Efficiency is not a virtue

Efficiency is the allusive goal of a huge number of people. And why wouldn't it be? Isn't efficiency a valid thing to strive for? Let's consider a few examples and think about how efficiency plays a role. First, let's consider the function of government, specifically the privatization of prisons. The government often spends huge sums of money on it's projects, and takes a fair amount of criticism for it. Privatization makes the promise of doing the same job for less money, hooray for saving the taxpayer dollars. So the questions we should ask ourselves are 1. does privatization fulfill it's promise, and 2. is that the deal we want? As far as the promise of private prisons, well they do seem to cost less than government prisons. Are they doing the same thing for less, or just doing less. Where do all those cost savings come from? Guard salaries? Food? Medical care? The same place all other corporations save money: everywhere they can get away with it. A prison is a particularly insidious example, because they're specifically hired to be an authority that makes sure people are doing what they're supposed to. So who holds them accountable? Certainly not the prisoners. Accountability is expensive. It's one of those pesky things that the government spends a lot of money on. And accountability means that a prison can't skimp on things like clean water and nutritious food, so it's doubly expensive. If a state or a federal government sets about assessing how much it actually costs to humanely house prisoners, and some company comes along and says it can do it for less, should we believe them? Companies are masterful at externalizing risks and costs, the government is just as masterful at absorbing risks and costs that other people have weaseled out from under. Shirking costs, or paying less for what you're getting than what is fair, is the core of efficiency. If I buy a car for $1000 less than it's value, then somewhere there is a person who sold their car and didn't get what it was worth. I paid less, and that's good for me, but the system as a whole doesn't benefit from that displacement. The reason the government (and the functions it undertakes) shouldn't be efficient, is it has an obligation to function as the entire system, not as one party taking advantage of another party in an exchange within the system. 

As a second example of efficiency failing to be a virtue, let's examine academic science. Science has the unfortunate benefit of occasionally being useful. Every now and then, science is credited with curing a disease or inventing transistors, but if you consider the whole endeavor of science these towering achievements are really rare. Watson and Crick published a slick and streamlined one page paper that showed the world that DNA was double helix shaped, why can't all science be as straight forward and to the point? Most of science isn't focused, it's schizophrenic and chases an unpredictable few stars in the whole galaxy of possibilities. Only occasionally and in hind sight can we look back and see a constellation that unifies our small studies into a larger picture. Our deepest and most important knowledge about life and the universe is only ever synthesized from decades of exhaustive (and sometimes fruitless) antecedent work. If efficient creating of novel and important utility is the measure of science, then most science absolutely fails to meet that standard. Even the science that fails to efficiently create a concrete deliverable can still create the conditions that will generate amazing breakthroughs, the soil from which the most beautiful flowers will grow. In the domain of science, we don't know what will be important, relevant or useful in the future, so we don't have an obvious and efficient path towards those ends. We do have a pretty good idea that there will be somethings that are so important that they will change our lives forever. If we pursue science efficiently, we're betting on our ability to predict which avenues will take us to the most important and worthwhile ends. We've been wrong every time so far. Inefficiency leads us in every direction at once. If we let our young scientists wander down whatever avenues their gut tells them too, then we're at least going to have a better chance to find one that is worthwhile. The endeavour of science needs to be accounted for as a whole, when you try to 'trim the fat' for the sake of efficiency, you invariable are pruning branches that no one knows how strong they would've grown to be in the future.

The last venue I want to consider where efficiency is poisonous, is art. The Sistine Chapel took four years for Michelangelo to paint, and he spent three years carving the statue of David. Could he have finished earlier? Yes. Would it have been almost as good if he only spent two years? Probably. Isn't 'almost as good' as the statue of David still pretty great? Yeah, it would still be pretty great, but there are so very many statues that aren't quite as good, and there's only one statue like David. That's not to say that art must take years for it to be good, some art seems to happen in a flash. Picasso could make a masterpiece in an afternoon. Part of why Picasso could do that, is he spent a lifetime making masterpieces, so when you consider 30 years of work to paint a guitarist, it isn't very efficient at all. Art that is made on a timeline, or to fit within a budget may be amazing display of talent, but it will always run the risk of being uninspired. Leonard Cohen spent years trying to perfect his song Hallelujah, and never seemed to be satisfied with it, however much inspiration he was able to find was still enough to crush the hearts of the people who have listened. Imagine how many artists have put in equal amount of effort and toil but never found enough inspiration to create a masterpiece. We never know which gems are going to shine the brightest, and to find the really dazzling ones, we need to have a lot of artists with plenty of time to try and plenty of chances to fail. The mathematicians have an axiom that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards will eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare, that's maybe the least efficient way imaginable to produce good art but our system seemingly isn't far behind. Maybe the better adage is of the master calligrapher who painted the most perfect character his student ever had seen, when his student asked how long it took him to make it, the master replied 'my whole life'. In the end, if we want good art we have to accept that it doesn't come efficiently.

There are plenty of examples of efficiency being entirely incompatible with the most earnest and important endeavours of human kind. Government works to improve society, science works to expand our knowledge, art works to explore our humanity, all are incompatible with efficiency. But you still think that doing things efficiently is good, after all the opposite of efficient is 'unnecessarily wasteful'. Of course there are instances when being efficient gives us more time and resources to put towards those parts of our lives that we place a higher importance on. If you want to just press 8-8-START on the microwave instead of 1-3-0-START, well, you've saved yourself a button push and haven't cost anyone else anything. I can't complain about that paragon of efficiency. But like basalmic vinegar, efficiency isn't necessarily virtuous or deleterious, it all depends on what you apply it to.