"Book"pile 10: The Cult of efficiency

I've previously written about the Massey Lectures, an annual lecture series broadcast on the CBC, Canada's national broadcaster. Ursula M. Franklin’s The Real World of Technology was a Massey Lecture before it was a book (see my post about why you should definitely listen to that). This week's "book"pile post is another example of the same: Janice Gross Stein's The Cult of Efficiency.

Stein makes the argument that we've changed the role of efficiency in society. Instead of seeing it as an means to an end, we've come to look upon efficiency as an end in and of itself. This, she says, has turned efficiency into a cult. We cannot talk about efficiency without knowing what we want to achieve and what we value. There is no efficiency without efficacy. As Stein says, in its true form, "efficiency doesn't tell us where to go, only that we should arrive there with the least possible effort."

I'm writing this post, having listened to four of the five lectures. In the first, two, Stein gave a wide-ranging history and grounding for the idea of efficiency, bringing it back to Utilitarian philosophy, and travelling through the neoliberal turn in global economics. Below all of this, however, is the importance of looking at efficiency not as something to be achieved all on its own, but as an idea that must be tied to values. There is no point in trying to achieve efficiency if we do not know what that efficiency is serving.

In the later lectures, the focus on public markets in healthcare and education makes them feel a little of-their-time, and makes them less fresh and relevant. But do take a couple hours of your life to listen to the first two. Though they date from 2001, they remain important today. The question "efficiency for what?" is arguably even more crucial than it was twenty-five years ago.