Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency ... I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with efficiency. Some dislike the term for its connotations about lacking humanity, whilst others see it as a god-like saviour of all problems. Though arguments about efficiency should always be **coupled with the object of analysis** - what are we trying to be efficient about? A capitalistic system makes the **tradeoff** of producing economic inequality for increases in material efficiency, given that the strong private wealth incentive from owning the means of production can motivate competition, lower costs, and increase efficiency. Though every now and then we should **stop to consider whether past tradeoffs that guided important decisions still hold**. In the 1950s, this tradeoff seems worth it. Economic efficiency was a good proxy for experience because it translated to the tangible basics like housing, transport, food and healthcare. In addition, inequality was orders of magnitude lower than now. Though, does this tradeoff make sense now? Many gained economic efficiencies are being used in absurd ways to convert it into experience that is incredibly inefficient. I have three main points contesting our assumption that economic efficiency translates smoothly to experiential value: 1. **We overestimate the rationality and agency of humans.** I have been a tad addicted to youtube shorts as of late where I can find myself endlessly and mindlessly scrolling without really feeling any joy or content - where the advertisements that elicit desires for random material goods produce economic value, but I would class it as negative experiential value. You may ask then, why do it? Irrespective of my rational reasoning about it, my environment and [[Patterns of operation|patterns of operation]] guide me. There needs to be significant investment in the process of reason, where system 2 plans to beat system 1 [[@kahnemanThinkingFastSlow2011|(Kahneman, 2011)]], to be able to act on rationality when it goes against my nature - such as turning my phone off and putting it in an inconvenient location. 2. **Experiential value is vague and does not follow the laws of conservation.** Given our societies obsession with the 'hard' sciences, we may mistakenly start thinking that such rules may translate over into how humans perceive reality. We attempt to quantify subjective aspects of humans experience with contrived metrics that fails to capture the absurdity of how we actually experience reality. See [[Alchemy exists!|alchemy exists!]] 3. **Self-referential nature of experiential value.** The organisation of the society influences the values of people who go onto make up the society and have decisions that influences the organisation of society. The incentive for profit motivates many companies to increase our 'taste' for what is meaningful, leading to more expenditure in material efficiency for the same or even less amount of experiential value in our lives. Let's think from first principles for our setup of society. For this it may be useful to take the thought experiment of veil of ignorance. That is, if you were in charge of designing a society you would be biased by your position, nearby environment and community. Though now imagine that don't know what person/position you will be in after designing the society - such as race, social status, gender and so on. If you could be homeless or a discriminated minority, how would that change the way you reason about the design of a society? Studies show that when people are placed under such a veil, they tend to reject extreme inequality, support the development of a social safety net, and overall increase fairness in society [[@huangVeilofignoranceReasoningFavors2019|(Huang et al., 2019;]] [[@frohlichChoosingJusticeExperimental1990| Frohlich & Oppenheimer, 1990)]]. Of course, the danger lies in that people often do not consider the loss of material efficiency that may come with such decisions for fairness. However, these efficiencies are only useful until a point of saturation after which we don't really need all this excess - and whilst in the past technology was not developed enough, I think we have now reached that point of being able to saturate the basics. We don't do it right now (eg. housing crisis, poor transport infrastructure, ...) since so much material efficiencies are wasted in attempts to bring experiential value in the most contrived ways, but if directed they could improve our societies experiences even with significant reductions in efficiency. Nonetheless, such change is not easy and brings great risks. # References Frohlich, N., & Oppenheimer, J. A. (1990). Choosing justice in experimental democracies with production. _American Political Science Review_, _84_(2), 461–477. [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/choosing-justice-in-experimental-democracies-with-production/43AFEA7F710484C9C8A8857395A79C38](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/choosing-justice-in-experimental-democracies-with-production/43AFEA7F710484C9C8A8857395A79C38) Huang, K., Greene, J. D., & Bazerman, M. (2019). Veil-of-ignorance reasoning favors the greater good. _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_, _116_(48), 23989–23995. [https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910125116](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910125116) Kahneman, D. (2011). _Thinking, Fast and Slow_. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.