EFFICIENCY

Efficiency is a beautiful concept, it is the foundation of all that happens in Life, it is the driving mechanism of evolution, it dictates if a project can succeed or not, if a process continues or stops, if a society or even a civilization or an entire planet will survive, die or disappear.

We engineers know very well how to calculate efficiencies, we just divide a number by another number “et voilà” we know how an engine works. We take the work made by the system, which is the result and the energy inserted in the system, which is the effort… their ratio gives us a number that we know for sure is less than one, or more dramatically said, less than 100%.

We know, since long time, thanks to Physics, that real efficiency cannot be more than 100%, it is usually very far from it, much smaller that such magic limit. From time to time we have to sweat to convince some wishful thinkers that machines with efficiencies higher than 100% cannot exist… even patent offices are instructed to reject “perpetuum mobile” related inventions. You cannot get out of a system more than what you input. Full Stop. Punkt. End of the Story… ?

No, there is more to this story…

We engineers, we usually do not care where those two numbers have been taken from as long as they measure coherently a result and an effort… we usually do not care what kind of process they represent from other points of view. We may not even care if that process is a small part of another process, if the efficiency we calculate is very large while another one, of which ours is just a small factor, has become actually very small. Engineers are paid to do a job and they do it very… efficiently.

The problem is who decides what kind of process has to become efficient.

The problem is the boss of the engineer.

Unfortunately, not so long time ago, very “efficient” methods have been devised to dispose of “undesirable” people or to bend the will of “enemy” populations. Efficient organizations developed means to burn them in the millions, some with ovens, and some with bombs, from both sides of the same conflict. Later on, one was deemed horrible, the other was defined as the only possible solution. And such things still happen today.

The engineer doesn’t care, the boss decides what to ignore in the efficiency calculation.

People have spoken to decide their boss; they also have guessed some sort of efficiency, what goes in their car engine this morning, what is in the plate for dinner in their own home tonight, how much is left in the bank at the end of the day. And the numbers they used for such calculations came... efficiently to them by doing the smallest efforts.

Tomorrow and the next home are part of someone else’s efficiency, they do not care.

This is the problem.

There is even much more on this story, but that will be for another day.