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2016-03-03 09:36:43
Umair Haque
March 01, 2016
Who doesn t want to be more efficient? Pay someone else to do your grocery shopping and clean your house, walk your dog, take that package to the post office. Blend your food so you don t have to spend time chewing it. Don t waste time remembering to buy toilet paper; just sign up for an Amazon Prime subscription.
Swipe right. Tap an app. What other on-demand drone-delivered same-day next-hour thingy do you need? Efficiency! Yay!
But perhaps our noble pursuit of efficiency is becoming something more like a frenzied and self-destructive obsession. The latest rage in tech is apps that call on-demand dogwalkers, personal assistants, concierges, butlers. Are these really the game-changing innovations that they re heralded to be? Or are they something more like the rumblings of a new feudal age, in which a small number are masters, and the people formerly known as the middle class servants? And if they are, should we desire such an economy not for moral reasons but for the sake of prosperity?
Here s the problem.
Efficiency is a stagnating economy s problem not its solution. We live in what is already probably the most efficient economy in human history. One where you can drive your car down the super highway to the local mega warehouse store and buy giant jars of peanuts for peanuts.
Efficiency is being able to utilize resources at the lowest cost. And boy, are we superheroes of it. We ve mastered it to a degree that s profoundly unhealthy: we ve beaten the costs out of our employees, people, managers roles, departments, organizations, industries, sectors. And now we re at a point where a lot of economic growth depends on tiny marginal gains in efficiency.
Efficiency, by itself, is not the challenge of an advanced economy. What is? At a simple level, as Michael Porter has argued, productivity. Productivity isn t just making stuff cheaper it s making stuff better. What do real-world productivity breakthroughs look like? Cures for cancer, vaccines, the internet, iPhones. They are not just minor-league conveniences; they truly and dramatically change lives. They create new markets and new categories. They let you do more stuff, not just get it done faster or through someone else. They create new growth opportunities for other companies who can build on top of them. Yet in many ways, it is precisely our ruthless, relentless pursuit of efficiency that has cost us productivity-creating breakthroughs like these.
Today, economists are furrowing their brows and searching for causes of a productivity slowdown.
I think the answer s hidden in plain sight. It s damned hard to come up with life-changing breakthroughs when you re trapped 25 hours a day on minimum wage being an on-demand insta-butler dogwalker chauffeur. And yet these services are in demand because the people who want them are also working 25 hours a day for the companies that make the smartphones, drone-deliver the toilet paper, and coordinate the on-demand cars.
The point isn t to demonize the consumers or users of efficiency apps. It is to think a little more wisely about them, to note that Silicon Valley s single-minded focus on them isn t likely to deliver significant economic gains, nor should such apps be lionized as groundbreaking innovations that yield higher standards of living.
And so we re trapped in an economy that has become all about efficiency so much so that most of us now use the words efficiency and productivity interchangeably. Productivity is about producing not just actual, tangible things, but true, real, value-creating breakthroughs. But the most efficient company is just software running software. The most efficient economy is just 99% of people working as servants to the 1%.
Civilized societies should not want a class of neo-servants. Not merely for moral reasons though there are moral reasons aplenty. But also, and perhaps and more subtly, for economic ones. A productive economy relies on breakthroughs which increase standards of living, and so create justifiably worthy inequality, higher wages, and middle classes that prosper instead of decline. Beyond productivity lies real social progress. But we cannot create real breakthroughs if we are too busy being servants.
So the challenge for us, as leaders, investors, inventors, dreamers, and doers, is this: not merely to settle for apps which make our lives a little easier. But to create the earth-shaking breakthroughs which make lives truly better and give others the chance to do so as well.
Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Follow him on twitter @umairh.