The Cult of Efficiency

Revised Edition

Janice Gross Stein

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780887848803
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Ordnung

We live in an age dominated by the cult of efficiency. Efficiency in the raging debate about public goods is often used as a code word to advance political agendas. When it is used correctly, efficiency is important: it must always be part of the conversation when resources are scarce and citizens and governments have important choices to make among competing priorities.

Even when the language of efficiency is used carefully, that language alone is not enough. Unilingualism will not do. We need to go beyond the cult of efficiency to talk about accountability. Much of the democratic debate of the next decade will turn on how accountability becomes part of our public conversation and whether it is imposed or negotiated.

Janice Gross Stein draws on public education and universal health care, locally and globally, as flashpoints in the debate about their efficiency. She argues that what will define the quality of education from Ontario to India and the quality of health care from China to Alberta is whether citizens and governments can negotiate new standards of accountability. The cult of efficiency will not take us far enough.

NOTES

Chapter I: The Cult of Efficiency

1 Cited in Corey Robin, “The Ex-Cons: Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left!” Lingua Franca 11, 1 (Feb. 2001), pp. 24–33, 32.

2 Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is as Close to Utopia as It Gets (Toronto: Penguin, 2001), p. 84.

3 In the 1990s, governments embarked upon measures to contain public-health expenditures. Ontario and Alberta began to experiment with case-based funding formulas in restraining hospital budgets. These formulas — cost per weighted case and negotiated volumes of activity, developed with the collaboration and support of provincial hospital associations — were an attempt to reward hospitals for “efficiency.”

4 Portals and Pathways: A Review of Post-Secondary Education in Ontario, Report of the Investing in Students Task Force (Toronto: Queen’s Park, 2001) included thirty-three recommendations to increase efficiency, such as system-wide collaboration to simplify procedures for transferring student credits and applying for student aid, as well as collaboration on future “e-learning” initiatives. See www.edu.gov.on.ca/task.

5 Ian Smilie, “NGOs and Development Assistance: A Change in Mind-set?” Third World Quarterly 18, 3 (1997), pp. 563–77, 566.

6 For an extension of the argument of consumerism to the home and family, see David Bosworth, “The Spirit of Capitalism 2000,” Public Interest 138 (Winter, 2000), pp. 3–28.

7 Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, Final Report on Social Cohesion (Ottawa: June 1999), available at www.parl.gc.ca/parlbus/commbus/senate/
com-e/soci-e/rep-e/repfinal/jun99-e.htm. Keith Banting makes precisely this argument in “The Internationalization of the Social Contract,” in Thomas Courchene, ed., The Nation State in a Global Information Era: Policy Challenges (Kingston: John Deutsch Institute of Economic Research, 1999), pp. 255–85.

8 Robert Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America,” PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (1995), pp. 664–83.

9 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 15.

10 Roland L. Meek and A. S. Skinner, “The Development of Adam Smith’s Ideas on the Division of Labour,” Economic Journal 88, 332 (1973), “Appendix A: Extracts from the 1762–3 Lecture Notes: Tuesday, April 5th, 1763,” pp. 1094–116, 1100.

11 Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), argues that “human sympathy” is the basis for social cohesion and an important corrective to an unhindered free market.

12 Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 26–27.

13 Plato, Republic, A. D. Linsay, ed. (London: Dent, 1976), p. 49.

14 S. Todd Lowry, The Archaeology of Economic Ideas: The Classical Greek Tradition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 108.

15 Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).

16 Ibid, p. 173.

17 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books), p. 127.

18 Cited in ibid.

19 Heath, Efficient Society, p. 12.

20 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911; reprint, New York: Harper and Bros., 1947).

21 Andrew Sharpe, “Determinants of Trends in Living Standards in Canada and the United States, 1989–2000,” International Productivity Monitor, 2 (Spring 2001), pp. 3–10.

22 There are different approaches, interpretations, and statistical requirements of productivity measures, and little consensus among experts on appropriate concepts and measures. See Paul Schreyer, “The OECD Productivity Manual: A Guide to the Measurement of Industry-Level and Aggregate Productivity,” International Productivity Monitor, 2 (Spring 2001), pp. 37–51.

23 Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 129.

24 James Allen Smith, The Idea Brokers (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 48.

25 William H. Allen, Efficient Democracy (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1907, 1912), p. 281.

26 This account of municipal reform draws on Smith, Idea Brokers, p. 47ff.

27 The political agenda of the reformers who used the language of efficiency was to develop and insulate the power of emerging metropolitan commercial and technical elites from the sustained pressures of machine politics. Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 192.

28 As Theodore Lowi and Edward J. Harpham observe: “Although Weberian state theory does not rely on human perfectibility, it has come close to an ideology of institutional perfectibility.” See “Political Theory and Public Policy,” in Kristen R. Monroe, ed., Contemporary Empirical Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 249–78, 264.

29 Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox and Political Reason (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 13, 53.

30 Heath, Efficient Society, pp. 18–21.

31 Later utilitarians considered the consequences of action not only on the happiness of the greatest number of members of the community currently living, but on future generations as well. Henry Sidgwick, writing in the late nineteenth century, claimed a “general — if not universal — assent for the principle that the true standard and criterion by which right legislation is to be distinguished from wrong is conducive to the general good or ‘welfare.’ And probably the majority of persons would agree to interpret the ‘good’ or ‘welfare’ of the community to mean, in the last analysis, the happiness of the individual human beings who compose the community; provided that we take into account not only the human beings who are actually living but those who are to live hereafter.” Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. 34, cited in John Morrow, History of Political Thought: A Thematic Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 120. Productive efficiency that increases pollution for future generations would then not be considered “efficient.”

32 Amartya K. Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, 4 (1977), pp. 317–44.

33 Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 294–95.

34 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 11–15.

35 Bentham, A Fragment on Government and an Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation, Wilfred Harrison, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 125.

36 Ibid, p. 127.

37 Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, Ann S. Schwier and Alfred N. Page, trans. (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1971), ch. 6, sec. 33, p. 261ff.

38 Axel van den Berg, “Politics versus Markets: A Note on the Uses of Double Standards” (paper presented to Reinventing Society in a Changing Global Economy Conference, University of Toronto, Toronto, March 8–9, 2001), p. 1. I draw heavily on his argument in the paragraphs that follow, and in the analysis of states and markets in the section that follows.

39 Ibid.

40 Albert O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 107.

41 Stephen Holmes, “The Secret History of Self-Interest,” in Jane J. Mansbridge, ed., Beyond Self-Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 267–86.

42 Kristen R. Monroe, “Human Nature, Identity, and Politics,” in Contemporary Empirical Political Theory, pp. 279–306, 282. There is robust evidence from contemporary research in psychology that demonstrates people rarely conform to this ideal of rational, efficient choice when they make decisions.

43 Heath, Efficient Society, p. 201.

44 Hayek, unlike Smith and F...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I The Cult Of Efficiency
• II Efficiency And Accountability In The Post-Industrial Age
• III Efficiency And Choice: Public Education And Health Care
• IV Measurin G Up : Constructing Accountability
• V The Culture Of Choice
• VI Security In The Post-Industrial Age
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index