The ethics of inefficiency

Great Debates
1

This thread How is any luxury spending ethical? brought up some old questions I’ve had. I’ve gone through bouts of guilt about luxuries, even though I have never by any means had a luxurious lifestyle compared to the average American.

Over time, I began to think about all the things that I don’t want that come as part and parcel of the things I do want. All the excess waste created by our society that is completely unecessary to the things I actually want. I’m talking about things like giving me a receipt every time I buy a sandwich, or bagging a six pack of beer bottles that has a handle on it.

To take this idea a step further, what about shipping goods from overseas due to cheaper labor? I’m not asking about the ethics of the labor so much as I am asking about the sheer volume of extraneous activity that has to happen to give me what I want. There is a greater cost in material and man hours to get me some piece of crap from China than to produce it here in the US. Parts get shipped back and forth, creating a volume of disposable crap that we don’t need. What about computer games that could EASILY be sold as CDs are, just in the crystal case without an accompanying box.

Is it ethical for us to create this waste that isn’t even necessary to what we want? I know of course that eliminating that extraneous crap would eliminate jobs as well. Is having a global economy, in many ways, unethical due to the waste that it creates?

Erek

2

I agree with your sentiment, and there is definitely waaaay too much crap pushed around. But I fear you’re post is a bit too short sighted, examples:

1.) Giving a receipt seems wasteful to you, but its part of accounting paper train that is supposed to prevent inefficiency on the other side of the counter. Those that have had to travel for business will also know the importance (or lack there) of submitting receipts to get re-reimbursed.

2.) The bag for the beer also seems a bit excessive, but it actually acts as a theft deterrent. It would otherwise be extremely difficult to spot the person walking out that didn’t pay for their beer.

3.) Shipping labour oversees is a bit more difficult. You are absolutely right that a ton of waste is generated in packaging alone in order to get cheaper goods from China. But the reality is that it is still far cheaper to having products made over there than in the US.

With that said, you’re still absolutely right that there is just far too much crap associated with everything we do on a daily basis.

3

How would you propose eliminating the “crap” as you call it? Companies don’t create extra crap for it’s own sake. It is usually a necessary part of the complex process of turning piles of rock, metal, oil and trees into usable products that you actually want. It’s not a 100% efficient process but by and large, companies try to iron out the inefficiencies as much as possible.

Take games for example, they are sold in smaller boxes these days. They used to be in boxes the size of a phone book. Now the box is about the size of the jewel case and instructions. For the game companies, it’s a balance between reducing packaging costs and making a package large enough to catch the eye of a gamer. It also benefits the store that gets to squeeze more games on the shelf.

Unfortunately, what is efficient is not always popular politically. Eliminating inefficiencies usually means outsourcing or eliminating, moving facilities, squeezing suppliers, eliminating or absorbing less efficient competition. Walmart is one of the most efficient companies in the world. Many people don’t think they are ethical.

4

Define “efficiency”. Are you striving for efficiency in using time? Money? Natural resources? Capital? Labor? Is it more efficient for 1 person who makes $1.00 an hour to make a widget in 5 hours, or is it more efficient for 1 person making $5.00 an hour to make a widget in 2 hours? Is it more efficient to spend $2.00 to take the bus, or more efficient to walk half an hour? Is it more efficient to throw away bottles, or more efficient to truck them across the state consuming fossil fuels, truck driver labor, and truck depreciation the whole time, so they can be recycled? Is it more efficient to stay home and watch TV or to go out for a cup of coffee?

5

Lemur: As I said, I wasn’t talking about the efficiency of the things we actually WANT, but the unecessaries that come with it.

We treat money which is infinitely renewable as though it’s limited, and we treat material goods which are finite as though they are limitless.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am talking about labor and material resources.

Msmith, I am talking about ethics, not trying to propose a solution. I am asking what you think about it ethically, not what you would do practically to change it.

I am a businessman and I save receipts. I don’t need a receipt for everything. Receipts can be totally voluntary. If I pay for it with my debit/credit card, they are wholly superfluous because I have the digital bank record.

That’s a slightly compelling argument.

Right, but we’ve created an almost slavelike relationship with our consumer goods. If we were serving each other’s needs locally more, we’d need less of the goods we get. It’s arguments like these that make me hope that China’s economy continues to rise and America’s economy crashes, a little equilibrium would be good, because then there would be fewer options to exploit the labor inequalities in the world, and a better balance could be maintained. I don’t believe that an American economic collapse would spell doom for us. I think in the long run it would be a good thing. If the price of shipping started to factor into the cost of doing business, then more locally made items would be in our posession and we wouldn’t be compensating for a lack of relationship with our local community by purchasing crap we don’t need from China.

Erek

6

You seem to have some fundamental misunderstandings of basic economics here. Money is not an infinitely renewable resource. The total amount of money in an economy is no more and no less than the total sum of the value of goods in that economy. Of course, you can print more dollar bills, but that just makes each dollar bill worth slightly less and keeps the total value of money exactly the same/

Uh, what makes you think the price of shipping doesn’t figure into the cost of goods? Even with the price of shipping, some goods are more productively (read: less wastefully) produced somewhere else. Australia has lots of farmland but a lot of the food we eat is not local because we don’t have very much water. It’s far more productive to have someone else with lots of water grow the food and ship it over to us.

7

But I’m not sure it is an ethical issue. It’s an economic one.

Wasteful perhaps. As already mentioned, there are practical reasons for providing a proof of purchase, regardless if you need it or not.

Also provides a certain level of convenience. You can always refuse a bag if you like and some places have started asking whether to include it or not.

Obviously there isn’t otherwise companies wouldn’t do it. It’s not like companies are evil for the sake of being evil. Hey! Let’s screw over as many American workers as we can! It will cost more but the evil dividends are worth it.

Talked about this already.

What you fail to grasp is that a global economy eliminates waste. Instead of everyone doing everything themselves, activities are centralized in countries or regions that are the most skilled at performing those activities. The end results is that more goods can be produced more cheaply and everyone benefits.

8

What do you mean by goods? I don’t see how this can be true, or even be viewed as a useful model.

I was taught that goods were tangibles, things with concrete existance and can be measured. Is that your definition? I’d think for a piece of goods to be in the economy, that it would have to be owned and posessed by someone. If if is not, it can hardly be in the economy. So each dollar that exists now is worth so much goods in existence now?

Does labor have any value? Is a transaction that results in no goods being created or destroyed valuless? If I create goods or add value to them, how does that affect the value of a single unit of currency in someone elses possession?

9

The two are not mutually exclusive. A discussion about the economic viability of it would be it’s own discussion. Relating that economic viablity to the ethics of it would be this discussion.

But one size does not fit all. I am not saying that we stop providing proofs of purchase, only that when it’s unecessary, perhaps it’s unethical. For instance, I don’t need a proof of purchase when I buy a sandwich at Subway. When I buy computer parts from CompUSA, it makes sense to have one. I am thinking about all the trees/petrochemicals that go into the production of the plasticlike receipts that we receive.

Sure, and I refuse bags regularly.

No this is wrong. You are equating money with the issue, and that’s a fundamental lack of understanding of what I am talking about. I am talking about the pure physical resources and the pure labor.

To get parts from China, they have to build a factory in China, then trucks have to take it from the factory to the port, where it has to be put on a ship, and brought to America, where stevedors have to unload it. Think about the trail of workmen and the raw materials in the ships, the containers, the trucks, the forklifts, the packaging, the repackaging that goes into getting it here to me in New York.

They would have to pay someone in New York at least $7 an hour to produce it, $7 an hour I’d wager can employ probably 10 people in China for an hour. So the raw output of energy expenditure by the overall human race has increased, the only thing that has decreased is the amount of money spent, because of an exploitation of market inequalities.

I fail to grasp it because it’s untrue. A global economy DOES NOT eliminate waste. It creates a byzantine structure of middle men and support requirements to ship a widget across oceans. A global economy brings material resources from one place that has it to a place that doesn’t have it, and allows us to draw upon the expertise of anyone in the world for the right price. It has nothing to do with waste reduction. Those goods are produced more cheaply in terms of money, but not in terms of resources and labor. Again, this is only because of Market inequalities.

shalmanese
I disagree with your assessment of the economy. That’s a nice simplistic theoretical observation of the economy, but it falls apart in practice. Mostly the economy is faith based. THere are people who make a valiant effort trying to understand it, but there are no hard and fast rules as to what the value of money ACTUALLY is.

Erek

10

Actually, if they were more expensive in terms of resources and labor they’d be more expensive in terms of money too. I don’t follow you here. That is EXACTLY why items are cheaper to ship from China than they are to produce in your hometown and ship across the street. Labor costs are cheaper, resource costs are cheaper. Unless you argue that “labor” means something like “man-hours”. But that would argue that the labor of every worker is exactly equal in value, and that is not the case.

11

Sorry but you are just flat out wrong. I’ve explained why. If a circuit board is made in the US, it only has to be shipped to me from an area in the US. There is a ship or port required, this substantially increases the labor. Labor is measured by man-hours, not by monetary costs. If a chinese person works for 8 hours a day earning 5 dollars, and an American works for 8 hours a day earning $ 56 dollars, then it is clearly more expensive than the Chinese worker while requiring the same amount of labor. Do you understand this simple concept now?

Erek