The Origins of Efficiency

This is a book-review

The Origins of Efficiency provides a overview of how mass-production happens today, as well as the history of how we got here.

In general, all manufactured products (in this case meaning both tangible goods as well as intangible works) are produced from raw materials and feedstock, that goes through value added transformations, resulting in a something we can use at the end.

Brian’s book provides a deep dive into how these processes are optimized, but he takes it as a given that any efficiency added to a process provides value.

His motivating example at the beginning of the book concerns the manufacturing of penicillin. As the first anti-biotic, penicillin was a wonder drug for curing disease, but it initially could only be produced in miniscule amounts. Using the techniques outlined in the book, production of penicillin was scaled up until it could be relied up as a cost effective and cheap treatment.

Nobody is questioning the efficiency improvements that were made with penicillin, every drop in price can be plausibly linked to mortality reduction, but even for other examples there isn’t really any exploration of the drawbacks of only optimizing for efficiency.

Especially when we get to chapter 3 Reducing Input Costs, there is only a focus on making things cheaper. One way to make things cheaper is to move manufacturing to a location with cheaper labor (outsourcing). Another way to get more efficient is to replace inputs with cheaper substitutes that fulfill the same job (value engineering).

But there is no discussion of the externalities of moving production, only a focus on reducing cost. Value engineering has made it so that it doesn’t make sense to repair a TV anymore, we just throw it away and buy a new one.

I guess you could say the book does what it says on the tin: it does explore the origins of efficiency. I guess I just had hoped it would go a little further to explore the drawbacks of pursing efficiency at all costs.