Worth his weight in paper clips
I have started to speculate about the efficiency of Capitalism.
While having sympathy for Socialistic ideals I can see that Socialism is more prone to bureaucracy and autocracy than Capitalism. The reason I say this is that Socialism has no in built mechanism to correct activities that are wasteful, inefficient or detrimental. This is somewhat broad and debatable so an example may help understand my meaning.
In the Soviet Union irrigation of land meant that less and less water flowed into the inland Aral Sea which started to dry up. Leave aside whether this itself was good or bad for the moment and consider the factories on the edge of the Aral Sea which canned the fish for delivery to customers. Of course these factories had less and less work to do. The solution fond by the bureaucrats was to fly in fish from Vladivostok. This was, of course, tremendously wasteful but it didn’t matter in the Soviet Union. Waste was not an issue. Nobody was watching the bottom line.
In a capitalist economy flying in the fish would have been so expensive that the company would have gone bust and that would have been the end to the madness.
This “evolutionary” tendency seems to me to be built into capitalism. It works to eradicate inefficiency and, when working at its best, it works to provide the best goods and services to the consumer. Admittedly there can be detrimental effects to this tendency within capitalism but for the moment let’s leave them aside. I think it is generally accepted that Socialism is less efficient and less adept at modifying its processes to suit the general public.
I had seen this as a feature of Capitalism which made it simpler and more efficient than Socialism but recently I have been wondering about this.
Let us suppose that we tried to create a mechanism within Socialism to provide this feedback. A mechanism which forced factories to adapt to produce what the consumer wanted and to close down wasteful industry. How might it work?
One way it could work would be to employ an army of bureaucrats working for a separate government department to monitor activity. It would be the responsibility of this department to review the workings of industry and to assess whether the desires of the general public were being met.
At a practical level this would mean industries being forced to record information on their work which would be raked over by officials who would then direct them to stop flying in fish and close down the canning factory.
It would also mean thousands of bureaucrats visiting a representative sample of households and interviewing them on their satisfaction with their products. It would mean more officials analysing the statistics.
On the doorstep:
“Are you happy with your television set?”
“When you last purchased a car what colour did you choose?”
“Was your first colour preference available”
In the office:
OK people we have work to do. In brighton the people have started to listen to their radio in the bath so we need to make radios with suckers to attach to the tiles and we need water proof front panels. We also need to produce more red cars.
OK, OK, This is, of course, absurd.
It is the sort of plan that might be dreamt up by silly bureaucratic state officials in the old Soviet Union but in a modern, democratic capitalist country nobody in their right might would try to implement such a scheme.
But hold on.
That is exactly what has happened.
Consider all the activities which we take for granted in a Capitalist economy which provide no basic function but merely exist to enable the workings of the system.
Consider insurance, audit and finance. Consider that Financial Services was the second biggest contributor to the British exchequer in 2008 after oil and gas. Consider the Financial area of London. The City and Docklands. Consider the thousands, if not millions, of people who commute into London every day from the home counties. Consider the advertising industry and the marketing departments. Consider the customer relations people, the complaints departments and the public opinion survey organisation such as Gallup.
And consider that in capitalist economies the people who work for banks and finance institutions are not low skilled bureaucrats but extremely well paid professionals.
Of course I don’t know the figures and I doubt that anyone does but one has to wonder.
With all that activity, with all that money spent on secondary tasks one has to consider whether it might have been more efficient to simply modify socialism a little bit.
I work with a guy from Pakistan. He observes the way we in England spend enormous amounts of time weighing up the pros and cons of every purchase. (Should I buy the Prius because it’s green or the Avensis because it’s got a big boot?) He is amused at this for, as he says, these things are not important. And of course he’s right. A car is a car. Despite what the guy from the finance company says and despite what the advertising industry would have us believe differing models of cars will really not make a difference to our lives.
Efficiency in motion
at Manchester Airport. The idea is that security staff can identify hidden weapons without the time consuming searches which currently take place.
Art Photography
The cost of efficiency 1 – Our food turns to crap
Tags: Ammonia, corporations, efficiency, fast food, globalisation, Jammie Oliver, junk food, outsourcing, Pink Slime
Nutrition: That's not ice cream... that's 'pink slime'
Efficiency savings. Every time a new government gets in they claim they will make efficiency savings. One of my first jobs was as a computer operator. In those days computer time was so expensive that work would be “batched up” and done in a big chunk. One guy said to me that we are the slowest things in the computer room and he meant that if a batch job stopped and needed another tape loaded then we needed to change it immediately.
I was young and I got into this efficiency stuff. I worked to maximise the time that the computer was doing work. Since then I have noticed efficiency is a driving force behind capitalism. The way it’s sold is that efficiency will mean we get quicker service, that our products and services will be cheaper and so overall our lives wil be better.
I have started to question this.
It seems to me that efficiency these days is a way to squeeze more profits from a process or organisation. Computers have been introduced everywhere and most organisations now provide a web interface for front ending their services. The idea is that we as “consumers” will be given a better service but often this is not the case.
Take the sale of car insurance for example. In the old days you would meet with some salesman in an office and he would ask you a few questions and get you to fill out a form and hand him a cheque. That would be it. The salesman would have done much of the work. In my case he would have realised that I was over 21 and so not asked me this idiotic question. He would have noticed my gender. He would see that I did not have a wooden leg. etc etc.
A corporate fashion of recent years has been outsourcing and this is usually taken to mean a company getting it’s non-core work done by a third party company. However, in the case of many interactions with consumers, companies are outsourcing work to you. In the case of car insurance we are forced to wade through endless pages of forms and tick boxes on the web. Am I over 18? Am I male? Have I ever been involved in an accident? Did I claim? How much did I claim? Along with this outsourcing, computerisation has meant that is easy for the corporations to throw in extra questions. The risk department will be telling the software designers to ask more and more questions and as the time wasted is not their own they just throw them in.
What race am I? What is my previous address? What is my national insurance number? We are forced to answer hundreds of impertinent questions and then, when we’re done, we are forced to read their bloody agreement. Pages and pages of clauses and caveats that get the company out of paying claims.
We are doing their work for them.
The end result is that all this efficiencies has worked in favour of the organisation but not in the favour of the consumer. Service may be cheaper but they are also crapper.
More and more our society has been reduced to two actors: The global corporation and the individual and this relationship is decidedly unequal. When did you last play any part in creating the contract which you signed for a service? You probably never have. The corporation creates the contract and presents it to you. You either sign it or they refuse to do business with you.
Efficiency means squeezing more people onto aeroplanes so that many of the seats don’t tilt back. Efficiency means cramming more and more homes into smaller and smaller areas of land so that interior walls are now made of chipboard. Efficiency means there is never any slack in the system. Efficiency means that when you call the bank they read from a menu and are incapable of dealing with non-standard requests. Efficiency means that when you go to buy petrol, the few seconds that you have to chat with the guy behind the counter is taken up by him asking if you would like two fucking chocolate bars for the price of one and you drearily replying no. Efficiency means we drink out of paper cups and the food in Indian restaurants consists of microwaves meat covered in bulk order sauce.
The picture at the top of this article is of a product known as Pink Slime. It’s seems that, in an effort to squeeze even more value out of the consumer , American food “manufacturers” have taken to collecting the offal that is normally thrown to animals after a cow has been slaughtered, mixing it up with a lot of chemicals (including Ammonia), sticking it in a spin dryer and then putting it into hamburgers and feeding it to Americans.
Bollocks to efficiency!
hove station
Rate this: