way. One way is to convince people to prefer beer, cookies, fruit, and other products from remote regions instead of from their own region. Another is to confuse means and ends. Most of the needs in Europe today are social and psychological, which calls for personal relations, but their satisfaction is marketed through material means. People are being taught to get satisfaction from purchasing goods rather than possessing them. The consumer becomes addicted to the flow of goods, which is itself the root of the environmental problem. The businesses that act as pushers have the full support, acknowledgement, and even subsides from growth-oriented governments.
Mander, Jerry In The Absence Of The Sacred, California: 1991 ISBN0871567393, Page 95 The main point to understand in all this is that the efficiency of television in influencing and controlling the populace does not result so much from any premeditated conspiracy by the military or corporations as it does from a de facto conspiracy of technical factors. As is the case with computers, TV technology is more efficient and more effective as an instrument of centralized control than it is for any other use.
Dave Barry, Dave Barry In Cyberspace, New York, 1996: ISBN 0517595753, Page 11Without computers, the government would be unable to function at the level of the effectiveness and efficiency that we have come to expect. This is because the primary function of the government is—and here I am quoting directly from the U.S. Constitution—“to spew out paper.” This can be very time-consuming if you use the old-fashioned method of having human beings sit down and manually think about what each individual piece of paper is actually going to say. This is why today’s government uses computers, which are capable of cranking out millions of documents per day without any regard whatsoever for their content, thereby freeing government employees for more important responsibilities, such as not answering their phones.
Hillman, James. Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses. New York: 1995. ISBN 0385469640, Pages 33 and 38 The extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, Treblinka, and its commandant, Franz Stangl, present efficiency at its purest. Treblinka was the largest of five camps built exclusively for the purpose of extermination. According to a most conservative estimate these camps killed close to 3,000,000 people in seventeen months. The extermination camps were devised for the Final Solution because an earlier method—simply shooting masses of people above pits to be bulldozed under (a method used by the Nazis in the Soviet Union) -- was soon rejected as inefficient for what Himmler was to call “the enormous task ahead.”* This method was inefficient for many reasons: the escaping gases from corpse putrefaction gave an indication of what was happening; no salvage of goods and gold; open-pit killing took too many soldiers to do the shooting, so that secrecy could not be maintained; too such confusion, some victims mimicked death, some escaped, some soldiers did not shoot, etc. Efficiency here is to be understood solely from the viewpoint of the one in power, the executor. An efficient execution in other situations takes the victim’s viewpoint: quick, painless, neither cruel nor unusual.
Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1983, p. 98 In contemporary psychological language, efficiency is a primary mode of denial. Stangl makes this clear in his explanations. His single-minded devotion to doing an efficient job closed his eyes to what the job was actually doing. His efficiency defended him from his sensitivity. Work justified itself; efficiency for its own sake—and it could not be stopped “because it worked.”
From “The Deserted Village” by Oliver Goldsmith Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Aldo Leopold, “The Ecological Conscience” speech to the Conservation Meeting, Minneapolis, June 1947. Reprinted from the December 1947 issue ofthe Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin We have not asked the citizen to assume any real responsibility. We have told him that if he will vote right, obey the law, join some organizations, and practice what conservation is profitable on his own land, that everything will be lovely; the government will do the rest. This formula is too easy to accomplish anything worthwhile. It calls for no effort or sacrifice; no change in our philosophy of values. It entails little that any decent and intelligent person would not have done, of his own accord, under the late but not lamented Babbitian code. No change in human conduct is ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphases, our loyalties, our affections and our convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that our philosophy, ethics and religion have not yet heard of it.
Gauss, Christian. The Prince. New York, Page 86A prince, therefore, not being able to exercise this virtue of liberality without risk if it be known, must not, if he be prudent, object to be called miserly. In course of time he will be thought more liberal, when it is seen that by his parsimony his revenue is sufficient, that he can defend himself against those who make war on him, and undertake enterprises without burdening his people, so that he is really liberal to all those from whom he does not take, who are infinite in number, and niggardly to all to whom he does not give, who are few. In our times we have seen nothing great done except by those who have been esteemed niggardly; the others have all bee ruined. Pope Julius II, although he had made use of a reputation for liberality in order to attain the papacy, did not seek to retain it afterwards, so that he might be able to wage war. The present King of France has carried on so many wars without imposing an extraordinary tax, because his extra expenses were covered by the parsimony he had so long practised. The present King of Spain, if he had been thought liberal, would not have engaged in and been successful in so For these reasons a prince must care little for the reputation of being a miser, if he wished to avoid robbing his subjects, if he wishes to be able to defend himself, to avoid becoming poor and contemptible, and not to be forced to become rapacious; this niggardliness is one of those vices which enable him to reign. If it is said that Caesar attained the empire through liberality, and that many others have reached the highest positions through being liberal or being thought so, I would reply that you are either a prince already or else on the way to become one.
William Knowlton. Writing to Learn. New York: 1998. ISBN 0062720406, Page 36The British Empire, however inefficient in its management, was very much a going concern, and wise men on both sides of the Atlantic believed that its success was intimately connected with the bumbling way in which it was run. They saw both the prosperity and the inefficiency of the empire as results of the freedom that prevailed in it. Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not infrequently found together, and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two. The British Empire was inefficient, but its inhabitants were prosperous, and they were free.
Greider, William. Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. New York: 1998. ISBN 1891620096 Page 158 The global economic system, led by the United States, governs trade, financial markets, and the rights of capital by imposing complex rules but insists that fundamental human freedoms are not a legitimate basis for global regulation. Raising questions of environmental protection, labor rights, or social equity -- not to mention the democratic principles of free speech and freedom of assembly -- is described as an intrusion on the trading system, possibly even an impediment to the spread of prosperity. National sovereignty (including America's is told to yield to the efficiencies of globalizing enterprises
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State 1998. ISBN 0300070160, Page 98 For many specialists, a narrow and materialist “productivism” treated human labor as a mechanical system which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the physics of work. The simplification of labor into isolated problems of mechanical efficiencies led directly to the aspiration for a scientific control of the entire labor process. Late nineteenth-century materialism, as Anson Rabinbach emphasizes, had an equivalence between technology and physiology at its metaphysical core.... What is most remarkable about both traditions is, once again, how widely they were believed by educated elites who were otherwise poles apart politically. Taylorism and technocracy were the watchwords of a three-pronged idealism: the elimination of economic and social crisis, the expansion of productivity through science, and the reenchantment of technology. The vision of society in which social conflict was eliminated in favor of technological and scientific imperatives could embrace liberal, socialist, authoritarian, and even communist and fascist solutions. Productivism, in short, was politically promiscuous. The appeal of one or another form of productivism across much of the right and center of the political spectrum was largely due to its promise as a technological “fix” for class struggle. If, as its advocates claimed, it could vastly increase worker output, then the politics of redistribution could be replaced by class collaboration, in which both profits and wages could grow at once. For much of the left, productivism promised the replacement of the capitalist by the engineer or by the state expert or official. It also proposed a single optimum solution, or “best practice,” for any problem in the organization of work. The logical outcome was some form of slide-rule authoritarianism in the interest, presumably, of all.... A combination of Rathrnau’s broad training in philosophy and economics, his wartime experience with planning, and the social conclusions that he thought were inherent in the precision, reach, and transforming potential of electric power allowed him to draw the broadest lessons for social organization. In the war, private industry had given way to a kind of state socialism; “gigantic industrial enterprises had transcended their ostensibly private owners and all the laws of property. The decisions required had nothing to do with ideology; they were driven by purely technological possibilities, particularly huge electric power grids, made possible a new social-industrial order that was both centralized and locally autonomous. During the time when war made necessary a coalition among industrial firms, technocrats, and the state, Rathenau discerned the shape of a progressive peace-time society. Inasmuch as the technical and economic requirements for reconstruction were obvious and required the same sort of collaboration in all countries, Rathenau’s rationalist faith in planning had an internationalist flavor. He characterized the modern era as a “new machine order ... [and] a consolidation of the world into an unconscious association of constraint, into an uninterrupted community of production and harmony. The world war was the high-water mark for the political influence of engineers and planners. Having seen what could be accomplished in extremis, they imagined what they could achieve if the identical energy and planning were devoted to popular welfare rather than mass destruction. Together with many political leaders, industrialists, labor leaders, and prominent intellectuals (such as Philip Gibbs in England, Ernst Junger in Germany, and Gustave Le Bon in France), they concluded that only a renewed and comprehensive dedication to technical innovation and the planning it made possible could rebuild the European economies and bring social peace. Lenin himself was deeply impressed by the achievements of German industrial mobilization and believed that it had shown how production might be socialized. Just as Lenin believed that Marx had discovered immutable social laws akin to Darwin’s laws of evolution, so he believed that the new technologies of mass production were scientific laws and not social constructions. Barely a month before the October 1917 revolution, he wrote that the war had “accelerated the development of capitalism to such a tremendous degree, converting monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism, that neither the proletariat nor the revolutionary petty-bourgeois democrats can keep within the limits ofcapitalism. He and his economic advisors drew directly on the work of Rathenau and Mollendorf in their plans for the Soviet economy. The German war economy was for Lenin “the ultimate in modern, large-scale capitalist techniques, planning and organization”; he took it to be the prototype of a socialized economy. Presumably, if the state in question were in the hands of representatives of the working class, the basis of a socialist system would exist. Lenin’s vision of the future looked much like Rathenau’s, providing, of course, we ignore the not so small matter of a revolutionary seizure of power. Lenin was not slow to appreciate how Taylorism on the factory floor offered advantages for the socialist control of production. Although he had earlier denounced such techniques, calling them the “scientific extortion of sweat,” by the time of the revolution he had become an enthusiastic advocate of systematic control as practiced in Germany. He extolled “the principle of discipline, organization, and harmonious cooperation based upon the modern, mechanized industry, the most rigid system of accountability and control....” By 1918, with production falling, he was calling for rigid work norms and, if necessary, the reintroduction of hated piecework. The first All-Russian Congress for Initiatives in Scientific Management was convened in 1921 and featured disputes between advocates of Taylorism and those of energetics (also called ergonomics). At least twenty institutes and as many journals were by then devoted to scientific management in the soviet Union. A command economy at the macrolevel and Taylorist principles of central coordination at the microlevel of the factory floor provided an attractive and symbiotic package for an authoritarian, high-modernist revolutionary like Lenin.... The clarity of the high-modernist optic is due to its resolute singularity. Its simplifying fiction is that, for any activity or process that comes under its scrutiny, there is only one thing going on. In the scientific forest there is only commercial wood being grown; in the planned city there is only the efficient movement of goods and people; in the housing estate there is only the effective delivery of shelter, heat, sewage, and water; in the planned hospital there is only the swift provision of professional medical services. And yet both we and the planners know that each of these sites is the intersection of a host of interconnected activities that defy such simple descriptions. Even something as apparently monofunctional as a road from A to B can at the same time function as a sit for leisure, social intercourse, exciting diversions, and enjoying the view between A and B. The point is simply that high-modernist designs for life and production tend to diminish the skills, agility, initiative, and morale of their intended beneficiaries. They bring about a mild form of this institutional neurosis. Or, to put it in the utilitarian terms that many of their partisans would recognize, there designs tend to reduce the “human capital” of the workforce. Complex, diverse, animated environments contribute, as Jacobs saw, to producing a resilient, flexible, adept population that has more experience in confronting novel challenges and taking initiative. Narrow, planned environments, by contrasts, foster a less skilled, less innovative, less resourceful population. This population, once created, would ironically have been exactly the kind of human material that would in fact have needed close supervision from above. In other words, the logic of social engineering on this scale was to produce the sort of subjects that its plans had assumed at the outset.... Diversity and certain forms of complexity, apart from their attractiveness, have other advantages. In natural systems, we know, these advantages are manifold. Old-growth forests, polycropping, and agriculture with open-pollinated landraces may not be as productive, in the short run, as single-species forests and fields or identical hybrids. But they are demonstrably more stable, more self-sufficient, and less vulnerable to epidemics and environmental stress, needing far less in the way of external infusions to keep them on track. Every time we replace “natural capital” (such as wild fish stocks or old-growth forests) with what might be called “cultivated natural capital” (such as fish farms or tree plantations), we gain in ease of appropriation and in immediate productivity, but at the cost of more maintenance expenses and less “redundancy, resiliency, and stability.” If the environmental challenges faced by such systems are both modest and predictable, then a certain simplification might also be relatively stable. Other things being equal, however, the less diverse the cultivated natural capital the more vulnerable and nonsustainable it becomes. The problem is that in most economic systems, the external costs (in water or air pollution, for example, or the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, including a reduction in biodiversity) accumulate long before the activity becomes unprofitable in a narrow profit-and-loss sense.
Simpson, Kemper. Big business, Efficiency and Fascism. New York: Harper and Row 1941. ISBN 040416529X Page 31 Hitler and Mussolini asked for unlimited power and the suspension of democracy in Germany and Italy in order to obviate the evils of communism. Big business asks for unlimited size and the abrogation of competition in the United States in order to serve the American consumer by increased efficiency. Have Hitler and Mussolini through fascism obviated the evils of communism? Has big business in the United States through ever increasing size and limitation of competition accomplished a compensating efficiency? The writer believes that both of these questions must be answered in the negative. In the pages to follow there will be presented the results of a comprehensive inquiry of the Federal Trade Commission into the effectiveness of the giant corporations that dominate American industry. They will not be judged by the threat to democracy which their very size and financial power obviously imply. They will be judged by their efficiency, the very standard which they never fail to emphasize. Page 63 Big business while giving lip service to the competitive system actually mistrusts it and circumvents it at every turn. Therefore, big business has become an unwitting fifth column in the democracy, and in league with it are the many propertied folk who admire its "streamlined efficiency" and who fear the "dirty communists." Its more reckless and cruel representatives may yet finance a dictator when a crisis threatens the economy they have so selfishly misused. That dictator may have a red rather than a brown mustache, he may have a quiet, forceful manner rather than a blatant, bumptious one. But he will be just one more evidence of the defeatism with which he world is becoming paralyzed. Let us hope that if he comes he will be an American with an ounce of tolerance and a sense of humor with which to lighten the dark ages that may accompany his is not really efficient if it is strangling competition which is the vitalizing force in a democratic economy. Big business will not be able to justify the largest of its accomplishments if it eventually destroys democracy. Fascism is certainly not so efficient as it is advertised to be. The "statistical onslaught" on unemployment, whereby the true number of jobless has been concealed, the campaigns obviously employed to divert attention from domestic crises make it easy to see that fascists have not solved their economic problems. Finally, fascism may yet have to answer for the destruction of civilization. Page 64 What must those of us who really believe in the competitive system and in democracy do to check the trend toward fascism? First, we must fight for fair competition with its equality of opportunity.
V. I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” (1918), Collected Works, Vol. 27 (Moscow, 1965), p. 259. The Taylor system, “like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our ends.”
Huber, Peter W. Hard Green. New York: 1999. ISBN 0465031129, Pages 144-6 and 184-5 “Efficiency” planners have been around a lot longer than Soft Greens. Socialism, recall, was “Scientific.” It wasn’t just going to make cars or refrigerators efficient, it was going to make whole economies efficient. It was going to wring the waste out of capitalism itself. Yet centrally planned industrialism, for all its desperate pursuit of efficient production, produced far fewer amps and ingots than the honestly efficient capitalists. Everywhere they came to power, central planners laid waste. Economic waste, and environmental waste, too. They despoiled the environment with gross, arrogant, blundering, callous, stupid savagery almost unimaginable to us capitalists. Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., set out some of the appalling details in a 1992 book, Ecocide in the USSR. For seventy-five years, the Commies systematically poisoned the air, soil, and water of one-sixth of the Earth’s land mass, stretching from Poland to the Pacific. Draining the Aral Sea in Central Asia to irrigate cotton fields, they precipitated the “greatest single, man-made ecological catastrophe in history.” In Western Siberia they poisoned the Tom River and the Angara River, and hence Lake Baikal, the Enisel, and the waters northward to the Artic Ocean. In European Russia they poisoned the Volga, Dnieper, and Don. In the steel city of Magnitogorsk their open hearth furnaces dumped 870,000 tons of atmospheric pollutants per year into the air. “No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, water and people.” None of this happened, not officially. The communists had enacted some of the strongest environmental laws in the world. Unfortunately, they neglected to obey any of them. Capitalists have something to lose under the law: their own wealth. Public bureaucrats don’t. Capitalists are said to sacrifice nature to material abundance. The Communists sacrificed nature far faster and more ruthlessly, with no abundance to show for it. Capitalists tend not to feel heroic; they merely aspire to conquer Wall Street. The Communist agitprop depicted a heroic society that would conquer all of nature. And because everyone owned the land no one took responsibility for it. Oh yes, to be sure, those were the old efficiency planners, red socialists, not green ones, The Soft Green has seen the new “future that works.” It’s no longer the system that will generate more electricity than any other; now, it’s the system that will generate less. Because we will use it so efficiently. Soft Green is for the 1990s what the Dnieper Dam and the newest red salmon-canning factory were for the 1930s. Economic efficiency then, environmental efficiency now, the laws of economics then, the laws of ecology now, the oppression of workers then, the oppression of all life in the bio sphere now. soft Greens will suppress demand or electricity as ruthlessly as the Reds once promoted its supply. They aren’t going to build an enormous salmon-canning plant; they are going to package millions of tons of tofu instead and teach us all to like it. But they won’t, of course. Central planning is never efficient, it is congenitally stupid, whether aimed at electricity or salmon, supply or demand, economy or ecology. Central planners disdain, and so never engage, the vast reservoir of initiative and intelligence in ordinary people. Even while they remain honest and well intentioned, which they rarely do for long, central planners disdain, and so never engage, the vast reservoir of initiative and intelligence in ordinary people. Even while they remain honest and well intentioned, which they rarely do for long, central planners get hopelessly muddled. They want to manage the scarcity wisely, but they also want to be fair. So they build big dams to supply new power, then sell it so cheap it is used in profligate excess. They mandate clean cars, but won’t touch clunkers driven by the poor, the worst polluters. They prescribe the size of our toilet cisterns, but they won’t put a price on water; think of the poor. They slap a gas-guzzler tax on the rarely driven Rolls, but never on a million-mile Chevy. They demand clean air, and they demand jobs for coal miners. However imminent the famine, fairness to the fecund populace can never mean raising the price of food. Central planning invariably ends with huge bureaucracies laboring to conserve salmon in a toilet cistern. Central planners are the only ones who can turn the green triumph of Hard technology into environmental ruin. In the hands of a capitalist, the central electric power plant is the greenest option there is. In the hands of the central planners it is Chernobyl: not hard power gone wrong, but its management gone wrong. Central planning always goes wrong. The Communists built and operated power plants fanatically, because for them, big power was a symbol of political triumph. Why should we be surprised they turned Hard power into a green disaster? They turned all wealth into poverty. If there is one political lesson we should not have to relive and relearn, it is that central planners always promise efficiency and always deliver its opposite. When workers were poor, they promised efficient wealth and delivered three generations of waste. Now that environmental poverty looms, they promise efficient green. They use the word freely enough, but they simply don’t know that efficiency means. Out of ignorance that deep there comes only one thing: despoliation and decay. It is the free market that is efficient: spontaneously efficient. The Hard technology of modern capitalism is fantastically efficient. It produces food, power, transportation—everything—far more cheaply and abundantly than Soft alternatives. It solves every problem except the problem of wealth. Hard technology does not reduce consumption, it increases it. It makes us richer, not poorer. Which means it lets us grow and grow, if we choose to. That is what ultimately damns Hard technology in the mind of the Soft Green. Not its inefficiency or instability, but just the opposite: its relentlessly stable efficiency. Hard technology is so efficient, so stable, that it makes us rich. Which—the Soft Green believes—means growth, “the creed of the cancer cell.” Marx himself allowed that capitalists were efficient. Efficiency was what was going to limit capitalism’s own march through the pages of history. More capital meant ever-more efficient machines, which meant ever-increasing unemployment. The Soft Green tells exactly the same story today, but likes it: More efficient refrigerators mean less employment at the power plant and the mine-head. Now as the, the logic seems impeccable—on paper. Yet the real world does not see it. Efficiency rises and rises, but so do employment, consumption, power plants, and drilling rigs. The scarcity futurists somehow miss something so fundamental that what is supposed to go down goes up. Seeing what lies ahead, seeing it so clearly and at such a great distance, megatrend futurists always have a lot to say about how best to make the journey “efficient.” They understand clearly how all the economic currents interact. They understand how this trickles into that, how fiddling with this economic spigot over here will produce that excellent consequence over there. Much as they reviled efficiency under the capitalist’s private control, the Marxists were boundlessly confident in their own ability to deliver it, through “scientific” central planning. Stalin “seemed to live in a half-real and half-dreamy world of statistical figures and indices, of industrial orders and instructions, a world in which no target and no objective seemed to be beyond his and the party’s grasp.” The party placed grand orders, for steel, electricity, and wheat and for environmental protection, too. Everything was meticulously modeled and calculated and planned, down to the last detail. What actually emerged was lunacy, both economic and environmental. The political planners of the scientific future delivered a random walk to waste, inefficiency, dispersion, and disaster. Happily for the environment the Softs lack Stalin’s totalitarian grip on things, but they still go for as much as they can, with what grip they have. And unhappily for the environment, they have quite a bit. They too have their reams of efficiency statistics, which they translate into prescriptions for the gas economies of cars, the electrical economies of refrigerators, and the aquatic economies of toilet tanks. They understand how the efficiency they prescribe for the refrigerator will trickle back up through the power plant to the mine-head; they understand the intricate trickling in ways the ordinary householder or factory manager will never grasp. They alone understand why protecting the wilderness is not enough; to protect the wilderness they must redesign the refrigerator, too. They don’t just move Yellowstone into the public domain, they move the toilet tank industry there, too. This means less free market, not more, and therefore— quite predictably and inevitably—less efficiency, not more. Which means less wealth, not more. Which means, in the end, less green, not more. Wealth is green, poverty isn’t Once again, that conclusion does not emerge from elaborate models of the future, it is compelled by direct observation of the past and present. Poverty curbs environmental decay the Malthusian way; wealth curbs it, too, the way T. R. prescribed. Wealth solves the problem of scarcity with abundance. Wealth solves the problem of population by defending life, not by surrendering to death. That is whey Hard Greens must resolves in the end to be inefficient. Inefficient in government. Inefficient in prescribing and controlling dictating, as Stalin did, as Softs still aspire to do. Wealth is not the product of efficient central planners, it is the product of unplanned markets. Markets, we well know, are appalling inefficient. How could they be otherwise? In free markets, competitors duplicate each other’s investments, businesses rise and fall, many go bankrupt, and everyone’s information about what’s going on is miserably incomplete. Private projections of the future are laughably ad hoc and inadequate; they do not look the least bit professional or serous when compared, say, with the enormous modeling and computing power that produced The Limits to Growth. No, free markets are efficient at all. They are just less inefficient than every other alternative. So they generate wealth much, much faster. And wealth is green.
“The Idea of a Local Economy” by Wendell Berry – Orion Magazine, Winter 2001 The economic theory used to justify the global economy in its "free market" version is again perfectly groundless and sentimental. The idea is that what is good for the corporations will sooner or later - though not of course immediately - be good for everybody. That sentimentality is based in turn, upon a fantasy: the proposition that the great corporations, in "freely" competing with one another for raw materials, labor, and marketshare, will drive each other indefinitely, not only toward greater "efficiencies" of manufacture, but also toward higher bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers. As a result, all the world¹s people will be economically secure - in the future. It would be hard to object to such a proposition if only it were true. But one knows, in the first place, that "efficiency" in manufacture always means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper workers or with machines. In the second place, the "law of competition" does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the "free market" will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war. In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap long-distance transportation, without which it is not possible to move goods from the point of cheapest origin to the point of highest sale. And cheap long-distance transportation is the basis of the idea that regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to specialize in production for export of the few commodities or the single commodity that can be most cheaply produced. Whatever may be said for the "efficiency" of such a system, its result (and I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence. This idea of a global "free market" economy, despite its obvious moral flaws and its dangerous practical weaknesses, is now the ruling orthodoxy of the age. Its propaganda is subscribed to and distributed by most political leaders, editorial writers, and other "opinion makers." The powers that be, while continuing to budget huge sums for "national defense," have apparently abandoned any idea of national or local self-sufficiency, even in food. They also have given up the idea that a national or local government might justly place restraints upon economic activity in order to protect its land and its people…. SO FAR AS I CAN SEE, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices. Sagoff, Mark. The Economy of the Earth. New York: ISBN 0521341132, Page 6In this book, I shall argue against the use of the efficiency criterion in social regulation, and against the idea that workplace, consumer-product, and environmental problems exist largely because “commodities” like environmental pollution, workplace safety, and product safety are not traded in markets. I shall argue, in contrast, that these problems are primarily moral, aesthetic, cultural, and political and that they must be addressed in those terms. The notion of allocatory efficiency and related concepts in the literature of resource economics, as I shall show, have become academic abstractions and serve today primarily to distract attention from the moral, cultural, and political and that they must be addressed in those terms. The notion of allocatory efficiency and related concepts in the literature of resource economics, as I shall show, have become academic abstractions and serve today primarily to distract attention from the moral, cultural, aesthetic, and political purposes on which social regulation is appropriately based. This is not to say that I oppose markets or that I am insensitive to the many virtues of a free market economy. I do not deny that competition is an important value—it is surely one that Americans cherish—or that economic regulation and deregulation, insofar as they enhance competition, are prima facie good things. Like Dr. Kneese, moreover, I respect private property ownership and the freedom of individual choice. I shall argue, however, that although many important virtues may underlie a free market—freedom, autonomy, competitiveness, respect for property rights, and so on—efficiency is not one of them. Free markets are rarely if ever efficient. Efficiency, I shall contend, functions not as a vindication of personal or property rights but primarily as a pretext for centralized governmental planning. A planner rarely has to look far an “externality” or “free rider” problem with which to justify a favorite regulation. Page 7 There are important shared values, for example, health, well-being, safety, cleanliness, and respect and reverence for nature, however, that unlike the goal of efficiency, justify governmental intervention in markets, whether or not these markets are efficient. The values, I shall argue, provide a sound basis for social regulation. Page 27 Environmental economists generally define “efficiency” as the “maximum consumption of goods and services given the available amount of resources.” On this approach to environmental policy, it is the preferences of the consumer that are important. “The benefit of any good or service is simply its value to a consumer.” The only values that count or that can be counted, on this view, are those that a market, actual or hypothetical, can price. “In principle, the ultimate measure of environmental quality,” one text assures us, “is the value people place on these services... or their willingness to pay.” Willingness to pay. What is wrong with that? The rub is this. Not all of us think of ourselves primarily as consumers. Many of us regard ourselves as citizens as well. As consumers, we act to acquire what we want for ourselves individually; each of us follows his or her conception of good life. As citizens, however, we may deliberate over and then seek to achieve together a conception of the good society. In a liberal state, we are all free to pursue our personal ideas of the good life, for example, by buying the books we want to read. In a democracy, however, we are also free to pursue our ideal of ourselves as a good society, by trying to convince one another and our political representatives of a particular idea of our national goals and aspirations.... Page 60 To speak bluntly, the problem with efficiency and equality as principles of social policy is that they have the smell of the lamp about them. Each approach assumes that academic economists and philosophers, by practicing deep thinking, discover the fundamental truths about Man, Civil Society, and the State from which the goals of social regulation may be derived. This assumption is false. The goals of social regulation are based in public values and are found in legislation. Insofar as options are available under the law, policy decisions, often expressed in parts per billion, must be justified, as it were, from the bottom up, not from the top down. To make hard choices, public officials must organize the minute particulars involved in assessing risks, monitoring compliance, and litigating penalties. Discussions of the “trade-off” between efficiency and equality have become a useless academic pastime to which this book seeks to write an epitaph. These discussions have little to contribute to the practical and political concerns of social regulation....
Heilbroner, Robert L. Business Civilization in Decline. Norton: 1976 ISBN 039305571X, Page 87 In place of the sprawling and inefficient nation-states that interpose their arbitrary and irregular boundaries over the globe, the multinationals offer the vision of world production organized along "transnational" lines designed to promote efficiency and technical superiority. They appear, therefore, to the archaic nation-state, what the nation-state itself was to the disorganized crazy-quilt of feudal autarchy. Already bigger and more powerful, in financial terms, than any but the largest nations, they suggest that capitalist enterprise, freed from the confines of its cramping national borders, will find in its multinational existence the organizational form required for its survival. If this contention is true, it would profoundly alter our previous assessment of the survival capacities of a business civilization. But is it true? The impressive reach of multinational power does indeed suggest that some great sea change is underway. But here is where the picture becomes obscure and confusing. Consider, to begin with, the following thumbnail description of the multinational economy whose salient features we have been examining:
The description surely covers many of the salient features of the multinational phenomenon. The trouble is that it was written (with a few emendations by myself) by Lenin in 1917. This suggests that the phenomenon is not as new as we tend to think -- or rather, that whatever is "new" about it cannot be discovered in the mere presence of great sums of capital invested by the enterprises of one country in the territory of another country.
Sagoff, Mark. “Environmental Economics”. Page 11 and 19Prosperity, that is, the macroeconomic performance of a society—expressed in measurements of employment, inflation, interest rates, balance of trade, etc. depends on such things as fiscal and monetary policy, the education and skill levels of citizens, their technological progress and prowess, and so on, far more than on the efficiency of resource utilization for consumption.... Pollution control provides a clear example of the opposition between utilitarian and deontological or rule-based conceptions of collective choice. A utilitarian approach regards pollution primarily as an external or social cost of production and therefore may seek to “internalize” this cost in prices paid for goods and services that pollute. A Kantian perspective, in contrast, regards pollution as a form of coercion, invasion, or trespass to be regulated as a violation of the rights of person and property. From this perspective, pollution constitutes a tort or nuisance—like a punch in the nose. Thus, pollution control protects the rights of individuals against trespass, which is not the same thing as—indeed, it may conflict with—satisfying their consumer desires or preferences.
Podgorecki, Adam. Social Engineering. Canada: 1996. ISBN 0886292700, Pages 51-2 The first methodological stage of the paradigm of efficient social action consists of an examination of the social problem. The question at hand is whether the state of affairs regarded as difficult, creating tension, close to explosion or potentially dangerous, should be sociotechnically investigated, or whether to question the initial perception as being possibly biased. Reflection on this subject should result in a decision to place this problem under investigation or reject it as spurious, exaggerated or untreatable. (For a more detailed discussion on social problems see Henshel 1976, and Kubin 1979). The second methodological stage of this paradigm of purposeful social action involves fixing the hierarchical order of social priorities and ideological values deemed appropriate to the means and ends of the sociotechnical activity. in this stage those values seemingly important to the potential activity should be assembled, clarified, set into a hierarchical order, and analyzed for possible vagueness or contradiction. One makes a diagnosis of the social situation causing the problem. The diagnosis consists of a comprehensive, systematic empirical description of the e existing situation. One then examines both a broader and a narrower meaning of the diagnosis. In the narrower sense, the diagnosis must describe the situation, classify collected facts, and translate the data into scientifically operational terms. In a broader sense, the diagnosis must also try to explain the situation. It tries to specify the causes that shape it and, if possible, present a picture of the mutual interplay of these causes. The paradigm’s third methodological stage comprises an evaluation of the situation that was the subject of the diagnosis. It must answer the question of whether applying acknowledged values to the situation dictates efforts to change it, or whether the costs, including those of acquiring the necessary information, would be greater than toleration of the existing liability. If the answer is to recommend change, one then applies the proper sociotechnical procedure. If substantive change is not recommended, one might still apply sociotechnical action to help people tolerate the situation, as in the elevator example given above. Both of these situations represent univocal evaluations. An evaluation is equivocal when a given set of values leads to a negative evaluation of the given situation, but one can also reach a positive evaluation of the same situation from the viewpoint of different but also accepted values. This makes necessary a suspension of the teleological course until one reaches a final evaluation (Podgorecki 1975). When an equivocal evaluation exists, the sociotechnician must consider three basic possibilities. The first exists when a higher, complete and noncontradictory system of values is available as the result of an analytic-normative reasoning process (e.g., a social contract). The second arises when upon examination an incomplete value system turns out to be non-contradictory and thus a merely spurious contradictory value set appears within the larger system (e.g., expansion of already-established values into a new area such as euthanasia). The third possibility is that two completely incompatible systems of values (e.g., Western civilization and values versus Islamic values) confront each other. One can apply normative-evaluative reasoning (which in the first stage clarifies priorities inside a given hierarchy of values) to the first and second possibilities, but not the last (Podgorecki 1975). Here values derive from a complete and closed value system. As a rule, such institutions as voting, referenda, arbitration or mediation serve as useful tools to find solutions in the first and second possibilities. The whole procedure of efficient social action should stop if it proves impossible to reconcile the values involved. The paradigm of efficient social action requires that we set into motion only consistent and unified values.
Shulevitz, Uri. Toddlecreek Post Office. New York: 1990. Page 1The postal inspector surveyed the post office for a very long time. Then she entered and walked slowly around, without saying a word. She stopped to scrutinize the barn-dance announcements, and the notices on the bulletin board. She examined the other books that Sally Boone had left. She looked at Dexter Shuffles and Charlie Ax. Then she glared at Silken and the Mayor. At long last, she stood before Vernon and said, “A post office is for post-office business only. And it is obvious that a small village like Toddlecreek does not have enough post-office business. Therefore, this post office must be closed.” Dexter Shuffles and Charlie Ax froze. Vernon was stunned. How could he explain that, to the Toddlecreek villagers, their post office was much more than a post office? Vernon could not explain it, so Vernon did not explain it. Vernon said nothing.
Shuman, Michael. Going Local. New York: 1998. ISBN 0684830124 Page 97A lively debate has ensued in recent years over whether private firms working under government control can deliver public goods more efficiently than public agencies. The jury is still out. Certainly there are government functions that cannot be measured strictly by private-market efficiency considerations.
Bourne, Randolph S. War and the Intellectuals. New York: Harper Torchbooks 1964. Page 138, also Hackett Publishers, 1999 ISBN 0872205010That is why I can make him understand what I mean by “exploitation.” He thinks of it as something personally brutal. He does not see it inherent in a system, for which no one is “specifically to blame” only because all are equally guilty of short vision and flimsy analysis. And yet as I read his letters and clippings, I wonder if he is not the realist and I the mystic. He punctures my phrases of power and class with a coarse satisfied hunky to whom work and disease and riot are all in the day’s work and who would despise the philosophy which I am so anxiously weaving for him. It seems a long way from my dainty music-bench to the iron range, or the stove-factory. One has to feel exploitation perhaps before one understands it. I console myself with the thought that power is itself mystic, and that my friend will have to get hit with some invisible threat of class-force, as some of his frightened friends
Brown, Lester R. “Crossing the Threshold.” World-Watch Institute World Watch March/April 1999, Page 17 More than 300 U.S. cities now have part of their police force on bicycles. Not long ago I found myself standing on a street corner in downtown Washington, D.C., next to a police officer on a bicycle. As we waited for the light to change, I asked him why there were now so many officers on bicycles. He indicated that it was largely a matter of efficiency, since an officer on a bike can respond to some 50 percent more calls in a day than one in a squad car. The fiscal benefits are obvious. He also indicated that the bicycle police make many more arrests, because they are both more mobile and less conspicuous. |
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Forget Shorter Showers Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide. Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen. Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.” I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change. So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet. Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world. The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.” The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it. The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead. The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.
Sam Smith, Why Bother? Los Angeles: Ferel House, 2001. ISBN 0922915725Page 18Whenever I hear of another school shooting or other youthful violence, the first thing I think about is Dr. Calhoun and his mice. Dr. John Calhoun put four pairs of white mice in a steel cage eight-and-a-half feet on a side. Within two years the mice had increased to 2,200. The adult mice began excluding young mice from their company and the young began biting, attacking, and slashing one another. Finally social and sexual intercourse became impossible without violence. The mice stopped reproducing and eventually all died out. Page 29Thus, with Auschwitz-like efficiency, over 6000 people perished every day during World War I for 1,500 days. Rubenstein recounts that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men and half of the officers assigned to them. But the internal bureaucratic logic of the war did not falter at all; over the next six months, more than a million British, French and German soldiers would lose their lives. The total British advance: six miles. No one in that war was a person anymore. The seeds of the holocaust can thus be found in the trenches of World War I. Individuals had became no better than the bullets that killed them, just part of the expendable arsenal of the state. Page 128That we have come to accept a politics that offers no choice save between our acquisition of abusive power or our submission to it speaks only to the depths of our condition; it says nothing about that which is possible.
Meyer, Michael and Jennifer, “The Myth of German efficiency.” Newsweek, 7/30/90, Vol. 116 Issue 5, p36, 1p A few costs of the Teutonic ethic: meddling neighbors, sodden pedestrians and wooden tomatoes Is it deserved? Even as the Teutonic industrial machine rolls along like a supercharged BMW, there are signs that German efficiency is not all it’s cracked up to be. Yes, West Germany is Europe’s economic dynamo, boasting the highest per capita productivity in the world. Yes, German planes and trains leave (more or less) on time, and the streets are clean. “The Germans are not perfect,” says John Meyer, an American business consultant in Dusseldorf “But when it comes to efficiency, they come closer than anyone else.” But let us remember: efficiency, taken to an extreme, can become inefficiency. Anyone living in Germany quickly learns the drawbacks of excessive perfectionism. Take the helpful telephone operators at the West German Bundespost. They will routinely disconnect your call if it exceeds the time deemed necessary to efficiently conclude your business. Frustrating? You bet, but less so than the hassle of getting a phone in the first place. That can take six weeks (three months if “street work” is required). Nor is the technician who installs your line the man who plugs your phone into the wall. That five-second operation requires yet another appointment—and another long wait. Don’t do it yourself; you will be fined. Rules and regulations encumber German society. “The price of efficiency is bureaucracy,” says Stephanie Wahl, a sociologist in Bonn. “We Germans like to be told how to do everything.” That may be an understatement. In Germany, there are laws against squeezing the tomatoes at the grocery store, laws telling you when to clip your hedge, laws on how to hang your window curtains. When you move in Germany, you must register with the police. You should also register your TV. Roving vans cruise German streets, equipped with antennas that pick up waves from whatever electronic appliances you might have. They know how many radios, TVs or telephones you have—and tax you accordingly. But watch out. A foreigner with a new baby recently found herself in an endless wrangle with the German government, which was convinced that the signals picked up from her baby monitor were transmissions from an unregistered (and therefore illegal) cordless telephone. Few advanced countries make the mundane tasks of life so...inefficient. A simple money transfer takes two weeks. Trains and planes are canceled without notice on holidays. Grocery stores close during the lunch hour, on weekends and before most people get off work. And don’t dare mow the lawn on Sundays, a statutory day of rest. Violations might elicit a note from the neighbors, pushed under the gate, reminding you of the regulation . . . and the likely interest of the police. Germans argue, not without merit, that such restrictions make you think before you do. The theory is that if you make a careful list and budget your time, you are automatically more efficient. So be resourceful. Slip in for doorknobs or diapers on the way to interviews with heads of state. Traffic jams: Being so efficient, Germans have oodles of free time. Come weekends, they all climb into their cars and drive on the same autobahns to the same spots to relax in the same cafes. That produces the world’s biggest traffic jams on the world’s most efficient highways. You also see this in L.A. But in Germany, the breakdowns have a different cause: a love of institutional behavior. The German Bundespost regulates everything from selection of television programs to what size envelope you must use to mail your mother’s birthday card. There aren’t a lot of choices—but then, at bottom the Germans don’t really like choices. How do you calculate the costs of over-regimentation? Manfred Bauer, an executive of Prudential Bache in Munich, suggests one answer. “No one disputes the Germans’ flair for organization and management,” he says. “But they are less skilled as innovators.” German-made ovens are wonders of industrial design—yet hardly a manufacturer in the country has childproofed them by moving the controls from the front of the stove to the top. There is a more serious side to the question, summed up in the word Gehorsamkeit. It means dutiful obedience, with the faintest allusion to lemminglike behavior. Today, as Germany sweeps toward unity, people fear that things are happening too fast, too efficiently. But there is little resistance, no public outcry. It’s hard not to respect a people who can stand calmly in the rain, waiting for the light to cross a street on which no traffic passes. But sometimes you feel like a friend who recently took a vacation in Italy. “God, it was wonderful,” she said. “Everybody was driving the wrong way down one-way streets.”
Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Wherever You Go, There You Are, New York, 1994: ISBN 1562827693, Page 47 On the radio, I heard someone define ethics as “obedience to the unenforceable.” Not bad.
GULF: JANUARY 17, 1991 Ah, love, let us be true And didn't our love seem almost a political act,
Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. NewYork: Perseus Books, 2002. ISBN 1586480499,
Charlie Pye-Smith, The Subsidy Scandal: How Governments Squander Public Money and Destroy the Environment. London and Virginia: Earthscan Publications, 2002. ISBN 1853839027. Pages xvi and 154-5 During the early 1970s I worked on a mixed arable and dairy farm in the north of England, and as a farm student I was frequently entrusted with the least skilled and most dreary tasks: forking bales of hay, unloading wagons of fertilizer, shoveling cow muck, and the like. One of the less cerebral activities involved ripping out hedgerows, and during the course of a month I and a couple of others destroyed and burnt great lengths of hedgerow, which for two centuries or more had been home to a wide variety of plants, birds, and small animals. In doing so we turned half a dozen small, irregular fields into one large 100-acre field, thus gaining extra land on which to grow crops. From now on the business of plowing, sowing, and harvesting would also be much easier, and the farm more "efficient." Much of this-like many other practices whose purpose was to make farming more efficient-was paid for by a government subsidy. Hedge removal subsidies no longer exist: over a short period of time they led to the rape of a beautiful landscape, to the loss of wildlife habitat, and-eventually-to a sense of outrage among the public. Nowadays farmers in some area are paid a subsidy to plant hedgerows instead, which means that today's taxpayers are obliged to make amends for the damage done by activities that were paid for by yesterday's taxpayers…. In the waters off Newfoundland it was the big draggers, working throughout the year and catching vast quantities of fish, which were primarily responsible for the collapse of the cod. As Tom Best said, the inshore fishermen could never in millions of years have done what the draggers did in a matter of a few decades. They simply don't have the technology to be so destructive, although the emerging Mid-shore fleet is proving highly efficient - efficient in the sense that large numbers of fish can be quickly caught with relatively little manpower. But is that the only sort of efficiency? "You can't stop technological progress," Art May told me. "It's an inevitable law of nature." But what if the nations, or individuals, whose task it is to manage fish stocks, and to ensure that they provide a sustainable harvest in the future, fail to adequately control the latest generation of high-tech trawlers? This is precisely what has been happening in many parts of the world. Although there is no way of preventing net makers and boat-builders and sonar manufacturers from designing more efficient products, the time may come when we should insist that certain types of vessel must not be allowed to fish in certain waters. "To have the society we want," suggested David Schorr, "we may need to willfully embrace inefficient technologies. After all, what is wrong with that?" Nothing, though I might quibble with the use of the word inefficient. Is a fishery that provides a modest living for 10,000 people working froth small boats using hook and line less or more efficient than one of similar size that provides a living to 100 individuals using large trawlers with the most modern gadgetry? I would say it is more efficient: the same resource provides a living for a greater number of people. I am not suggesting that all fishing should be conducted from canoes. If that were the case, fish stocks far offshore, would remain unexploited. However, we do need to rethink our ideas about efficiency -and get rid of the perverse subsidies that encourage overfishing. If we don't, then there will be fewer and fewer fishermen making a living from the sea, and fewer and fewer fish.
Peter M. Senge, “Creating Desired Futures in a Global Society” in Northeast Sun magazine, Spring 2004 issue, Pages 11-19. One of the things that distinguishes the master from the novice is an appreciation of the constraints of his or her medium. Or as Fritz put it, "No painter paints on an infinite canvas." John Elter, a former vice president at Xerox who led development of the company's first fully digital product, used this principle to great effect. Early on in a multi-year product-development process to create a new generation of digital copiers, Elter took his team on a two-day wilderness expedition in the New Mexico desert. On the way back, they happened to walk by a dump - at the bottom of which they discovered a Xerox copier. It was a revelation. They returned to work with a new vision for the product and their entire enterprise: "Zero to landfill, for our children." Says Elter, "Most of the constraints engineering teams deal with are management claptrap. All the managers make it up: The product has got to grow revenue by this amount. It's got to achieve these cost targets." However, after their epiphany in the desert, says Elter, "We discovered our real constraint-that nothing from this product should ever go into a landfill." The product they designed was ultimately 94 percent re-manufacturable and 98 percent recyclable, and met or exceeded all its sales targets. The team created a great product - and probably saved the company from bankruptcy or takeover - by redefining the constraints they worked against. As Elter and his team showed, increasingly, the constraints that will enable creativity will come from appreciating the environmental and social realities of an increasingly interdependent world. Nature produces no waste. Why should business be different? But, by and large, we fail to see these constraints, because we fail to see the interdependence out of which they arise…. Systemic imbalances fail to compel our attention because we simply do not see them in the same way we see more immediate and local problems. And, we fail to see them because we define urgency by what is immediate. We are victims of a self-reinforcing crisis of perception, a crisis of our own making. If it persists, we doom ourselves to continued passivity. Only catastrophe will compel action, which, given the growing social divide that distributes problems like global warming unevenly between rich and poor, is likely to manifest as social and political disruption-not unlike what we are already seeing around the world over the past few years. My view is that nothing short of a radical shift in our dominant western materialistic worldview is likely to dislodge this crisis of perception. How can diverse people from different parts of the world come to a fuller sense of the whole-that is, the social, economic and ecological systems we share? Perhaps when we start to appreciate together the exquisite web of interconnectedness that enables life in the universe wherever we stand - and the role of our own consciousness in that web.
Donald A. Brown, American Heat. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield 2002. ISBN 0742512959 Page 208A number of economists have recommended that greenhouse gas allocations among nations be set to maximize global utility or efficiency. The idea is that the allocation scheme to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should be chosen that maximizes global GDP or some other measure of global economic activity. It would make no difference under such proposals if the U.S. economy would prosper more than other nations that might shoulder more of the burden of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, provided that total global economic activity is maximized in the chosen option compared to alternative allocation schemes for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The ethical basic for such proposals is, as discussed in chapter 3, the utilitarian notion that public policy decisions should choose the option that maximizes happiness or utility as measured by market preferences. Page 209In addition to the ethical concern with the use of welfare maximization strategies to assign national greenhouse gas emission rights, there are large practical problems with such approaches in an international setting that are not present in domestic policymaking. Any nation could choose to follow welfare maximization strategies domestically because sovereign governments have the ability to choose such strategies on behalf of their citizens. Yet if some nations are asked to shoulder proportionally larger burdens of protecting the atmosphere than other nations, it is highly unlikely that they would agree to a strategy that would make them poorer while others gained simply on the basis that total aggregate global welfare would be increased. This is particularly the case where some nations have been benefiting from irresponsible energy use. In an international system, nations are likely to prefer options that are viewed as just over those that maximize global utility. For this reason, narrow welfare maximization strategies are not only inconsistent with theories of equity but are also less likely to achieve widespread international support. Particularly the poorest countries that do not receive the benefits of high levels of global economic activity will likely strongly oppose proposed allocations that ask them to bear disproportionate burdens. Efficiency key to maintaining economic competitiveness, The Malta Independent Online - News
Robert M. Persig, Zen The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance New York: 1975 ISBN 0553103105 But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from among many choices the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind. Page 290, 291 I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to fix a motorcycle. THE DREAMER He made but dreams; for this they laughed him down, He made but dreams; such inefficient things! Sagoff, Mark. The Economy of the Earth. New York: ISBN 0521341132, Page 96Suppose a corporation proposes and an environmentalist group opposes the building of a shopping center in a rural area just outside of town. An economist might make a recommendation based on prices assigned to the various wants or preferences of relevant interest groups. This would effectively limit conflict to the immediate parties who know about and are affected by the project. The genius of democracy, however, is to let the conflict spread to a larger audience. The institutions of democratic government—legislatures, agencies, parties, courts, and the press—depend and thrive on the potential for conflicts of this kind to widen beyond their original bounds. This happens when one side— usually the side that otherwise would be defeated—finds a public issue (e.g., a “snail darter”) and moves the conflict into the press, the legislature, and the courts. The decision-making process then may become a kind of public good, since it allows everyone who participates in it the feeling of relevance, importance, and community-consciousness flowing from that participation. This might seem grossly inefficient, and perhaps it is, but it is what democratic government is all about. An alternative—technocracy quarantines or localizes conflict so that it can be resolved by the application of some mechanical rule or decision procedure. Cost-benefit approaches to public policy, if taken to their extreme, would do this, and thus they would substitute themselves for the processes of democratic government. The genius of cost-benefit analysis is to localize conflict among affected individuals and thereby to prevent it from breaking out into the public realm.
Dewey, John. Democracy and Education, Macmillan, 1916, Chapter Nine: “Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims” Translated into specific aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. If he is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance of an education which should have as a result ability to make one's way economically in the world, and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere display and luxury, should receive emphasis. There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose.
Bell, Daniel., and Stephan R. Graubard. Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress. United States of America: 1997. ISBN 0262522373, Page 219 A negative reaction to totalitarian efficiency leads to overt or covert efforts to prevent exploitation by managerial groups. One way of accomplishing this is to encourage bureaucratic inefficiency. Some of the attitudes expressed by our current adolescent protest groups include this idea. It is of some interest that those groups in our present society that most favor anarchy as a method of avoiding control by the establishment also favor the use of drugs for kicks.
From Touchtones: A Book Of Daily Meditations For Men, New York: 1986 ISBN 006255445X, for March 24 I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. United States of America: 1998. ISBN 0300070160, Page 98 It is helpful to imagine two different maps of activity. In the case of a planned urban neighborhood, the first map consists of a representation of the streets and buildings, tracing the routes that the planners have provided for the movements between the workplaces and residences, the delivery of goods, access to shopping, and so on. The second map consists of tracings, as in a time-lapse photograph, of all the unplanned movements—pushing a baby carriage, window shopping, strolling, going to see a friend, playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, walking the dog, watching the passing scene, taking shortcuts between work and home, and so on. This second map, far more complex than the first, reveals very different patterns of circulation. The older the neighborhood, the more likely that the second map will have nearly superseded the first, in roughly the same way that planned, suburban Levittowns have, after fifty years, become thoroughly different setting from what their designers envisioned. If our inquiry has taught us anything, it is that the first map, taken alone, is misrepresentative and indeed nonsustainable. A same-age, monocropped forest with all the debris cleared is in the long run an ecological disaster. No Taylorist factory can sustain production without the unplanned improvisations of an experienced workforce. Planned Brasilia is, in a thousand ways, underwritten by unplanned Brasilia. Without at least some of the diversity identified by Jacobs, a stripped-down public housing project (like Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis or Cabrini Green in Chicago) will fail its residents. Even for the limited purposes of a myopic plan—commercial timber, factory output the one-dimensional map will simply not do. As with industrial agriculture and its dependency on landraces, the first map is possible only because of processes lying outside its parameters, which it ignores at its peril. Our inquiry has also taught us that such maps of legibility and control, especially when they are backed by an authoritarian state, do partly succeed in shaping the natural and social environment after their image. To the degree that such thin maps do manage to impress themselves on social life, what kind of people do they foster? Here I would argue that just as the monocropped, same-age forest represents an impoverished and unsustainable ecosystem, so the high-modernist urban complex represents an impoverished and unsustainable social system. Human resistance to the more severe forms of social straitjacketing prevents monotonic schemes of centralized rationality from every being realized. Had they been realized in their austere forms, they would have represented a very bleak human prospect. One of Le Corbusier’s plans, for example, called for the segregation of factory workers and their families in barracks along the major transportation arteries. It was a theoretically efficient solution to transportation and production problems. If it had been imposed, the result would have been a dispiriting environment of regimented work and residence without any of the animation of town life. This plan had all the charm of a Taylorist scheme where, using a comparable logic, the efficient organization of work was achieved by confining the workers’ movements to a few repetitive gestures. The cookie-cutter design principles behind the layout of the Soviet collective farm, the ujamaa village, or the Ethiopian resettlement betray the same narrowness of vision. They were designed, above all, to facilitate the central administration of production and the control of public life.
Fodor, Eben. Better NOT Bigger. Canada: 1999. ISBN 0865713863 Page 142 Our modern society has managed to all but isolate us from Nature, which was once our dearest friend. Children, who are fascinated by nature and love the outdoors, are weaned from it as quickly as possible. We go from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices without more than a puff or two of fresh air in between. Let’s assume that our values shift away from consumption and growth and towards simplicity and stability. We rebuild our bond with the natural world. We discover the neighborhood that we live in and meet the people next door for the first time. We discover a sense of place. We find that our community is not all it could be and we make changes. We re-prioritize our lives and find that we want to spend much more time with our families and good friends, even if we have to cut back work hours and reduce our incomes. Page 143 In spite of these changes, we find that occasionally the fish lure still attracts us. So we create incentives to encourage healthy, productive activities. We reward ourselves for doing what’s best for us. We use green taxes to reduce consumption of resources and to minimize wastes. We replace income taxes with progressive consumption taxes. We eliminate the influence of unwanted commercial advertising altogether, relying instead on other information sources (such as Internet databases and search engines) to find all the products that aren’t conveniently available through local merchants. Amazingly, the entire economy starts to change. Like the circulatory system of our bodies, it quietly delivers the nutrients we need without dominating our lives. With the economy shifted from center stage, society rediscovers cultural, intellectual, and spiritual pursuits. We are entertained by life’s richness and wonders. Page 144 Qualitative growth is sustainable. There is no limit to how much information, understanding, or enlightenment we can acquire. There is no limit to diversity, complexity, or variety. There is no limit to creativity, enterprise, or ambition. There is no limit to personal growth or achievement. A sustainable community can be a dynamic and evolving place. There is no limit to the richness of our lives in such a community. Page 148 1. Build a positive vision. A positive, shared, long-range vision for the future can provide the inspiration, motivation and direction to propel a community forward and encourage the various interest groups to work together with a common purpose. Developing a community vision requires broad participation and may involve extensive public input. Visions change and must be updated on a regular basis. 2. Improve citizen involvement. Broad, open citizen involvement in public planning and policy-making respects and enhances our democratic process. Increased citizen involvement generates many benefits, including policies that better serve the broader public interest. Citizen involvement doesn’t just happen. Local governments must actively engage citizens and create productive processes for meaningful involvement. Public hearings are just a small part of the venue for actively involving citizens. Others include public forums, town hall meetings, roundtable sessions, televised broadcasts, surveys, speaker series, etc. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of strong public involvement processes in achieving good governance. The desire for expediency and economy on the part of policy-makers can cause them to take costly short cuts with public involvement. Citizens who are empowered with opportunities for meaningful participation will tend to appreciate and support their government and not lead anti-government tax revolts. 3. Provide economic opportunity. The basic economic needs of the entire community must be met without compromising the quality of the natural environment. Local economic development must be focused on the long-term welfare of existing residents. Economic gains can no longer come at the expense of the environment. 4. Page 149 6. Provide better information. Good decisions require good information, including natural resource inventories and status reports, growth forecasts, alternative scenarios, policy analysis, development impact analysis, etc. Disseminate information widely and make it readily accessible to everyone. Good government starts with an informed public -- it’s the cornerstone of democracy.
Page 150 8. Use full-cost accounting. Acknowledge the full environmental, social, and economic costs of growth and development. Evaluate these costs in making policy decisions. Eliminate subsidies that distort markets and cause overdevelopment. Enact pay-as-you-grow policies. 9. Think long range. Consider the impact decisions will have far into the future. Extend long-range community panning horizons to 50 or 100 years (instead of ten or 20 years). Utilize computer modeling capabilities to evaluate the long-range consequences of current trends and compare alternatives. 10. Encourage efficient resource use. Set efficiency goals for energy, water, and other resource uses for all sectors: residential, commercial, industrial and transportation. Use incentives and regulations to minimize resource consumption and waste production and maximize re-use and recycling by business and households. 11. Make neighborhoods walkable. Safe, friendly, walkable neighborhoods designed to eliminate automobile dependence will be one of the most visible attributes of the sustainable community. Walking is the oldest and most reliable form of transportation. It has a proven track record dating back four million years that justifies its being treated as a major component of all local transportation plans. Create automobile-free zones and automobile-independent housing complexes where walkers and bicyclists enjoy the privilege of maximum access and convenience. 12. Preserve unique features. Preserve features of local and regional significance: valuable farmland, forests and open space, and unique natural, scenic, recreational, historic, or cultural resources. Treat these natural assets as priceless family heirlooms to be passed on to future generations. Page 152 13. Recognize physical limits to growth and consumption. Population size, resource consumption, land use, and pollution levels must be in balance with the complex environmental support system. Start by acknowledging that physical and practical limits do exist. Then, try to identify what these limits are in terms of desirable, optimal, or ideal conditions. This book provides many of the tools needed to achieve desired limits on urban growth. Page 149 Getting Started Here are some things you can do now to get involved and help your community take charge of urban growth:
From http:\\www.eff.org/pub/EFF/quotes.eff – downloaded 1/12/97 The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency. “The Idea of a Local Economy” by Wendell Berry – Orion Magazine, Winter 2001 The economic theory used to justify the global economy in its "free market" version is again perfectly groundless and sentimental. The idea is that what is good for the corporations will sooner or later - though not of course immediately - be good for everybody. That sentimentality is based in turn, upon a fantasy: the proposition that the great corporations, in "freely" competing with one another for raw materials, labor, and marketshare, will drive each other indefinitely, not only toward greater "efficiencies" of manufacture, but also toward higher bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers. As a result, all the world¹s people will be economically secure - in the future. It would be hard to object to such a proposition if only it were true. But one knows, in the first place, that "efficiency" in manufacture always means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper workers or with machines. In the second place, the "law of competition" does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the "free market" will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war. In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap long-distance transportation, without which it is not possible to move goods from the point of cheapest origin to the point of highest sale. And cheap long-distance transportation is the basis of the idea that regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to specialize in production for export of the few commodities or the single commodity that can be most cheaply produced. Whatever may be said for the "efficiency" of such a system, its result (and I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence. This idea of a global "free market" economy, despite its obvious moral flaws and its dangerous practical weaknesses, is now the ruling orthodoxy of the age. Its propaganda is subscribed to and distributed by most political leaders, editorial writers, and other "opinion makers." The powers that be, while continuing to budget huge sums for "national defense," have apparently abandoned any idea of national or local self-sufficiency, even in food. They also have given up the idea that a national or local government might justly place restraints upon economic activity in order to protect its land and its people…. SO FAR AS I CAN SEE, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices. Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities. Random House Trade; (February 1, 1970) ISBN: 039470584X Page 89 Today, only two cities in all of Britain remain economically vigorous and prosperous. One is London. The second is Birmingham. The others have stagnated one by one, much as Manchester did, like so many lights going out. British town planners, ironically, have regarded London and Birmingham as problems, because they are places in which much new work is added to old and thus cities that persist in growing. The British New Towns policy was specifically devised to discourage the growth of London and Birmingham and "drain it off." Birmingham's economy has remained alive and has kept up to date. Manchester's has not. Was Manchester, then, really efficient? It was indeed efficient and Birmingham was not. Manchester had acquired the efficiency of a company town. Birmingham had retained something different: a high rate of development work. Efficiency as it is commonly defined -and I do not propose to change its definition, which is clear and useful -is the ratio of work accomplished to energy supplied. We can speak of high or low rates of efficiency because, in any given instance, we have two relevant factors to measure: input of energy, and quantity and quality (value) of work accomplished. We can compare the measurements in one instance with measurements in other instances. Manchester turned out a great deal of cloth relative to the energy supplied by its workers and by those who served the needs of the workers in the city. But these particular measurements are not relevant when development work is wanted. A candy manufacturer, reminiscing to a New Yorker reporter about the first candy bar he developed as a shipping clerk in a candy factory, recalls, "I showed it to my boss and he was very happy. `How many of these can you make in a minute?' he asked me. `In a minute?' I said. `It took me four months to make this one!' " Suppose it had taken him eight months? Or two months? That measurement has nothing to do with the operating efficiency envisioned by his boss. Efficiency of operation, in any given case, is a sequel to earlier development work. Development work is a messy, time- and energy-consuming business of trial, error and failure. The only certainties in it are trial and error. Success is not a certainty. And even when the result is successful, it is often a surprise, not what was actually being sought. A low rate of efficiency in production work means that the person or organization doing the work is going about it ineptly. But the exorbitant amounts of energy and time and the high rates of failure in the process of developing new work do not mean the development work is being done ineptly. The inefficiency is built into the aim itself; it is inescapable. There is no systematic way to evade it. The president of DuPont, a company that has tried to systematize its development work to the highest degree possible, has told a Fortune reporter that only about one out of twenty of those research projects that the company decides to develop further after initial exploratory work turns out to be useful to the company. The fact that an organization engages in large-scale production, which is what makes a large organization large, and that it produces very efficiently too, does not mean that the efficiency spills over into development work. Indeed, development work is inherently so chancy that by the law of averages, chances of success are greatly improved if there is much duplication of effort. The U.S. Air Force's analytical organization, the Rand Corporation, having been assigned to study how waste could be eliminated in the processes of military development work, came to the conclusion that although duplication of effort was theoretically wasteful, it was not wasteful empirically. For one thing, the report said, different people brought different preconceptions to development work and there was no way of telling in advance which might prove fruitful or where it might lead. Eminence or reputation or even past success was not a reliable indicator. The report cited, as an illustration, the fact that in 1937 when the jet airplane engine had already been developed in Britain (largely in Birmingham, as it happens), a committee of distinguished aeronautical experts in the United States, to whom this event was not yet known, having studied the possibilities of jet propulsion, came to the conclusion that it was not practicable. It was their recommendation that attempts to develop jet propulsion he dropped. The Rand researchers said that they had found definite waste, and a lot of it, in the development work of the military establishments; it was the great waste of administrative man-hours and energy devoted to trying to eliminate duplicated effort. Just so, when Pasteur, that wise old man, begged for enlarged support of the biological sciences, he begged for multiplication of laboratories. Page 96 Is it not possible for the economy of a city to be highly efficient, and for the city also to excel at the development of new goods and services? No, it seems not. The conditions that promote development and the conditions that promote efficient production and distribution of already existing goods and services are not only different, in most ways they are diametrically opposed. Let us consider a few of them. Breakaways of workers-especially very able workers from existing organizations promote the development of new work as well as the creation of new organizations. But breakaways, are not good for the parent company; they undermine its efficiency. To the company or companies in control, one of the advantages of a company town is that breakaways are not feasible there. And in any settlement where breakaways are inhibited, by whatever means, the development rate must drop, although the efficiency of already well-established work is apt to climb. Page 98 Now consider for a moment the question of suppliers of bits and pieces of work to other producers. Many relatively small suppliers, much of whose work duplicates and overlaps, are indispensable to a high rate of development. But they are not efficient, neither in respect to their own work nor the operations of the producers who buy from them. Page 99 Consider also the conflict between development and efficiency as it applies to the work of investing development capital and supplying working capital. The most efficient way to invest capital (whether by government, by semipublic, or by private lenders and investors-it does not matter) is through a relatively few large investments and loans, not through many small ones. If small loans are made, it is most efficient to consolidate them, in effect, by making them only for purposes that have already become standardized and routinized. To put capital into the purchasing of enterprises that produce goods and services already developed is more efficient than to put it into development of new enterprises and new work. Also, it is efficient to invest development capital in a sure thing-if in new work, then in new work for which customers are guaranteed in advance. Page 101 It is most efficient for large construction firms to produce monotonous multiples of identical buildings; it is most efficient for architects to design multiples of identical buildings. Superblocks are more efficient than smaller blocks because there are fewer crossings and traffic can flow more efficiently; when there are fewer streets, utilities can be distributed more efficiently and of course the maintenance of streets costs less. Indeed, numerous small enterprises, just by existing, are in conflict with the economic efficiency of a city's large and well-established enterprises. Page 120 Earlier in this century, it was conventionally supposed by American philanthropists that poverty is caused by disease. Healthy people, it was reasoned, would be more productive, have more initiative, be more capable of helping themselves, than people in ill health. Poverty was analyzed as a vicious circle in which poverty leads to disease and disease reinforces poverty. Measures to combat disease turned out to be quite successful at combating disease, irrelevant for combating poverty. They helped lead to the situation that is now being diagnosed as a different vicious circle-poverty-overpopulation-poverty. To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development. It can be overcome only if the relevant economic processes are in motion. These processes are all rooted, if I am correct, in the development work that goes on in impractical cities where one kind of work leads inefficiently to another. |
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