What’s So Great About Efficiency? Value It Less, Live Better
Governments and businesses fetishise ‘efficiency’ and ‘productivity’, but our daily lives are enriched by human interaction. Might prioritising the journey over the destination help shorten our path to a sustainable future?
This article pauses to sniff the flowers, engage strangers in idle chat and enjoy the view, instead of rushing headlong to tick off our next task.
By SternWriter (Robert Stern, See Through Newsletter Editor)
Administrative Efficiency in the capital of Mongolia, 2000
In 2000, idly sitting on a bench outside a telephone exchange while making my first documentary The Mongolian Navy: all at sea, the downsides of efficiency struck me.
I, my wife and 2-year-old daughter had flown from our Beijing home to the capital Ulaan Baatar to extend our Chinese visas.
We could have paid an express fee and returned the next day, but instead extended our stay for a family holiday.
I’d also packed my recently-acquired second-hand Sony VX1000, one of the first broadcast-quality handycams. I’d just quit my producer/reporter job at CNN Beijing, and hoped a career switch to documentary might give me more time with my family. This Mongolian jaunt was a grand opportunity to find out just how different producing, directing, filming and editing a half-hour documentary solo was from producing a 20-minute TV news report with a full crew.
Paperwork completed, I started doing a bit of documentary producing.
First, delegate to experts. A journalist friend had given me the name of a Mongolian ex-colleague. Over a beer, Lutaa would talk me through all the strings he’d pulled, contacts he’d tapped up and favours he’d called in to tick off the wish-list I’d presented him with:
Sort visas
Locate Ganbaatar, and get him to agree to participate
Get permission to film Ganbaatar at his ministry office
Find translator/fixer for trip north (Lutaa was busy)
Book Khatgal return flights for family, Ganbaatar and translator
Arrange flight back to Beijing in 10 days time
Lutaa ticked them all off in a day. His efficiency seemed to me to be largely based on literally knowing everyone. But as Lutaa explained to me, in a country of a couple of million people many of whom were still nomadic herders, almost everyone did know everyone.
Logistics Efficiency in Northern Mongolia, 2000
It was time to discover if Mongolia really did have a navy.
We waved Lutaa goodbye as we stepped onto a Soviet-era propeller plane to fly us 900 kilometres north to Khatgal, on the southern shore of Lake Huvsgul. Lutaa assured me that Khatgal was where the good tug Suhkbaatar and her three barges, which made up the fleet of the world’s most landlocked country, were moored.
Sitting next to me and my family were two additions to our entourage.
- Our translator Magnai, an enthusiastic university graduate with fluent American-accented English and zero TV experience. He was stoked to be visiting Northern Mongolia for the first time.
- Ganbaatar, the government official with a central role in my documentary. He’d grown up grazing his family’s livestock around the grasslands near Lake Huvsgul.
Magnai and Ganbaatar joined us in peering from the windows as our plane descended to the town beside Mongolia’s ‘Dark Blue Pearl’. I kept waiting for a concrete landing strip to appear, but the plane simply landed on the grassland. Why not?, I thought. Why pour concrete when your whole country is basically one huge airstrip?
Very efficient.
As we were picking our luggage out from the heap the pilot had left by the plane, Ganbaatar, whose entire luggage was contained in the slim leather briefcase he’d carried in his lap, spotted someone he knew. After a warm embrace and effusive greetings, Ganbaatar’s friends beckoned us into his jeep, and drove us to his home, a rickety wooden structure not far from the lake.
Magnai did his best to keep up with the translation, but I told him not to bother with a blow-by-blow. It felt like things were going fine.
We were toasted with airag (fermented mare’s milk) home-brew, offered home-made yak cheese nibbles, invited to introduce ourselves, and in turn our new host told us about his family and livestock. I can’t remember the exact number of horses he had, but it was something like a dozen for each member of his large family.
Amidst all the smiling, Ganbaatar and Magnai had somehow secured us lodgings for our stay. Our host sent his teenage children out to throw up a ger (yurt) for us by the lake. It was fascinating, and I still have the time-lapse footage of them assembling it.
When I asked, via Magnai, where I could re-charge my camera batteries, our jovial host showed me a nearby shed with power sockets. I asked if it was secure enough to leave my equipment there overnight, but they didn’t seem to understand the question.
I soon understood why. In a society as tight-knit as Mongolia’s, in a community as remote as Khatgal’s, there are few secrets. A thief would be instantly detected.
I’d been amazed, for example, that even though Magnai had never been within 500 kilometres of Khatgal, everyone he met seemed to greet him as an old friend. When I shared my amazement with Magnai, he explained that a couple of years ago he’d won a talent show on national TV, and his song had topped Mongolia’s charts for weeks.
It was around the same time that we realised why everyone was so particularly taken by our daughter Anita. It wasn’t just that she was a cute 2-year-old, but she shared a name with Mongolia’s top brand of soap.
Power Efficiency in Northern Mongolia, 2000
The next few days were the local Naadam summer festival. With my camera, we joined the crowds cheering on the participants in Mongolia’s traditional three manly sports.
I filmed 8-year-old jockeys competing in 20km bareback races, wrestlers performing ritual eagle dances before grappling each other to the grass, and archers displaying the horseback skills Genghis Khan used to conquer Asia. There’s a couple of minutes of these scenes inThe Mongolian Navy.
Observant film critics might note the Naadam sequences don’t add much to the narrative. I crowbarred them in just because they were such fun.
Every frame demonstrated the strength of community there. Nomadic families had travelled for days on horseback to attend their biggest annual social event. When they weren’t cheering on their favourite horses, wrestlers and archers, the locals were feasting, drinking, swapping yarns, bartering, courting, betrothing…
Apart from the odd jeep, us exotic visitors, and my VX1000, the scenes could have been from any time in the past few centuries.
There were some modern additions. One evening, we attended a dance event at Kahtgal’s municipal hall, the highlight of which was a power cut.
Before the lights went out, a phalanx of nervous young men, dressed in their finest robes, had their backs to one side of the hall, nervously admiring the shy young women.
The young women, also in their finest, formed a distant wallflower phalanx along the opposite wall. Separated by a deserted dance floor, they shuffled with their friends to pop songs played from a big ghetto-blaster. Maybe they played Magani’s hit, who knows, but suddenly everything shut down when the power cut out.
By the time the lights came back on, and the ghetto-blaster resumed its disco beat, there were couples canoodling everywhere.
At the time, I speculated the powercut may have been part of the event, with everyone except us knowing the lights would conveniently ‘fail’ at the usual time in proceedings.
A couple of days later, getting ready to shoot the navy now Nadaam was over, I realised my speculation was wrong.
I had a busy couple of days shooting the key scenes on the good tug Suhkbaatar coming up, now the sailors were back at work. But to my dismay, my spare batteries hadn’t charged overnight.
Magnai’s enquiries revealed that Khatgal, a town of 2,000, had only had power for the few days the festival was on, as a seasonal favour.
Now Naadam was over, the power company had turned the juice off again because Khatgal still hadn’t paid its bills.
This stand-off was a consequence of Mongolia’s privatisation of its energy market, following the 1991 fall of the Communist regime.
The power company had sent everyone bills, but without first investing in installing meters in every home. They’d taken an average of Khatgal’s total consumption, and divided it by the number of households.
The good folk of Khatgal had said they wouldn’t pay until they were being billed for the actual power they’d consumed.
No one had mentioned this issue up to this point. Nobody seemed particularly bothered. Who needs electricity, when you have yak-dung fires, oil-lamps, and horsepower?
I managed to charge my batteries in the end. It involved borrowing a couple of horses, riding them to find the guy at one end of town who someone thought had a generator, then to the other side of town to find the guy someone said usually had some diesel, and agreeing a price.
What with having a drink, nibble and chat with everyone involved, via translation, it took most of the day.
But what a day.
Telecom Efficiency in Northern Mongolia, 2000
The day before we were due to fly back to Ulaan Baatar to pick up our visas and return to Beijing, I found myself sitting on a bench, camera bag on my lap.
The bench outside the Khatgal telephone exchange.
A couple of hours before, I’d handed a scrap of paper with the phone number of the national airline’s Ulaan Baatar office through a little hatch.
The telephone operator in a blue uniform had delicately smoothed it out, smiled at me, and politely indicated the bench with the other waiting customers. She was the only staff member there.
I was there to reconfirm my family’s flight home. After what I’d learned about the power utilities, it seemed prudent.
At the start of Part 4, How Mongolian Communism’s Death Killed Its Navy, you can see my view from the bench, as I killed time by taking a few shots of passing locals on horseback.
2’15 in, you can see the telephone operator herself. I killed time by filming her doing her job. She was thrilled, and went about her job with particular verve when the camera was running.
You can see her hand-cranking some kind of transmitter – I couldn’t tell you if it was necessary, or just for show. She nimbly plugged and unplugged cables into the wooden switchboard, relaying instructions to other similar operators. She plugged and unplugged away, her bakelite handset, repaired with transparent sticky tape, at her ear, as the wall clock tick-tocked away the minutes.
It took three or four hours to place the call, and I could see why. Getting through to the airline office in the capital required my nimble-fingered film star to patch the call through a chain of two or three other operators. Presumably, each of them were plugging and unplugging cabled into their own wooden switchboards, bakelite handset to their ears as their wall clocks tick-tocked away the minutes.
The call didn’t help much in the end. When my turn finally came to enter the wooden booth with the receiver, my distant interlocutor didn’t speak much English or Chinese, and was mainly inaudible.
I bellowed the flight details a few times, in the hope it was getting through, but the call was cut off before I got any definitive confirmation.
By then, I’d spent a wonderful few hours sitting on the bench, watching the world go by, filming the equipment I’d only seen in black-and-white movies, having pantomime conversations with my fellow bench-warmers, all of whom enjoyed the joke about naming my daughter after a popular toiletry.
But mainly just lost in my own thoughts.
As my mind wandered, I came up with a thought experiment. What if, I speculated, I’d brought a satellite phone with me.
I could have set up a little table at the entrance to the telephone exchange, and offered everyone who came along the option of paying me to make their call immediately.
The difference between what they were prepared to pay for my instant communication, and the time it took my blue-uniformed friend, would literally put a price on efficiency.
If the smiling switchboard operator charged a dollar and took an hour, and they were prepared to pay two dollars for my satellite phone, they’d literally be pricing an hour of their time at one dollar. If I’d asked for three dollars and found no takers, I’d have overvalued the productivity gain I was offering. Had I charged a dollar fifty,I’d have undervalued it.
But I’m glad I didn’t have a satellite phone. If I did, I’d never have had that experience. And I suspect I’m not the only one who found it a memorable afternoon.
The switchboard operator may still be telling her grandkids about the day the foreigner filmed her for a Hollywood movie. My bench-warming acquaintances’ children might be passing on to their own incredulous children the story about the foreigners who named their girl after a bar of soap
A satellite phone would have been way more efficient, and spared me spending most of a day making a pointless call.
But what a day.
Aviation Efficiency in Northern Mongolia, 2000
It turned out that a confirmation from the airline wouldn’t have made any difference.
The next morning, when we showed up with the other passengers at the same area of grassland where we’d landed, at the time indicated on our tickets, there was no plane waiting.
After some rumour-mongering, Magnai told us a consensus was emerging – the plane probably wasn’t going to land at Khatgal today. It seemed quite likely, however, that it would instead fly from the airstrip at the town of Moron (settle down at the back there, it’s pronounced more like ‘Maroon’), some time soonish.
The knot of passengers soon dissipated. Some headed home to await the next time the plane landed in Khatgal, whenever that might be.
The rest of us crammed into Soviet-era jeeps, which somehow appeared, for a bone-shaking 100km drive across the unpaved grassland to Moron, in the hope of catching the plane there.
I sat next to Ganbaatar, Mongolia’s only qualified deep-sea navigator (if you want the full story, it’s told in the first series of the See Through Prod-cast The Truth Lies In Bedtime Stories, The Story of Ganbaatar).
Ganbaatar, after finishing his filming with us, had headed off into the mountains with some old chums. Via Magnai, bouncing along in the front seat, I asked what they’d been up to.
By way of answering, Ganbaatar clicked open the leather briefcase on his lap and showed me a wolf’s paw, still encrusted with blood.
He and his friends had gone wolf-hunting, and had kept a foot each. Ganbaatar was returning to his government ministry job with a souvenir to show his colleagues.
We eventually arrived at Moron, where we found a crowd gathering at the area of grassland where the plane usually landed.
- I chatted a bit, via Magnai, with Ganbaatar, who shared a few tips on hunting wolves. Time passed.
- I chatted a bit to Magani about Mongolia’s pop industry. Time passed.
- My wife, daughter and I engaged in some more good-natured soap-based pantomime with our fellow-would-be-passengers. Time passed
- Everyone shared food and drink – beers, yak jerky, chunks of hard goat cheese – as we waited to see if the plane would actually land at Moron today. Time passed.
Eventually, the plane arrived, and there’s not much more to report of any interest.
From the time we’d arrived with our luggage at Khatgal, to the time the plane landed in Ulaan Baatar, had pretty much taken all day.
But what a day.
The price of efficiency
What’s the point of sharing these exotic holiday snaps from a quarter of a century ago?
It’s all very well for a foreign filmmaker to spend a family holiday making a quirky little documentary about charming natives. It’s summer, it’s festival time, everyone’s happy. I don’t have to scrape a living there, or live through the bitterly cold winters.
Living without efficient administration, power, telecoms, aviation infrastructure isn’t charming, it’s harsh. Deprived, even.
Modernisation brings remote countries like Mongolia into the streamlined, efficient supply chains of the global economy. Foreign investment brings wealth, rising living standards, and a better quality of life.
But does that tell the whole story? Does it even tell the important story?
Let’s examine the changes the past quarter century has brought to Mongolia. Like my thought experiment with the satellite phone, let’s try putting a price on efficiency.
Industry
As well as animal-derived products like cashmere and wool, Mongolia now exports significant quantities of coal, copper, gold, oil, Rare Earth Elements like lithium, dysprosium (among the most valuable rare earth metals), neodymium, praseodymium, and terbium.
These REEs are all critical in the manufacturing process of batteries and hi-tech electronic goods.
After China, Mongolia is also the world’s number two producer of fluorspar.
Fluorspar, in case you were wondering, can be turned into key industrial chemicals. It can be used as a flux for steel and aluminium smelting, and to produce hydrofluoric acid for refrigerants, Teflon, pharmaceuticals and lithium-ion batteries.
Most of these mines are majority foreign-owned, and most of the value is added outside Mongolia.
Very efficient.
Agriculture
For Mongolia’s nomads, the benefits of industrialization to Mongolia are offset by the downsides of accelerating greenhouse gas emissions.
Mongolia’s geography means its air temperatures have risen at double the global average, so the impacts hit Mongolian herders much harder.
The nomadic life is quickly disappearing, as dzuds become more frequent. A dzud is a severe natural disaster unique to Mongolia, which human-induced climate change is making more frequent.
Intense summer droughts, followed by an extreme, bitterly cold winter with heavy snow and sheet ice, ices up the steppe. This prevents livestock from reaching the grass, causing millions of animals to starve or freeze to death.
Very efficient.
Culture
In losing their livestock, Mongolians lose the bedrock of their Mongolian culture and identity.
Very efficient.
Urbanisation
Their livestock gone, Mongolia’s nomads are abandoning the steppe to converge on the capital, in search of survival.
Ulaan Baatar is now surrounded by ger ghettos. Not just the world’s coldest capital, Ulaan Baatar has become the capital that’s home to highest percentage of its total population (60%).
UN research reckons city-dwellers have the lowest per-capita emissions. But Ulaan Baatar’s ger-ghettos are more like suburbs, which have the highest per-capital emissions.
Very efficient.
Environment
Mongolia’s extremes of hot and cold made it a fragile ecosystem to start with, but modernisation, on top of climate change, is wreaking havoc.
In the grand scheme of things, should we really mourn the loss of the Huvsgul grayling, (Thymallus nigrescens), indigenous to the lake that’s home to the good tug Sukhbaatar?
It may only be found in Lake Huvsgul, and may turn a particularly spectacular opalescent blue during spawning season, but even if Huvsgul grayling goes extinct, that still leaves 9 other fish species there.
Except the reasons for its rapid drop in numbers – overfishing, spawning grounds drying up, soil erosion from overgrazing, bigger storms, a rise in eco-tourism – impact the entire ecosystem.
Very efficient.
Pollution
Huge open cast mines bring industrial pollution, which amplify and aggravate the impact of climate change.
Even a country as vast and unpopulated as Mongolia has a waste problem. Foreign investors are happy to spend on mining gear, less keen to clear up the mess.
The endless pristine blue skies of the steppe are no longer the reality for most Mongolians. Instead, they’re struggling to breathe. Winter air pollution levels have rocketed to 27 times the level the World Health Organization considers ‘safe’.
Desertification, urbanization, more traffic, coal burnt for heat, have all combined to create a rise in respiratory and other problems.
Mongolians who once stepped out into a vast wilderness now choke in their gers, huddled around the capital for handouts.
Very efficient.
Feeling ambushed?
Apologies if you’re feeling ambushed.
My aim isn’t to guilt-trip you for your profligate, carbon-burning lifestyle choices. I’m actually trying to accentuate the positive here.
By contrasting my dream-like trip to Mongolia more than a quarter of a century ago with the world I’m bequeathing to soap-star Anita (now approaching the age I was on that trip) and her younger sister, also in her 20s, I’m not saying we may as well all give up.
Neither am I offering false hope.
I’m just reflecting on what makes our daily lives meaningful, joyful, memorable and fun, and what does the opposite.
‘Efficiency’ is a good lens, because it’s usually invisible to us.
The value of inefficiency
We’re so gaslit into accepting ‘efficiency’ as inherently and unambiguously good, we barely consider its cost.
Still less do we think of quantifying that cost, or balancing it against the benefits we’re being told efficiency will bring.
How often, having appreciated something is more efficient, do we choose to reject it?
Consider the experiences I had over a few days in Mongolia in 2000.
Why do I value those spectacular inefficiencies in power, telecoms and aviation more highly with every passing year?
Why is it that my few days in Mongolia are so rich in human interactions, surprising outcomes, and yarns, they’ll keep me going well into my anecdotage?
It helps that I recorded some of it on my VX1000, which you can now view vicariously via YouTube, but most of the stories I told in this article I didn’t film. None appeared in the edit of The Mongolian Navy: all at sea.
Charging my camera batteries was, at the time, a serious production challenge that was amusingly resolved. But the day I ‘wasted’ in search of electricity for a little camera has become a much more treasured memory than finding my supposed quest, the sailors of the good tug Suhkbaatar.
That’s because all these glitches, screw-ups, snags and pickles formed my journey, not my destination.
At the time they seemed like trivial incidents. My focus was on making my first documentary, and they were so clearly everyday occurrences for Mongolians, they didn’t strike me as lifelong memories. No one ever puts ‘spend a day waiting for a pointless phone call’ on their bucket lists.
Very inefficient.
Hi, I’m Simiae sociales. You too? Pleased to meet you.
The more time passes, the greater the value we place on such non-bucket-list experiences.
We only live once, so far as we know, and we’re social apes, Simiae sociales.
Not all family holidays involve a quest to find the Mongolian Navy, but any day can bring unexpected pleasures if we keep our eyes and hearts open to human interactions, and seek community.
Imagine your obituary listing your lifetime achievements as:
- improved department’s productivity 33% by downsizing staff
- reduced commute time by 12 minutes by excluding neighbour from carshare
- cut headcount by 50% through early adoption of LLMs
Does that sound like a life well lived?
The stories our friends and family will remember us telling, and pass on, are more likely to be ones involving:
- when you appreciated the unexpected kindness of strangers, not that time you owned that dipshit on Instagram
- when you welcomed outsiders into your community, home and heart, not when you evicted those tenants who missed rent once after they were made redundant
- happy accidents involving serendipity, chance, and happenstance, not when that itinerary you planned months in advance was perfectly executed
So why are we so supine in allowing such experiences to be crowded out of our lives in the pursuit of efficiency?
- Self-checkouts at supermarkets mean no speaking to anyone when you shop
- Self-driving cars and TripAdvisor mean no friendly taxi drivers recommending local pubs and bars
- Wall-to-wall after-school activities leave no time for children to get bored and create their own entertainment
- AI ‘boosting productivity’ turns us into thumb-twiddlers or relegates us to robot-polishers
- ‘Safe spaces’ mean never risking being challenged or stretched by new experiences
Rebrand ‘stress’ as ‘adventure’, or ‘risk’ as ‘opportunity’, and we might enjoy life more.
Bring Back the Real Ned Ludd
If I’m sounding like a Luddite, that’s because I am.
But I’m a real Luddite.
The tech bros should try Googling it. They use the term as a term of abuse for anyone who stands in the way of their ‘efficient’ technology. If you think that’s what a Luddite is, you’ve been gaslit again.
Our Silicon Valley Overlords are quick to squeal ‘Luddite’ at anyone meekly hinting that maybe we should:
- tread a bit cautiously on AI
- put some safeguards in place
- consider the social cost of replacing us all with robots before racing ahead just because we can, and damn the environmental cost.
If the tech bros and their boosters spent a couple of minutes researching the actual Luddites – or listened to entertaining podcasts on the subject – they’d discover the Luddites weren’t reflexive anti-technologists.
On the contrary, they accepted the inevitability of the automation of their hard-won artisan skills. They simply wanted a negotiated transition to minimise, and mitigate, the pain.
For the weavers and knitters who smashed up looms and frames under the banner of the fictional ‘General Ned Ludd’ 1811-12, violence was a last resort. Desperate working people, action was their only alternative to destitution, after the factory bosses had rebuffed or ignored all their attempts to negotiate the gradual introduction of new technology to preserve some human dignity, and feed their families.
The grasping textile barons:
- cared only for short-term profit
- were emboldened to act with impunity because of their wealth and friends in high places
- unquestioningly fetishised ‘efficiency’ and ‘productivity’ above all else
Sound familiar?
To our Silicon Valley Overlords and data centre hyperscalers, ‘Luddites’ are the doomed peasants, burdened with obsolete skills, who refuse to retire gracefully to the scrapheap, or re-train as robot-polishers.
They’re talking about us.
As we struggle to comprehend the consequences of our headlong rush towards maximising efficiency, we face a similar predicament to the followers of General Ned Ludd.
What actions are left to us, short of loom-smashing (prediction: one human job that will see an uptick from AI is data centre security)?
Loom-smashing didn’t work out for anyone in the long-run. The Luddites were hanged, the factory owners assets, and in some cases homes, were destroyed. The government ended up introducing exactly the kind of modest, gradualist regulations the Luddites had been asking for all along.
What a waste.
How inefficient.
***
If you want to Speed Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active, avoid loom-smashing, and join the dots to see the whole picture, visit www.seethroughgoether.org