I don’t think the author understands what efficiency measures.
All of the examples involve a bad proxy metric, or the flawed assumption that spending less improves the ratio of price to performance.
All of the examples involve a bad proxy metric, or the flawed assumption that spending less improves the ratio of price to performance.
to quote wikipedia quoting Sickles, R., and Zelenyuk, V. (2019). "Measurement of Productivity and Efficiency: Theory and Practice". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Offering that criticism without clarifying what efficiency measures in your opinion doesn't allow us to follow your viewpoint without us just taking your word for it. Needless to say this isn't considered good style in a discourse.
A 100 percent "efficient" system can be one that is overfitted to certain metrics and it is the typical death sin of management to confuse metrics with reality and miss that their great numbers hollow out anything that makes a system work well and reliable, because guess what: having 1 critical employee and working them like a mule is good when things work, but bad when they suddenly don't, because that second employee you thought was fat that could be cut, was your fallback. In that case your metric of efficiency was slightly increased while another, less easy to quantify (and therefore often non-existent) metric of resilience went down significantly. This means if your goal was having an efficient and resilient company, but your metric only measured the former, guess what.
Same is true in engineering, where you can optimize your system so much to fit your expected problem, one slight deviation within the problem now stops the whole thing from working alltogether (F1 racing car when part of the track turns out to be a sucky dirtroad). Highly optimized systems are highly optimized towards one particular situation and thus less flexible.
Or in biology, where everybody ought to know that mixed woods are more resilient to storms and other pests, while having great side effects for the health of the ecosystem, yet in pure economic terms it is easy to convince yourself the added effíciency of a monoculture is worth it economically, because all you look at is revenue, while ignoring multiple other metrics that impact reality.
It eventually becomes a bad proxy metric.
What it means is the objective can't be static - for example once satiated, you need to pick different one to keep improving globally. Or do something else that moves the goalpost.