Britblog Roundup # 68

Efficiency is a relative measure.  What is efficient differs depending on position and ontology; what objects are considered inputs and outputs, and how are these weighted in the judgement of efficiency.  

Regardless, we do tend to regard efficiency as an objective, unarguable good.  Who can argue against an increase in efficiency?  This is the rhetorical question that is asked whenever workers oppose measures to increase their productivity.  But the efficiency being considered here is organisational efficiency, investor efficiency or proprietor efficiency.  These are not, necessarily the same as worker efficiency.  Superficially, it does appear that we are discussing worker efficiency in these disputes.  But that demands that we understand workers as being mere tools, machines without subjective position, and such would be a totalitarian understanding.   

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People are shit at stuff.

This is the key axiom of political economy, which you forget at your peril.

It explains, for example, exactly why free markets generally work while attempts at state control tend to end in breadlines, cost spirals and well meaning bureaucrats scratching their heads and wondering where their car industry went. And it also explains why we are witnessing the agonizing slow-motion political death of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. Read More

Self indulgent Sharpener contributor linkage. What are the real reasons why the University VCs won’t divvy up more money for academic salaries?