I Break For Inefficiency

HIYA, GUYS AND GALS. I'm at work.

It's 3:21 in the afternoon, and I am, for all intents and porpoises, still on my lunch break. I closed a few tickets this morning, and checked out some old printers (notably, one in Central Processing, entrance to which is predicated on the wearing of gown and hairnet)--but since going on lunch at noon, I've had nothing to do. It irks me 'cause I'm bored stupid, and it's a lovely day (but not very much, because those who know me know I know I could just leave if I really wanted to and face the consequences), but more than that I'm frustrated with the immorality of waste, and I'd like to write about that immorality here. (But not, I might add, without the appropriate sense of irony.)



A capitalist system of resource allocation is only possibly morally tenable if wealth follows the creation of happiness. In an ideal system a carpenter, selling a beautiful desk, is recompensed at market prices (which are understood, in aggregating automatically the preferences of all buyers and sellers, to be fair rates) for his efforts and time--precisely in proportion to the total contribution to societal happiness his desk represents. If the buyer was perfectly informed about how happy the desk would make him (as he is assumed to be), and the market price of the desk included the cost to the environment and to future generations of lumber harvesting, then this system would channel all wealth to the producers of value who make life, on balance, better. Only by creating happiness could you gain the entitlement to consume resources and enjoy (material) happiness of your own. As long as you don't believe in any hippie nonsense like inalienable rights, this works great.



If our carpenter claims his desk will last for 20 years with normal use, but in reality his workmanship is shoddy and it falls apart sooner than that, it will be sold at a price that represents the value to the buyer (assume he is a butcher) of the desk described, not the one actually sold. This has two effects: first, it enables the carpenter to steal value (happiness) from the butcher, because the (say) $100 premium the carpenter was willing to pay for alleged quality is produced by his butchering but creates happiness for the crooked carpenter and not himself; but by the same token the carpenter earns $100 of consuming power without creating any value, which means whatever he spends the $100 on (say, a stripper), the initial transaction will have contributed less to total social welfare than it could have. A better carpenter could have used the same resources to make a better desk, which would have given him the same $100 of happiness that the poorer one receives, but it also would have given the butcher $100 of value in the form of a good desk. The cheating carpenter deprives society of the chance to enjoy that extra value forever. Resources, in other words, can be wasted; all it takes is a little imperfect information.

That's me, now, sitting at my (shoddy, laminate pressboard) desk. My time is the wood, and the value it's supposed to create doesn't actually exist, because there's no work for me to do. (Many summer positions in non-regional industries, I'm given to understand, have this problem; since the full-time staff can handle the workload during the winter, when there's actually more to do, my job doesn't actually need to exist. And the bureaucracy is afraid to reclaim the budget for it, because no one outside of IT has any idea how it works or how much it costs.) I'm being paid to waste time--and in doing so I am not only poaching value from the public and the hospital's donors; what's more, the time I'm wasting is losing forever the chance to ever be of any value to anyone, one second at a time. It's both stupid and wrong.

Also I'm flippin' bored.