Finally, the Clinton administration has done something really stupid.
It’s going to attack waste and inefficiency, with Vice President Gore in the lead and an 800-number that citizens can call with their anti-waste ideas.
How boring. How pointless. How wasteful and inefficient.
It isn’t just that waste and inefficiency cannot be eliminated. They should not be eliminated. Waste and inefficiency are useful and productive, and not only in government, either. On the contrary, without waste and inefficiency American capitalism might wither away.
As long as they don’t get out of hand, waste and inefficiency, like hypocrisy, are necessary lubricants for the machinery of a society composed of flawed human beings. Which, in case you had not noticed, is what we have.
First of all, there’s no point in getting so upset about the inevitable, annoying though it might be. In a perfect world there would be no waste and inefficiency. Nor would there be any mosquitos. But there are and there are, and in both cases the outcome hath been ordained by nature.
For this (the waste, etc.; leave the mosquitos to the entomologists) there are two simple reasons. The first is that people are imperfect. All of us individually, even you and I, waste some time, money and energy each day. Whether it is because you forgot where you put the car keys; or because you bought something you already had but you forgot you had it; or because you just didn’t have enough energy to do everything, or anything, you absolutely had to do today in order to be ready for what you have to do tomorrow, the chances are that you have failed to use every minute of the day to its (and your) full potential.
Second, in both business and government, waste and inefficiency are not individual. They are collective. They accrue to the organization. Thus, in any organization, there is a certain amount of waste that is unavoidable. Were it not for two complications, that amount-call it the W&I Quotient-could be measured simply by multiplying each individual’s imperfectness by the number of individuals in the organization.
No such luck. First, each individual’s waste and inefficiency output is immeasurable. Second, the combined waste and inefficiency of the organization is not equal to the sum of its parts. It’s much greater.
That’s because the organization itself becomes anthropomorphized. It takes on human characteristics and becomes a player in fouling its own nest. Needless to say, the larger the organization, the larger a role it plays in this befoulment. That’s why huge organizations-the Army, General Motors, California-are (to use an expression, euphemized version, created in one of them) fouled up beyond all recognition.
Again, we are in the realm of the inevitable; there are no villains here. If a few folks get together and start a business, they can go out and buy what they need. When there are a few hundred in a corporation or a government agency, the purchase order becomes necessary, and with it a staff to process purchase orders.
In other words, once an organization reaches a certain size, it ceases to run itself and must be run, meaning people have to be hired to run it. For those people (who often become the bosses), running the organization becomes more important than manufacturing goods or healing the sick or writing the news or whatever may be the actual purpose of the company or the department.
Hence the creation of that odious pursuit-management, which is simply a glorified way of describing the operation of bureaucracy, which in turn is a very wasteful enterprise.
But within this waste and inefficiency, paradoxically, is efficiency. Consider the hospital, which employs far more administrators and operatives than doctors and nurses. But if it didn’t, the nurses and doctors would have to spend so much time filling out forms, making photocopies, brewing coffee and cleaning up that they would hardly have time for patients. Wasteful overhead means productivity.
It also means jobs, perhaps too many in some cases, but too many is better than too few. Featherbedding, within limits, is a virtue when it employs lots of beginners, some of whom will become valuable employees in the future, and when it continues to employ veterans who are in those in-between years, past their prime but too young to retire.
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To the horror of efficiency experts and reformers, some companies and government agencies create positions for such people to fill until they can start drawing their pensions. In the newspaper business it’s usually called something like Assistant Managing Editor for Special Projects, and I devoutly hope they have one for me when the mental deterioration becomes more difficult to hide. There are times when waste and inefficiency is just another term for decency.