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Just Too Efficient

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On a Spring 2019 [2]walk in Beijing I saw two street sweepers at a
sunny corner. They were beat-up looking and grizzled but probably
younger than me. They’d paused work to smoke and talk. One told a
story; the other’s eyes widened and then he laughed so hard he had to
bend over, leaning on his broom. I suspect their jobs and pay were
lousy and their lives constrained in ways I can’t imagine. But they had
time to smoke a cigarette and crack a joke. You know what that’s
called? Waste, inefficiency, a suboptimal outcome. Some of the
brightest minds in our economy are earnestly engaged in stamping it
out. They’re winning, but everyone’s losing.

I’ve felt this for years, and there’s plenty of evidence:
Item: Every successful little store with a personality morphs into a
chain because that’s more efficient. The personality becomes part of
the brand and thus rote.
Item: I go to a deli fifteen minutes away to buy bacon, rashers cut
from the slab while I wait, because they’re better. Except when I
can’t, in which case I buy a waterlogged plastic-encased product at the
supermarket; no standing or waiting! It’s obvious which is more
efficient.
Item: I’ve learned, when I have a problem with a tech vendor, to seek
out the online-chat help service; there’s annoying latency between
question and answers as the service rep multiplexes me in with lots of
other people’s problems, but at least the dialog starts without endless
minutes on hold; a really super-efficient process.
Item: Speaking of which, it seems that when you have a problem with a
business, the process for solving it each year becomes more and more
complex and opaque and irritating and (for the business) efficient.
Item, item, item; as the world grows more efficient it grows less
flavorful and less human. Because the more efficient you are, the less
humans you need.

The end-game · Efficiency, taken to the max, can get very dark.

I suggest investing a few minutes in reading [3]Behind the Smiles by
Will Evans. Summary: Certain (not all) Amazon warehouses seem to have
per-employee injury rates that are significantly higher than the
industry average, as in twice as high or more. Apparent reason: It’s
not they’re actually dangerous places to work, it’s just that they’ve
maximized efficiency and reduced waste to the point where people are
picking and packing and shipping every minute they’re working, never
stopping. And a certain proportion of human bodies simply can’t manage
that. They break down under pressure.

Robots matter, but not in the way you might think. The idea was that
robotized warehouses should reduce stress and strain because they bring
the pick-and-pack to the employees, rather than the people having to
walk around to where the items are. But apparently robots correlate
with higher injury rates. Behind the Smiles quotes employee Jonathan
Meador: “‘Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,’ he
said. Afterward, ‘we were in a fight that we just can’t win.’”

It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor
even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good,
right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing
efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is
really extremely good at it.

And it’s good, until it isn’t any more.

Efficiency and weakness · Let’s hand the mike over to Bruce Schneier.
In [4]The Security Value of Inefficiency he makes one of those points
that isn’t obvious until you hear it. Quoting briefly:

“All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our
healthcare system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in
our food production that has been consolidated away; we want that,
too. We need our old, local supply chains — not the single global
ones that are so fragile in this crisis. And we want our local
restaurants and businesses to survive, not just the national
chains.”

Bruce is pointing out that overoptimizing efficiency doesn’t just burn
people out, it also too often requires cutting into what you later
realize were prudent safety margins.

How hard should people work? · Today, we assume the forty-hour week
without thanking the generations of socialists and unionists in the
[5]Eight-hour-day movement, whose struggle started around 1817 and
didn’t bear global fruit until the middle of the twentieth century.

But there’s nothing axiomatic about forty hours. Twenty years ago,
France [6]introduced a 35-hour workweek. Their economy still functions.
And John Maynard Keynes, approximately the most influential economist
in the history of the world, predicted his grandchildren would enjoy a
15-hour workweek. It seems [7]he was wrong. But [8]maybe only partly.

And of course Keynes himself worked like a madman. As did I, for most
of my career. Because some jobs are just jobs, but others are
vocations; people doing what they love, and who’d really rather be
working than not. Nothing wrong with that.

Some ideologists of Capitalism think that every business should try to
make every job a vocation, that people should be delighted with their
work, with the benefit (for the capitalist) that you don’t have to hire
that many. One famous example of this thinking is at UPS, the delivery
company, whose leaders wanted the delivery people to “bleed brown”.
Here’s [9]an interesting take on the UPS story, in which the “bleeding
brown” notion didn’t catch on.

And while there’s nothing wrong with vocations — I’m lucky and blessed
to have found one — most jobs are just jobs. Whether it be a job or a
vacation, work should at least leave time for a smoke break in the sun
at the corner (or its 21st-century equivalent). And it’s perfectly
possible that Keynes’ prediction could come true, in certain future
economic configurations.

But, wealth! · If we all work less, we’ll be poorer, right? Because the
total cash output of the economy is a (weird, nonlinear) function of
the amount of work that gets put in.

That sounds like it should be important, until you ask basic questions
like “how much money is there, and who has it?” The answers, pretty
clearly, are “Too much” and “An inefficiently small number of very
wealthy people.” [10]Business Insider has a nice take on the problem,
highlighting the evidence for and consequences of there being just too
much money around.

In practice, interest rates stay low, governments can borrow more or
less for free, and all sorts of crazily doomed shit is getting
investment funding. There is really no evidence anywhere of a global
shortage of money, and plenty for the existence of a surplus.

Stop and think · Specifically, do it when something is annoying you; at
work, or in your personal interaction with a big organization. Could
this be explained by someone, somewhere, trying to be more efficient?
In my life, the answer is almost always “yes”.

Cracks · “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”
[11]sang Leonard Cohen. And there need to be cracks in the surface of
work, in the broader organizational fabric that operates the world.
Because that’s where the humanity happens. You can be like the people
who optimize warehouses and call the gaps “waste”. But that path,
followed far enough, leads to a world that we really don’t want to be
living in.

It’s hard to think of a position more radical than being “against
efficiency”. And I’m not. Efficiency is a good, and like most good
things, has to be bought somehow, and paid for. There is a point where
the price is too high, and we’ve passed it.
__________________________________________________________________

Updated: 2020/07/11
__________________________________________________________________

Contributions

Comment feed for ongoing:[12] Comments feed

From: [13]Andrew (Jul 12 2020, at 00:16)

I think that anyone who's studied control theory can recognize, indeed
feel, the closed-loop control that has been optimizing the world for
the last thirty or forty years.

Remember the modern management theory from the Japanese car expansion?
"If you can't measure it you can't control it." Ever since then
_everything_ has been about metrics, and (for a time) the ever
increasing burden of administration, as those metrics for everything
were used as inputs to the control systems.

At first it was just efficiency experts and analysts, and like all
humans, they leave some wriggle-room. Now the digital systems and "AI"s
are getting involved. Not much room any more.

The profit margins in markets are the result of information
inefficiencies. As those are controlled-away, so are profits (where
there are still functioning markets: your previous post about the many
monopolies and duopolies are a way for business to engineer some
inefficiency that can be profited-from.)

I don't know what the end-game is. I don't think that it's market
capitalism. Could be the excess of communist utopia or the penury of
feudalism.

I like and frequent the artisanal merchants, especially where food is
concerned, too. I'm glad that they exist, but I suspect that it's
mostly because of the uneven wealth distribution that you mentioned.
Real food is the ultimate luxury good, perhaps.

[[14]link]

From: [15]All is love love (Jul 12 2020, at 00:23)

It reminds me of this
[16]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/business/automated-planes.html

efficiency with plane controls leads to more accidents, e.i. naive
automation leads to more accidents.

[[17]link]

From: [18]FeepingCreature (Jul 12 2020, at 01:23)

Once there's UBI, all those undesired kinds of efficiency should flip
right over into desired efficiency in the sense of freeing up more time
for us to have human value related interactions with other humans. Istm
this kind of inefficiency is only a problem if you hold human value
from paid labor as a fixed requirement.

[[19]link]

From: [20]TK (Jul 12 2020, at 02:55)

There was an interesting article written on the type of incremental
social erosion you're observing.

[21]http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

[[22]link]

From: [23]andydj (Jul 12 2020, at 03:48)

This sounds like the Dockyard Inefficiency problem. In the eighties in
the UK, there was a big push to root out inefficiencies in the main
Royal Navy dockyards - I lived in Plymouth, where Devonport Dockyard is
based, and it was a major employer in the city. But the inefficiency
was not only legendary - it was *institutional*. I knew several
yardies, and they all used to tell tales of slacking off, doing
"rabbits" (private work on company time, using company materials),
hours long Euchre sessions and an expectation to use all your sick
quota (they treated it like extra holiday).

Obviously, this sounds awfully wasteful, so the government put on the
squeeze - reducing head-count and funding; imposing targets and
efficiency quotas. The work-force was decimated, and costs went down;
there was much trumpeting of record turn-arounds on ship refurbs.
Everything was better, though it took about 10 years.

Then, in the nineties, there were ships coming back from action in the
Gulf needing urgent repairs... and the yard couldn't cope, because it
didn't have any slack to cope with a sudden unannounced upsurge in
business.

It's the same in any business where the amount of work can vary
immensely in emergencies - you need teams which are well integrated,
and know each-others capabilities, and are confident in them. Most of
the integration occurs during slack-time, when people are swapping
yarns about past trials and victories, or idly discussing the merits of
various techniques and equipment. Team bonding doesn't happen without
this "slacking off", but when "it" hits the fan, you need that
cohesion. Good teams take time to slack off "officially" - team
meetings are a good way. Relentless efficiency would try to remove this
and would result in dis-coordinated teams that don't trust each-other.

[[24]link]

From: [25]Jason Lamb (Jul 12 2020, at 04:30)

You've done a few posts now which are pro-left. That's fine. The
problem is that you're now mid-sixties, probably retired, and you spent
much of your life profiting from working at some of the biggest market
participants in the history of capitalism. Do you realise people will
therefore think "hypocrite"?

[[26]link]

From: [27]David Magda (Jul 12 2020, at 04:36)

The efficiency argument for more redistribution of wealth:

"""

If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest
utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is
sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as
happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation.

However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to
greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is
then what level produces the best outcome?

"""

* [28]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342

Thomas Piketty has written extensively on this topic:

* [29]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

[[30]link]

From: [31]Ivo (Jul 12 2020, at 04:48)

There is an important thing you are not mentioning: things are
efficient *by certain metrics*. Those metrics are (necessarily) limited
in how much of the total process, and the actual total efficiency, they
capture. For one thing, they can only be used to capture things that
are /measurable/. How do you measure the PR cost of employees grumbling
about their working conditions? You don’t, so that doesn’t get taken
into account.

The insights from “Seeing like a state” by James C. Scott are relevant
here: by reducing what is considered important to things that are, or
can be made, *legible*, a lot of value is lost, because it is not
seen/recognized and thus not considered important.

This is why startups can compete with Fortune 500 companies: the large
companies are actually wildly inefficient. Partly due to them becoming
a moral maze
([32]https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/moloch-hasnt-won/), but
that is in a large part related to them becoming inefficient due to not
rewarding illegible value.

[[33]link]

From: [34]Rob (Jul 12 2020, at 06:50)

What we have a lot of today is financial/capital efficiency, and we end
up with parasitic private equity and sub-prime mortgage pyramids as a
result. The relationship between financial and productive efficiency is
unclear at best.

What is clear is that classical economics is deeply broken-- there seem
to be oceans of excess capital slopping around the world, with the
predicted consequent inflation. The only fallout seems to be a lot of
immiserating rent-seeking (both intellectual and real property), and
highly destructive parasitism.

Both of which are "efficient" I suppose.

[[35]link]

From: [36]John Cowan (Jul 12 2020, at 08:21)

Tim: Perhaps we should put the IT security people, or just the security
people period, in charge of the corporation instead of the sales folks.
*They* know the value of redundancy, which is just inefficiency by
another name.

FeepingCreature: If you want to fight the good fight for UBI (and I'm
with you), fight the better fight for public collection of economic
rents and using them for the community's benefit (google "LVT"). Labor
and capital are not enemies! The true enemies of both are the robbers
who take all the rest.

Jason Lamb: “The personal strengths and weaknesses of a leader are no
true indication of the merits of his cause.” —Roger Zelazny

[[37]link]

From: [38]Tom Welsh (Jul 12 2020, at 09:05)

“‘Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,’ he said.
Afterward, ‘we were in a fight that we just can’t win.’”

Why does that remind me of that old song?

"John Henry, he drove his fourteen feet

That steam drill, it only made nine, Lord, Lord

That steam drill, it only made nine

"John Henry told his woman “Polly fix my bed.

I want to lie down and get some rest.

For I’ve got an awful roaring in my head, Lord, Lord

I’ve got an awful roaring in my head”

[[39]link]

From: [40]Dave Kosiur (Jul 12 2020, at 10:13)

A related issue that I've frequently thought about is what I call "the
power of convenience". How many processes and things are we willing to
put up with in order to make life "easier" for us? and what's the cost?

[[41]link]

From: [42]Sam Penrose (Jul 12 2020, at 10:35)

Highest recommendation for David Wootton's magisterial history of how
European culture came to be defined by unbounded maximization of
"Power, Pleasure, and Profit":
[43]http://www.davidwootton.com/power-pleasure-and-profit/

[[44]link]

From: Federico Rampazzo (Jul 12 2020, at 10:35)

It's an interesting point of view and I share with you the hate for
this hyper-centralised world. More in particular, I would say, the
bigger the organisation (whether that's a company, a non-profit or a
government), the greater the chance for it to contain useless
bureaucracy and behaviour which is negative for society.

I don't think capitalism is to blame for it though. I think the market
would push for smaller companies and save us from this situation if
only we would get rid of governments.

Governments are the single point of failure in our society and they're
made of corruptible people.

A company in a purely free market will grow if it provides more value
than competitors for its customers.

In our world, regulations and laws can favour one company over the
others, creating an imbalance.

Companies with enough money can spend some money to corrupt / make the
right candidate reach the oval office - which in turn will grant even
more money to that company.

Money is also not linked to anything physical anymore, which means
governments can just create it out of thin air, again favouring some
companies over others.

And governments are corporations as well; they're just massive (the USA
government is the largest corporation in the world officially, even
though there are claims about China being bigger) and are the only
corporations who can use violence or order people to hurt other people.
If the cost of war wasn't socialised and coming out of this giant pot
of tax contributions, nobody in their right mind would spend that much
money to kill someone on the other side of the world.

All of this contributes to the massive inequality we see now, it
contributes to middle class people paying half of their pay-checks to
the government (under threat of violence and imprisonment) while big
companies avoid taxes in offshore locations.

If we didn't have taxes, if we didn't have a government and organised
privately much needed services (like law making and citizen protection)
I believe companies would end up being smaller and more local.

Given the situation we're in now (eg: billionaires got richer during
covid, while the lower class lost jobs), even if we were to try this,
it will take some time to get there and there is a chance that
billionaires would just push for good old government to come back.

The richer you are, the more you can use tax loopholes, the more you
can control information and the more you need governments to solidify
your monopolies.

I don't think the problem is a search for efficiency, the problem is
that big companies can unfairly kill the competition and keep growing
thanks to their government ties and regulations. If we didn't have
bureaucracy to make more efficient, big companies wouldn't have as much
to optimise. If big companies are more efficient dealing with their
taxes and useless regulations, the end product can be cheaper and be
exactly the same.

Sure they could still optimise by getting cheaper materials, but then
the supermarket wouldn't be able to replace your deli shop because the
quality is different and different customers would just get what they
want (cheaper and meh, more expensive and good).

The EU created a law (VATMOSS) to "punish" Amazon by forcing everyone
to track customer location (with 2 proofs) in order to accurately
report in which country a customer should pay VAT. The end result was
that small businesses stopped selling independently not

to have the technological overhead and - shockingly - moved en-masse to
Amazon and other big players.

GDPR was another regulation which forces small businesses without the
money to adapt to cut off part of their customers and pushed companies
towards other platforms.

I don't have the presumption of changing anyone's mind, I'm just a
comment on the web, but I hope I presented an alternative point of
view.

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By [64]Tim Bray.

The opinions expressed here
are my own, and no other party
necessarily agrees with them.

A full disclosure of my
professional interests is
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