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Efficiency vs Value
Efficiency is sometimes treated as an absolutely valuable characteristic, but that is a bit too simplistic.
One Thursday afternoon, long ago — the animals had already stopped talking, but it was certainly well before the COVID-19 pandemic paved the way for widespread remote working — I was in the West-London office of my then employer’s. A planned meeting had been postponed, and earlier that morning I had completed a major piece of work after a frantic first half of the week, so I felt justified leaving a little early in order to “beat the traffic”. Bar a couple of miles at either end, the road to my front door was almost 80 miles (130km) of motorway. The most efficient road, that is, for there is an alternative along A- and B-roads. And that afternoon, I decided to take the inefficient route.
Efficiency is not always what it seems
Efficiency is an important measure, expressing how much of a scarce resource we need to expend (that is the numerator) to obtain a desired valuable output (that is the denominator). Our life is constrained, in many respects, by scarce resources: we only have 24 hours in the day, we have only so much energy before we need a rest or some sustenance, we have only so much money to spend, and so on. Like all living organisms, we have…
