Business: America the Inefficient

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competing efficiencies. In its crowded and complex society, the goals of individuals often conflict with those of larger groups, making one man's efficiency another man's inefficiency. To take a simple example, the man who drinks soda or beer likes the "one-way bottle." He can drink up and toss it away, rather than return it for a refund. But that little everyday luxury builds up a mountain of hard-to-dispose-of garbage. To the shopkeeper, efficiency means getting merchandise delivered at the start of every business day. Result: trucks flood the streets, producing traffic jams that are staggeringly inefficient for the city as a whole.

Thus the whole matter gets down to the question of goals. Just what kind of efficiency should one strive for? "In love affairs," notes Syracuse University Sociologist Manfred Stanley, "it is a very different kind of efficiency if you want to achieve marriage, or if you want to seduce a girl for one night."

One goal, of course, is to continue aiming for efficiency for the majority of Americans—not efficiency for the few, as in less developed societies. But the basic idea of efficiency is that a nation must make the most of what it has and not squander its resources. To that end, the nation may have to give up some of its past great luxury of choice —all the different makes and models that are not so different from one another. "We have always been able to afford enormous waste," says Sociologist David Riesman, "because we thought our space and resources were unlimited. We are spendthrifts with our time and materials. We no longer have that room. We learned to feel that it is our unalienable right to have the freedom of many options at our disposal and to have things always go smoothly."

The Charms of Loafing

Some inefficiencies may have to be tolerated simply because they make life more human. A labor shortage that inspires employers to hire ghetto blacks and other handicapped people instead of leaving them to subsist on public welfare is a good thing, whatever inefficiencies it may breed. Goof-off time feeds inflation by lowering productivity —and nobody should underestimate what social damage that can cause. But one of the charms of the affluent society is that it indulges the human propensity to loaf and gives at least partial fulfillment to the Industrial Revolution's old promise that the machine will free man from drudgery.

The inefficiencies that will be hardest to surmount are those that do nobody any good. Making sense out of the jumble of local governments will require a decades-long struggle against that most powerful of vested interests, inertia. Correcting the inefficiencies of workers in the service trades—repairmen, waiters, barbers and laundry employees—may be more difficult yet; it will take nothing less than a cultural change. Such jobs need not be regarded as menial; the person performing a service is exercising power, doing something for the customer that he cannot do for himself. But the U.S. has long been moving in the opposite direction, toward the state that John W. Gardner, head of the Urban Coalition, warned about in his book Excellence: "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing, because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy, because it is an exalted activity,