Against efficiency

[sabotabby]

I was arguing with a Stupid Person On the Internet^TM on a friend's post about John Tory, which led to a digression. Basically, John Tory, who likes to promote himself as a reasonable centrist* believes that creationism should be taught in schools and wanted to funnel public funds into religious education. Another person on the thread brought up that, as potential mayor of Toronto**, he would have nothing to do with education.

Very well, I (and several others) replied, but it's indicative of a stupid way of thinking. And I pointed out that, if he was willing to fritter away my tax dollars—I really do sound like an arch-conservative sometimes—on religious education on a provincial level, who knew what he might get up to at a municipal level. At any rate, he couldn't be trusted with the budget.

Somewhere during the course of this discussion, I found myself arguing against the Catholic school system and Tory's proposed publicly funded religious schools on the grounds that this was an inefficient use of public resources. This is true, and it is, but it's not the primary reason why I don't support tax dollars going to religious schools, and Stupid Person On the Internet immediately jumped in with, "well, it's not like our public schools are models of efficiency now."

Which is true (though they are more efficient than a multitude of little Bible camps and Branch Davidian compounds and yeshivas and madrassas would be), it occured to me that I needed to amend my initial statement. Schools should not be models of efficiency. Education and health care are the two big areas that I can think of that can never, and should never, be efficient.

Is it, for example, a practical use of money to extend the life of an aging cancer patient by five years? It is not. But if that aging cancer patient is your loved one, you understand that while not practical, it's a correct use of money. Likewise, it is expensive and inefficient to ensure that special needs kids have EAs, adaptive equipment, and a lower student-to-teacher ratio. We pour a lot of money into kids who won't necessarily put back into the economy what they give in. From a purely financial perspective, it is not cost-effective to educate them. But we should, we absolutely should, because the intangible social good of an educated and socialized populace transcends numbers. And because it's morally right. The alternative is barbarism.

Efficiency is the worst lie of late-stage capitalism. The economy has never been leaner or more efficient or more productive. And yet we work longer hours and the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. We buy into it because on an individual level we're told that it's good to be productive, and most people can't think past the individual level. On a macro level, inefficiency and redundancy are actually beneficial. We already have enough stuff.

There's, of course, a world of difference between pouring in resources that we won't get back (which is necessary) and deliberately taking money out of the system to duplicate services that don't need to be duplicated, and have a bunch of mini-systems that do a shittier job than one big one would do. Bureaucratic and lumbering though public education may be, it is the best of a series of worse alternatives.

* My least favourite political position, incidentally; well below Westboro Baptist Church and the RCP, who at least can be arsed to take a stand on things.
** And dear readers, you have no idea how much it pains me to even write that sentence; Ford More Years would actually be better than fucking Tory.

Comments

[metalana.livejournal.com]

I would distinguish between:
System achieves its stated goals, efficiently;
System's goals contribute to an efficient society.

Would you be comfortable with the former, i.e. an internally-efficient health system that kept the cancer patient alive?

Society can also set boundaries on how to achieve efficiency, and what not to sacrifice in its favour. For instance, I'm always hoping that stupid paper-based processes will get automated, and the freed-up labour could be devoted to needed work that previously didn't fit in the budget.

[sabotabby]

That's a good way of framing it.

Or, more to the point, hospital should not blow its budget throwing glitzy dinners, but allocating resources to prolong the life of a cancer patient if they desire it (obviously within reason) is the ethical thing to do.

There's no reason that, in a just economic system, most menial labour couldn't be automated. But we're not in a just economic system.

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

On a Mac, you can go "opt"-2 to get ™. You knew that.

[sabotabby]

Oy, LJ's new interface doesn't allow for HTML, does it?

(I didn't know that.)

[princealberic.livejournal.com]

It does, at least I still see the little "html" tab when I'm typing a post.

[mimicucumber.livejournal.com]

You are so smart and I totally agree. - More admiring comments soon. :)

[sabotabby]

Aww, those are the best kind.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

I hate money, it's overvalued and dirty. If only I owned more, I could ignore its degrading existence better.

You remind me of the journalist who came to my Gymnasium (high school/lycee equivalent of Sweden) to talk about his profession and made us make the entrance test of the journalist school which most failed because it was on time and relied on quick associations. He then told us, how happy he was to see, there was more reflection in school kids than in most journalists for "we need some who think before they write". He almost made me want to be one but then I thought better of it.

[sabotabby]

There was a part of me that wanted to be a journalist, but even when I was considering career paths, the profession was pretty much dead.

[kakodaimon.livejournal.com]

A politician here, David Lega (with whom I by no means agree politically -- he is "right wing by Swedish mainstream standards"), is severely disabled -- he can't use his arms and has limited use of his legs, but can pedal a sort of tricycle wheelchair, and requires three personal assistants. He was elected deputy mayor of Gothenburg and they had to greatly increase accessibility at city hall, have a separate room for his assistants to chill in while they're not needed, etc.

He wrote in his autobiography about costing the Swedish state massive amounts of money. I don't remember how he puts it, because it actually comes across as fairly modest, but he conveys that what the state gets back is actually very good value. An accessible society, and one which is socially flexible enough to regularly not just tolerate but incorporate disability, is indispensable to everybody, even those who do not appear to benefit. He compares Sweden to Albania, which he has visited frequently for some reason, where many people don't even have access to wheelchairs and end up wasting their lives in apartments they can't physically leave without weekly assistance from a relative. His basic thought is that where disability is seen as a disadvantage, it is hugely draining on society, because that attitude actually increases the severity of disability, and of course the incidence of disabled persons doesn't decrease just because people dislike them.

Anyway, where was I going with this -- just agreement with the idea that efficiency should not be placed on a pedestal, that it's bizarre to value it over moral and just ways of ordering our world, and adding that often our image of what efficiency looks like might not match reality anyway.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, I agree. And there are other unseen benefits—what's helpful for disabled people is helpful for parents with strollers, etc. But you can't crunch numbers on it easily.

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of different possible meanings of "efficiency". The theoretical economic definition would be that, whatever combinations of outputs (goods, services, common goods such as clean air, etc.) you choose to produce, you get it for the least possible combination of inputs in terms of labour, materials, etc. So, putting a lot of extra resources into health care even when the amount that is needed to help one more person becomes large, can still be efficient. What would be inefficient is, say, if you have a really crappy organizational system in your hospital that means that a lot of time is being spent on dealing with bureaucracy and sorting out logistical messes, so that you are getting out less results in terms of patient well-being for the same resources.

But a) that is rarely what is meant in practice, and b) it is something that relates to the entire economy, and is thus a rather abstract concept that is hard to instrumentalize.

When Capitalists talk about "efficiency", they are more likely to be talking about getting the most production for their firm out of as few people as possible for as little reward, and that is a very different matter. Then when they apply it to the public sector, what they actually mean is that they want to cut both inputs and outputs, as well as of course the terms and conditions of employees, even though that may not be "efficient" even in the local sense of the service provided, let alone in the overall societal sense.

So "efficiency" is something which, like "reform" is hard to argue against, but which is used as a cover for, well, for the usual Capitalist goal of maximum profits for the Capitalists.

[sabotabby]

Yep. Agreed.

[matrixmann]

One thing they should be rather taught in school than religion is: "When our nation's been attacked, it's your living space that is in danger!"

[sabotabby]

I can't tell if you're serious or not.

[matrixmann]

Does I sound so unserious?

[sabotabby]

Well, I don't know you, and that statement is kind of cray-cray.

[matrixmann]

May sound a bit fetched from afar, but I didn't want to ride the patriotism-horse since it's nonsense.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

Erm... I'm a trained RE teacher btw.

Though that may be irrelevant, since I certainly wouldn't want someone who supports teaching Creationism dictating how RE should be taught. I see the subject as more of a way to promote critical thinking and understanding of multiple cultures. It's Religious Education, not Religious Instruction. (And it always annoys me that there are still parents out there who think the subject is about teaching kids morality. Whatever!)

[sabotabby]

I have no problem with Religious Education (we have World Religions here) as a subject! What I object to is publicly funded religious education. We have four public school boards—two English, two French (which I'm fine with, as we have two official languages), but one of each is ostensibly secular and the other is Catholic. Their religious class is Catholic indoctrination. They may learn about other religions, but that subject, and every other, is infused with Catholic values. They get public funding to send buses of their children to anti-abortion rallies. And that I have a problem with.

Courses that cover religion are entirely fine and valuable. I'm not denying that it plays a huge part in human existence. But it should be teaching about religion, not converting students to a particular religion, and it shouldn't be confused with science class.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

But it should be teaching about religion, not converting students to a particular religion, and it shouldn't be confused with science class.

Oh absolutely. My thoughts exactly.

I'm afraid I'm still not entirely sure I understand your explanation of how your system works. Might do a bit of a google tomorrow. :)

[sabotabby]

The slightly longer but still oversimplified version is that four boards receive funding through taxes—English public, English Catholic, French public, and French Catholic. This is because of some constitutional fuckery back in the day. All other religious schools are private (as are some secular ones). You say on your taxes which one you want to support, but there's still a certain amount of money from everyone's taxes that end up to all of them. The Catholic ones are better funded than the public because they also receive funding from the Church.

Catholic schools will not hire non-Catholic teachers and have been known to fire teachers for things like getting pregnant out of wedlock or being gay. They recently had a huge legal challenge over LGBT student groups. Every class is supposed to be taught from a Catholic perspective, and they also have a compulsory religion class. (Public schools can also have religion classes, but those are more like what I think you're describing.)

Oh, and you're in the UK, right? Here public = state and private = public, if I understand correctly.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, so Catholic schools are given state-funding, but aren't state schools? Weird.

Here in the UK Catholic schools are often state-funded (which is no doubt because so many schools are Church of England schools and are state-funded), but any faith schools have to take a certain proportion of students who do not belong to that faith in order to ensure they aren't overly segregating the society.

I've occasionally had to do supply teaching in Catholic schools - sometimes actually teaching my core subject (so they must have been desperate I guess). In some schools, the material in the lesson plan wasn't far removed from what you'd expect at a typical secular school, but in others it was decidedly biased by the 'religious ethos'. (In one school I saw several pieces of work on the wall in one classroom all using similar reasoning -suggesting it had been conveyed by the teacher, not independently reasoned- why Kant's moral law would be against homosexuality. I felt decidedly unconvinced by their use of the categorical imperative there.)

Of course, RE is compulsory in British schools anyway. I actually wish it wasn't compulsory at GCSE, because I find myself often shoved in front of a bunch of kids who are completely uncooperative, never would have picked the subject and yet still need to be prepared for an exam. Such a pain!

[princealberic.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a terrible system but it sounds a bit better than ours, especially since at least there's a "World Religions" class students can take. It doesn't exist here.

[sabotabby]

It doesn't exist in most schools. I'm pretty sure neither my high school nor any of the ones I've taught in have it.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

The idea that schools are inefficient is pretty silly anyway. We've done so much cuts to school that there can't be that much fat left, if there ever was (since clearly, every time there are cuts, it's not fat that is being cut, but essential services, or class sizes are increases, or capital spending is pushed further back). I think it's just code for "I think teachers are earning too much money." Split these people with a rusty axe.

[sabotabby]

In fairness, I think Stupid Person On the Internet was also talking about the $150 pencil sharpeners. But of course they always cut teachers and EAs, not overpaid contractors.