At the beginning of Jennifer Raff’s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas she discusses a 1996 paleontology project in a cave on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska where the scientists, while looking at animal bones, found human remains.
They immediately stopped work and consulted with people from the Tlingit and Haida tribes who live in the region. After some discussions, it was agreed that the scientists could continue, but that if they found it was a sacred burial site, they would stop. And they were also required to share their findings with the tribes before they were published.
In this case, it was not a burial site and the eventual outcome of the work showed that the bones of the person they found were related to the people living there and that they went back more than 10,000 years.
But what got me were not just the results, but the fact that the paleontologists stopped and consulted with the people native to the region. That does not fit into the modern focus on being “efficient.”
Meeting with people takes time, especially when the way the paleontologists look at the world and the way indigenous cultures look at the world are often at cross purposes. It’s easy to take the position that scientific inquiry should always come first.
But they didn’t, and the end result was useful to everyone. It just took extra time. And it treated people who were affected by the work with respect.
That brings me to how democracy should work. The people who are affected by decisions need an opportunity to discuss the matter and actually be heard. This is slow. It’s not efficient. But it’s vital to making a government that people can believe in.
I’m generally an advocate for inefficiency. It’s how I get my exercise these days. I walk a lot, and I’m more likely to get out and walk if I have an errand to run. So I try to run my errands in opposite directions, even if I could combine them in one, and I stretch them out over a couple of days when I could do them all at once.
It’s a purposeful inefficiency. It’s not careless or sloppy. And that’s the kind we need in running democratic institutions.
Now we have a lot of council meetings with public comment periods – though they are often structured with a lot of annoying rules that you only understand if you spend a lot of time going to council meetings. And much of that has become pro forma: you have comment period and then the council does what they were going to do anyway.
You often don’t get the impression that anyone is listening.
So what if, say, you were going to fund housing for homeless people and you actually spent a great deal of time talking with the homeless people in the area about what they needed and what they wanted. I’m pretty sure the project would end up looking quite a bit different.
It also probably wouldn’t add as much to the coffers of the local developers who make their living getting city contracts to building housing for low income people who are never consulted about what kind of housing they need and want.
It’s not efficient. But over time, done right, it might actually put a real dent in the problem of too many people who can’t afford a place to live.
Years ago I worked for a nonprofit law firm that helped tenant groups buy their apartment buildings. When a landlord put their building up for sale, the tenants got the first right to purchase it.
We sent lawyers and organizers to meet with the tenants and explain to them what their rights were and what the prospects were for making this project happen. It took a lot of time.
At the time, I was sometimes bothered by the fact that each project took longer than seemed necessary. But looking back on it, I think the very inefficiency of the projects was good. People learned how to work together.
It’s OK for things to take a long time because you want to be sure that everyone is on board with what’s being done.
That brings me to redundancy, which is related, but not quite the same. In Deb Chachra’s amazing book How Infrastructure Works, she talks a lot about redundancy. For example, she mentions the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, which took out the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco.
That bridge carries a hell of a lot of cars every day, but here’s the thing: it’s not the only way to get across the Bay. There’s BART, which runs a subway line under the Bay. There are other bridges, albeit ones much farther from both cities that require you to go the long way around.
And there are ferries. If you are a devotee, as I am, of the novels of Dashiell Hammett, you know that before a lot of the bridges were built, the ferries were a major means of transportation among the cities around the Bay. They’re less important today, but they’re still running.
Redundancy. More than one way to get somewhere or get something done.
I do that on computers all the time. I keep more than one browser available, because some websites don’t work on some browsers. I even have multiple word processing programs.
Not everything works the way we need it to all the time. Sometimes that’s due to a disaster. Sometimes it’s due to it being badly designed. Sometimes things just wear out and you need to work around the problem until you can get them fixed.
Take power outages. Sometimes they happen because the private utilities aren’t doing their job properly – I live in a place crippled by PG&E and I strongly remember the similar failures of PEPCO on the East Coast – but sometimes they’re really unavoidable.
Microgrids can provide useful backups in those times. So can resiliency hubs in every neighborhood where people can go and charge devices from phones to medical equipment. There are ways to go all-electric – with energy generated by renewables – and not always be at the mercy of the power company.
Early in the pandemic, when we shut things down to stop the spread, we found that “just in time” deliveries to manufacturers or even retailers – something touted as efficiency – went all to hell. Because everyone was being so efficient, there were no backups, no redundancies.
I’ve recently finished Ed Yong’s An Immense World. One of the things I got from the book was the understanding that pretty much all creatures, including humans, use multiple senses to navigate the world, including ones like proprioception (which we barely realize we have until we don’t). Some of them we use at one distance while changing when we get closer. If we lose one sense, we can often make up much of what we lose with the others.
That is, our internal systems are redundant. There’s always more than one way to get somewhere or get information.
I don’t think we’re meant to be efficient. I don’t think life is supposed to be streamlined. Redundancy should be required everywhere.
Slow down. Listen to each other. Have a different method available when things break down.
Stop deifying efficiency. It’s time to defy it.
Efficiency is sometimes deliberately used as a way not to have to listen to stakeholders or others who might have other ideas or requirements. As you say, sometimes the people who make a token show of “listening” already know exactly what they intend to do, and listening to others would only slow them down.
In government, as maddening as it can sometimes be, I think inefficiency may be a feature rather than a bug: things that slow the process down mean there are opportunities to reevaluate and ask “is this what we need to be doing?” I sympathize with the desire for speed, because, to paraphrase from When Harry Met Sally, when you find something you want to fix, you want to fix it right now. But if you want to fix it right, you need to take the time.
In our current political crisis, there is certainly an urge to just go back to the status quo as fast as possible. However, given how badly things are being broken, that’s probably not even possible, and if it’s going to be messy anyway, we might as well rebuild using inefficiency and redundancy.