#[1]Atom (full content)

Just Too Efficient

   Search ____________________

   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.

   [[45]link]
   [46]ongoing
   [47]What this is · [48]Subscribe to ongoing
   [49]Truth · [50]Biz · [51]Tech
   [52]author · [53]Dad · [54]software · [55]colophon · [56]rights
   [57]picture of the day
   [58]July [59]05, [60]2020
   · [61]The World (118 fragments)
   · · [62]Politics (167 more)
   · [63]Business (117 more)

   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
   on the [65]author page.

References

   1. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom
   2. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2019/04/15/Liking-Beijing
   3. https://www.revealnews.org/article/behind-the-smiles/
   4. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/07/the_security_va.html
   5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
   6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek
   7. https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong
   8. https://hackernoon.com/the-misunderstood-15-hour-work-week-of-john-maynard-keynes-9d4561c96ab6
   9. https://isreview.org/issues/58/rev-ups.shtml
  10. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-1-percent-dont-know-what-to-do-with-money-2019-6
  11. https://qz.com/835076/leonard-cohens-anthem-the-story-of-the-line-there-is-a-crack-in-everything-thats-how-the-light-gets-in/
  12. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/comments.atom
  13. http://https://blog.ac-r.nu/
  14. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594538171.530997
  15. http:///
  16. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/business/automated-planes.html
  17. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594538632.301176
  18. http:///
  19. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594542222.655101
  20. http:///
  21. http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
  22. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594547740.250628
  23. http:///
  24. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594550904.804930
  25. http:///
  26. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594553444.277917
  27. http://www.magda.ca/
  28. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342
  29. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
  30. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594553786.428809
  31. http:///
  32. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/moloch-hasnt-won/
  33. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594554482.71341
  34. http:///
  35. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594561829.206462
  36. http:///
  37. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594567281.87093
  38. http:///
  39. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594569959.896421
  40. http:///
  41. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594573990.891433
  42. http://www.sampenrose.net/
  43. http://www.davidwootton.com/power-pleasure-and-profit/
  44. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594575313.72160
  45. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient#c1594575336.749537
  46. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
  47. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/WhatItIs
  48. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom
  49. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/Truth
  50. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/Biz
  51. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/Tech
  52. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim
  53. http://www.textuality.com/BillBray/
  54. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Software
  55. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Colophon
  56. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Copyright
  57. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/goto-potd/
  58. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/
  59. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/
  60. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/
  61. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/The World
  62. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/The World/Politics
  63. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/Business
  64. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim
  65. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim