In Defence of Inefficiency

The emphasis on productivity in our lives has gone largely unchallenged. How can you argue against something that is self-evidently a good thing? Efficiency in methods of production and distribution of goods and services has transformed the ways we live our lives in advanced industrial societies. It is not efficiency of production itself that is a problem. The efficiency of a mathematical theorem or a line of poetry, or any task carried out well, is a source of both practical satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure. But a culture of productivity, where we measure performance against targets in an unexamined way, has become a materialistic ideal that also threatens to be elevated to the status of an overriding ethical principle.

Efficiency may be defined as delivering more for less. The assumption in public sector management is that goods and services can therefore always be made to work better and cost less. Inefficiency, by contrast, is ascribed to systems with uncertain outputs and unregulated costs.

This is not an economics paper. It is an exploration of states of mind and dominant discourses and, in particular, how they affect, or are the product of, socio-economic relations. There are several modern parables that will be familiar, as they are often told by management consultants and the like. One is about the efficiency expert who looked at an orchestra and questioned the unnecessary duplication of jobs. (Do we really need four first violins?) The other is about the business school graduate and the local fisherman, who makes a subsistence living and spends most of his days sitting out on his porch and enjoying the sun in the company of his children. The business expert explains how he could increase his productivity, buy another boat, hire labour, build a fish processing plant, set up distribution centres, make his fortune, become rich so that he could retire. Then he would have time to sit on his porch and enjoy the sun in the company of his