On Efficiency

The government of Alberta (that's a province in Canada) is in the process of trying to take control of that province's Universities. Here's an article about it. This is an almost comically bad idea for a number of reasons, most of them provided by the article. But if you look at the comments there is one part of the article I find extremely disturbing that most people seem to think a good idea:

“We have 26 post-secondary schools in Alberta,” says advanced education minister Thomas Lukaszuk, on the phone from Vietnam, where he’s volunteering to build playgrounds. “Each one is a virtuoso. But those 26 schools don’t play together. They don’t have a conductor.”

[skipped paragraph]

“Twenty-six schools. Why does each one need its own payroll department? Bureaucracy is repeated 26 times over.”

Here my earlier post about Universities and corporations is relevant. But I'd like to expand a little. The assumption Lukaszuk makes is all 26 payroll departments at all 26 schools do the same job and can, therefore, be centralized and amalgamated into a single payroll department. The next step is to take that department out of public hands and turn it over to a private corporation (with the ideologically presumed gain in efficiency). This is how the United States government handles its payroll - more accurately, the United States government pays Lockheed Martin to handle its payroll. But even a little thought about how those 26 different payroll departments actually operate demonstrates the problems with this logic. 26 different payroll departments means 26 groups of real people who you can call when the inevitable mistakes are made, 26 groups of people who have jobs and are putting food on the tables of all those families. The government is employing those people - although Universities are technically separate corporate entities - and the government wants to take those jobs away because it is more efficient.

Also, note each of the 26 schools has dozens of highly paid administrators, going all the way up to the President: here's a list of the highest paid university employees in Canada. Somehow I doubt the payroll officers are getting $500k per year. 

You can't make a strictly economic argument against this kind of move. I'm sure the accountants have no doubts it makes sense economically. But you can make a political argument about it. I don't want my government to be more concerned with efficiency than with the lives of people. The extra expense of 26 different payroll departments is the tiniest fraction of Alberta's budget. Save the money in some way that doesn't mean cutting people's jobs in the name of efficiency.

You can also make a different argument about it, although I'm not sure what you would call it. These days people pursue efficiency as if it was an end in itself. Again, from a purely economic viewpoint, I guess it is. But the relentless pursuit of efficiency costs us all the benefits of inefficiency. In the broadest possible context, being human is extremely inefficient. We spend most of our time doing things that do not advance any particular cause or bring us closer to reaching a particular goal. Music is tremendously inefficient. So are painting, sculpture, poetry, dancing, having friends - all those things which are most important to us as humans. If the things you think are most important to you as a human aren't on that list, think a minute about whether they are efficient. I bet they aren't. I like playing with my nephew - a total waste of time.

There is also a kind of economic argument for inefficiency. Ontario is home to one of the most advanced research institutions in the world - the Perimeter Institute. You may have read in the news Stephen Hawking recently made it his base of operations, maybe Cambridge was too efficient for him. Anyway, one of the architects who designed the building described it as "a place where coffee is translated into theorems". Because of this insight the hallways between the offices are absolutely gorgeous - an attempt to increase the amount of time the various members of the Institute stand around chatting. Some of the most intelligent people in the world have a building specifically designed to help increase their performance, and the key is to keep them from "working".

By most lights, humans are ridiculously inefficient. We sleep one third of every day. We have to eat and excrete. We get very unhappy when we can't talk to other humans. The best possible thing any institution can do, from an economic perspective, is replace humans (either with other humans who get paid less or with automata). Why should you pay a person a living wage when a machine can do the job so much more efficiently? The only reason, and it is sufficient to the point of being self-evident, is we care about other humans. Or we ought to. We don't care about machines, except in the extremely limited way we care about possessions.

Being human means being inefficient.

There is also a classist factor to all arguments about efficiency - no one ever argues the people getting paid the most are inefficient, although I'm never very clear on what, precisely, they do. David Johnson, former President of the University of Waterloo, got paid more than $1 million to campaign for his current job - Governor General of Canada. I don't know what the GG does, but I know there is no efficiency expert breathing down his neck.

There are so many ways the drive for efficiency is having a negative effect on all our lives I can't possible list them all. It limits what we can buy, what we can eat. It changes what we read and what we watch.

There is a famous joke about James Joyce. Someone asked him what he did in the Great War. He replied, "I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?" He wasn't kidding. It took him seven years to write that fucker and he would never have been able to, despite various jobs he held between 1914 and 1921 if a private patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, hadn't given him thousands of pounds over a quarter of a century. Joyce was inefficient as hell. Ulysses is 265 000 words long, divided by 7 years, divided by 365 days - a little over 100 words per day.