At the beginning of Jennifer Raff\u2019s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cefficient.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s easy to take the position that scientific inquiry should always come first.<\/p>\n
But they didn\u2019t, 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not efficient. But it\u2019s vital to making a government that people can believe in.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m generally an advocate for inefficiency. It\u2019s how I get my exercise these days. I walk a lot, and I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a purposeful inefficiency. It\u2019s not careless or sloppy. And that\u2019s the kind we need in running democratic institutions.<\/p>\n
Now we have a lot of council meetings with public comment periods \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
You often don\u2019t get the impression that anyone is listening.<\/p>\n
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\u2019m pretty sure the project would end up looking quite a bit different.<\/p>\n
It also probably wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not efficient. But over time, done right, it might actually put a real dent in the problem of too many people who can\u2019t afford a place to live. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s OK for things to take a long time because you want to be sure that everyone is on board with what\u2019s being done.<\/p>\n
That brings me to redundancy, which is related, but not quite the same. In Deb Chachra\u2019s amazing book How Infrastructure Works<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n
That bridge carries a hell of a lot of cars every day, but here\u2019s the thing: it\u2019s not the only way to get across the Bay. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re less important today, but they\u2019re still running.<\/p>\n
Redundancy. More than one way to get somewhere or get something done.<\/p>\n
I do that on computers all the time. I keep more than one browser available, because some websites don\u2019t work on some browsers. I even have multiple word processing programs.<\/p>\n
Not everything works the way we need it to all the time. Sometimes that\u2019s due to a disaster. Sometimes it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Take power outages. Sometimes they happen because the private utilities aren\u2019t doing their job properly \u2013 I live in a place crippled by PG&E and I strongly remember the similar failures of PEPCO on the East Coast \u2013 but sometimes they\u2019re really unavoidable.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 with energy generated by renewables \u2013 and not always be at the mercy of the power company.<\/p>\n
Early in the pandemic, when we shut things down to stop the spread, we found that \u201cjust in time\u201d deliveries to manufacturers or even retailers \u2013 something touted as efficiency \u2013 went all to hell. Because everyone was being so efficient, there were no backups, no redundancies.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve recently finished Ed Yong\u2019s An Immense World<\/i>. 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\u2019t). 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.<\/p>\n
That is, our internal systems are redundant. There\u2019s always more than one way to get somewhere or get information.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think we\u2019re meant to be efficient. I don\u2019t think life is supposed to be streamlined. Redundancy should be required everywhere.<\/p>\n
Slow down. Listen to each other. Have a different method available when things break down.<\/p>\n
Stop deifying efficiency. It\u2019s time to defy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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