Efficiency Is A Terrible Goal

In a recent discussion, a group of us were talking through options for using LLMs to make some our work tasks more efficient. I made the comment that I don’t believe efficiency is the correct goal for us to focus on. This statement set some of my colleagues aback. Modern American work culture is so steeped in the ideal of efficiency, it seems tantamount to sacrilege to suggest we shouldn’t value it the way we do.

I want to take some time here to unpack this belief. There are good reasons why I feel this way, but I also need to caution myself against dismissing the very real values that efficiency can bring.

Let’s start with a trite phrase: “Time is money.”

This phrase never sat quite right with me. It feels more correct to say, “Time is value.” On the face of it, these seem like they should be the same statement: money is intended as a measure of value, after all. But something interesting happens when you delve deeper into them.

When I consider the things that bring the most value to my life, the list includes: family and friends, health, hobbies, community, and experiences. For myself, I would also include work, as my career is mission and service driven, which is deeply important to me. All of these things deserve the investment of my time because they’re important and valuable. That’s why they’re important. They need attention and care, which requires an investment of time. Investing more time makes them more valuable.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, all human work was like this: time imbued work and the products of that work with value. Growing crops, livestock farming, weaving textiles, blacksmithing, carpentry: human endeavor gained value through the investment of time. More time meant higher quality.

The phrase, “Time is value,” defines a reinforcing relationship between time and value.

The phrase, “Time is money,” means that time costs money. The intent is to minimize the time we put into things in order to minimize money spent, and thus maximize profit.

In this phrase, time and money have a negative relationship.

So while these two phrases sound like they should mean the same thing, they define opposite relationships to time.

(And if time and value have a reinforcing relationship, but time and money have a negative relationship, then by the transitive property, money and value also have a negative relationship with each other. Which explains a lot about our current society, actually…)

It really comes down to the core question of what we value more: time or money?

It has been abundantly clear my entire life that modern American society has gone all in on valuing money above all things, even above valuing people.

Time is an actual physical reality of the universe (thanks, entropy!) and it’s the ultimate limited resource. Money is a fiction. It’s a thing we invented for ourselves and collectively agree to pretend it means something.

Why are we valuing the fake thing over the real thing? Why are we valuing a thing that can mean whatever we want over the thing that’s actually a limited resource? This makes no sense to me.

Time is so much more valuable in real terms than money can ever be.

So what does this have to do with efficiency?

Any discussion about efficiency is a discussion about time. Efficiency is usually used to express the belief that time wastes money. Efficiency believes we should prioritize minimizing our investment of time. And as I just argued: we should value time more than we value money, so efficiency values the wrong thing.

Of course it’s not that clear-cut. Efficiency can yield great benefit. It can speed up tasks and save us time, which lets us invest that time into things that matter more to us (which, let’s be honest, isn’t what actually happens: typically when we free up time, we just fill it with more busyness and not with more meaning). It can maximize the amount of stuff we can produce (which opens a whole can of worms re: waste and the social enervation of consumer culture) which can increase wealth (how we spread that wealth through our community and the continually widening wealth gap is a topic for many other discussions).

I also find it incredibly revealing that wealthy people very often use their wealth to buy themselves more time. This should tell us all something about the relative value of money and time.

This brings me to both my personal experience with what I call the Efficiency Gospel and some of the history behind all this.

Efficiency asks us to do more with less. But there comes a point when you just don’t have enough. Continuing to push efficiency past that point does tremendous harm to people and to the organization. The most ardent acolytes of the Efficiency Gospel I’ve encountered are the ones who refuse to admit when we’ve hit that point. Thus, in my experience, ardent acolytes pushing the Efficiency Gospel have been responsible for a large portion of the harm done to workers in this society.

This is actually a fairly generous assessment. The most ardent acolytes of the Efficiency Gospel are people who really just want to bilk as much cheap labor out of people as possible, and efficiency is both a convenient method and a justification. Efficiency benefits owners, not workers.

Besides, you can also do more with more. In my experience working in the arts and social services, this approach almost universally generates better outcomes for people, our community, and the organization.

A few years ago, I read an article on a business-focused website about how to make your business more efficient. All of the examples the author used came from Amazon. Stands to reason, they’re an incredibly efficient business! But there was no mention of the unethical and borderline illegal labor practices Amazon depends on for their efficiency. No mention of the leading role Amazon has played in destroying true competition in a free market or how they’re a main contributor to the death of small local businesses. No mention of the environmental impact of their ultra-efficient transportation system. There was no critical view or honest accounting of the social, environmental, moral, and economic costs of this efficiency.

What I took away from this article is simply this: If a business needs to be more like Amazon to be more efficient, then efficiency is a terrible goal. It values the wrong things. (This is certainly not what the author of the article intended to argue.)

Here’s what I understand about the history of efficiency in modern work culture:

Human beings have been inventing better tools to help us increase productivity and reduce effort since we started making tools. But our present-day ideal of efficiency is very much a product of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial age, efficiency wasn’t a central concern of human endeavor.

Efficiency makes a lot of sense when it’s applied to machines in factory lines. You want your machines to run as efficiently as possible, to both maximize production, and to reduce energy costs. I have no problem with this type of efficiency.

But industrialists and business owners began to apply this idea of efficiency to the people working in their factories. They wanted people to function more like machines. This is where our present-day Efficiency Gospel was born.

There is significant benefit when we make our tools and machines more efficient. But to expect people to function like machines is deeply dehumanizing. It’s a terrible way for us to treat people. We have machines to do machine things: let humans do human things, as only humans can do them. That’s the true value we bring to our endeavors.

[**cough cough** AI **cough cough**]

What this argument really comes down to is what you believe about people. Some people believe that we’re inherently lazy, selfish, and wasteful. Some of us believe that people are inherently trustworthy, that we all want to do good work and have useful purpose, and we can be trusted to make good use of the resources we’re given.

I pretty solidly believe the latter (*). The Efficiency Gospel is very much a product of the former. I have moral and ethical concerns around all this.

Ultimately, I don’t mean to argue that efficiency has no value. But we value it far too much and in the wrong contexts. Applying efficiency to people is dehumanizing and damaging. Applying efficiency to essential human endeavors like communication and art undermines the humanity that make these endeavors valuable in the first place. Efficiency is anathema to creativity and the kind of deep communication that builds understanding.

Using LLMs—machines—to take on essentially human tasks like communication removes people from responsibilities that are irreducibly human. It places efficiency in the driver’s seat of work that needs time to be done well. It seeks to automate endeavors that require care and attention to be healthy and useful.

We value efficiency to the point of fetishizing it. We value it to the point that we’ve become addicts to it. We’ve lost a healthy, human-centric view of what efficiency is actually good for, and we seem especially blind to what it’s not good for and where it actively does harm.

(* I’m aware my perspective is the result of having spent my entire adult life working in the arts and service-focused nonprofits. I’ve always worked with people who care about doing good. I understand how for-profit culture could lead to a very different opinion of people.)