Since the late 1970's and early 1980's making government more efficient has been a primary goal of policymakers and administrators. Efficiency has often been treated as a goal in itself leading to the privatization and marketization of government services to avoid the inefficient bureaucratic process. As Stone points out, however, efficiency is not really a goal, it's a process-based measure that strives to get the most output out of a given input. It says nothing about an ultimate outcome. There always has to be something you want to do efficiently, or more efficiently. Again here, Stone reminds us that efficiency is comparative. The only way we can judge whether or not a process is efficient is in comparison to another process.
Stone takes some time to problematize what we think of as efficiency. She uses the story of a library from Wildavsky and Pressman's Implementation. Wildavsky and Pressman believe they have a handle on what makes a library efficient, but Stone argues that this is too simplistic. It may not just be a count of books that is important but the quality of books. It may not be the variety of books that's important as much as having a sufficient number of the most in demand books. It may in fact not be the books at all that are most important, but the services being provided by the librarians. The problem is that Pressman and Wildavsky do not really explore how they would define the ultimate goal of the library. Is it to educate residents, provide residents with entertainment, help schoolchildren learn, increase literacy, help residents with job search and skills, or all of the above? Pressman and Wildavsky define the goal of a library solely in terms of an output, the number of books they provide to the community. This comes close to using efficiency as a goal in and of itself.
When we talk about efficiency as an ideal in the United States, we are usually defining it in market-based terms. From pp. 66-71 Stone gives us a lesson in critical economics. Although we tend to elevate economics as the best of the social sciences in America, we must remember that economics makes a lot of assumptions about human behavior that are not always true. Stone believes that these assumptions generally fail when it comes to public policy and we should be relying on the model of the polis more often. Things in the polis are not as simple as they are in the market. She repeats a lot of the contrasts between the two models that she discusses in chapter one. Ultimately, she arrives at the conclusion that markets can only be considered the ultimate form of efficiency if you define efficiency objectively. As she showed us with the library example, efficiency is often subjective.
The reason I assigned chapters 2 and 4 or chapters 3 and 5 and not just any two of the four chapters is that Stone discusses trade-offs between these goals at the end of each chapter. In America, we tend to believe that equality and efficiency are trade-offs. In debates about jobs, the economy, social welfare, education, and even healthcare; we hear the argument that increasing equality will make our economy less efficient. Again, we are relying on the straightforward assumptions of neo-classical economic theory here. If we assume that individuals are motivated solely by basic needs and individual well-being then this trade-off makes sense. If we instead believe that basic security, self-esteem, and community well-being are necessary for productivity then there may not be such a straight-forward trade-off.
What do you think? Can you think of an example where efficiency is subjective? Do you think efficiency and equity are trade-offs or does some degree of equity improve efficiency?
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