The Efficiency Trap

I am a stick­ler for effi­ciency and effec­tive­ness. I want things done bet­ter, faster, in fewer minutes/hours/days. Where I work, our pas­sion is in know­ing and find­ing out that there is a bet­ter way to do things. A nuance is impor­tant here though. Effi­ciency for efficiency’s sake is noth­ing but a bag of hot air and ambi­tion. Effi­ciency ought to be done for some­thing more. It is done so that a bet­ter stan­dard of liv­ing, a bet­ter all around life is attained. Hope­fully, we strive to be effi­cient so that we can be more disponible for other things. (I love that word: DISPONIBLE! It means to be avail­able for other things. For greater things. For “deeper” things.)

This is a review of the book: Slow-Tech: Man­i­festo for an Over­wound World. By Andrew Price [Atlantic Books, 2009, ISBN 9781843547266]

I got this from RESUR​GENCE​.ORG. Check their web­site out.

A CENTRAL PILLAR of our soci­ety is the drive for effi­ciency. Extract­ing the most in the short­est period of time is the moti­va­tion behind the vast major­ity of actions in the mod­ern world. As a con­cept, effi­ciency is so ingrained in our con­scious­ness that to call it into ques­tion can seem counter-intuitive, if not com­pletely ridicu­lous. We do not build excess into a sys­tem, because it appears to us, with our ‘cor­po­rate gog­gles’ on, to be a waste of resources. Yet, as I write, our econ­omy, the epit­ome of a sys­tem based around the con­cept of effi­ciency, is col­laps­ing around our ears. This book is a timely inter­ven­tion into what the author describes as the con­flict between the “effi­ciency of indus­try and devel­op­ment and the robust­ness of ecosystems”.

At its heart this con­flict seems to be between oppos­ing ways of con­ceiv­ing of effi­ciency and robust­ness. Here in the mod­ern world we con­sider an econ­omy robust “because of how much money it makes, and how many services/items it pro­duces, rather than how pro­duc­tive it may be in the long term”. As Andrew Price points out, this view is incom­plete, “for it does not allow for longevity”. Our “super­fi­cial effi­ciency” dri­ves out all robust­ness, rel­e­gat­ing such pesky issues as the envi­ron­ment and soci­ety to the role of exter­nal­i­ties – a “dis­pens­able surplus”.

Whilst it is a highly top­i­cal exam­ple it isn’t just our approach to eco­nom­ics that is in need of change. As the title sug­gests, a large part of the book is con­cerned with spe­cific tech­nolo­gies, par­tic­u­larly the pre­car­i­ous nature of our many high-tech mod­ern solutions.

One of the first sys­tems and its tech­nol­ogy to come under scrutiny is mod­ern agri­cul­ture. Price iden­ti­fies cur­rent, indus­trial agri­cul­tural prac­tice as the “num­ber one threat to robust­ness of ecosys­tems and hence to Earth and human­ity”. In a chap­ter that draws together the insights of some of our best thinkers on the sub­ject (James Love­lock, Jules Pretty and Colin Tudge, to name a few) he expounds a prag­matic use of tech­nol­ogy in agri­cul­ture. Where it is clearly for the pur­poses of max­imis­ing pro­duc­tion for effi­ciency and profit, as opposed to opti­mis­ing pro­duc­tion for robust­ness, the author, quite rightly, con­demns its use. GMOs are not dis­missed out of hand, although antibi­otics are frowned upon. It is an undog­matic approach that requires we assess each sit­u­a­tion, each new tech­nol­ogy accord­ing to the rule of robustness.

Fur­ther chap­ters delve into the worlds of fish­ing, water, coastal ecol­ogy and more explic­itly social sys­tems such as health care, the mil­i­tary and avi­a­tion. In each case Price con­vinc­ingly details his solu­tion of robust­ness against effi­ciency, from the “robust­ness as back-up or insur­ance” of nat­ural ecosys­tems (through their myr­iad of species) to the robust­ness as abil­ity to change or evolve, inher­ent in genetic algorithms.

When I’m not writ­ing I work in a library. I watch as ‘low-tech’ books are replaced with high-tech e-texts and online data­bases, as the drive for effi­ciency forces staff reduc­tions, clo­sures and a decrease in the ser­vices offered. The inter­net is cited as the major rea­son behind these changes. It is chang­ing the way we search for knowl­edge and sub­se­quently libraries are chang­ing. Yet, con­sid­er­ing peak oil and cli­mate change, will the inter­net be around for­ever? This is just one smaller, more per­sonal exam­ple of how in our desire to dis­card the old, low-tech meth­ods in favour of the high-tech we are under­min­ing our abil­ity to cope with the uncer­tain­ties the future will bring. That the cen­tral argu­ment of this book struck such a highly per­sonal note for me, as it will no doubt do for many oth­ers, is per­haps its high­est recommendation. •

Dan Grace writes and works in a library.