Inefficiency Quotes

“I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, that two become a lawfirm, and that three or more become a congress. -John Adams”
― Sherman Edwards, 1776

“His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.”
― Nikola Tesla

“When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”
― henry hazlitt

“What keeps earth air breathable? Not oxygen alone. The earth is a freer place to breathe in, every time you love without calculating a return -- every time you make your drudgeries and routines still more inefficient by stopping to experience the shock of beauty wherever it unpredictably flickers.”
― Peter Viereck, Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment

“You know what they say. If at first you don't succeed, try the same thing again. Sometimes the effort is called persistence and is the mark of a strong will. Sometimes it's called perseveration and is a sign of immaturity. For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behavior is called... policy.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't stick to trade…they colonize environmental labor, and consumer issues of grave concern (in terms of health safety, and livelihoods too) to many, many hundreds of millions of people - and they do that by subordinating consumer, environmental, and labor issues to the imperatives and the supremacy of international commerce.

That is exactly the reverse of how democratic societies have progressed, because over the decades they've progressed by subordinating the profiteering priorities of companies to, say, higher environmental health standards; abolition of child labor; the right of workers to have fair worker standards…and it's this subordination of these three major categories that affect people's lives, labor, environment, the consumer, to the supremacy and domination of trade; where instead of trade getting on its knees and showing that it doesn't harm consumers - it doesn't deprive the important pharmaceuticals because of drug company monopolies, it doesn't damage the air and water and soil and food (environmentally), and it doesn't lacerate the rights of workers - no, it's just the opposite: it's workers and consumers and environments that have to kneel before this giant pedestal of commercial trade and prove that they are not, in a whole variety of ways, impeding international commerce…so this is the road to dictatorial devolution of democratic societies: because these trade agreements have the force of law, they've got enforcement teeth, and they bypass national courts, national regulatory agencies, in ways that really reflect a massive, silent, mega-corporate coup d'etat…that was pulled off in the mid-1990's.”
― Ralph Nader

“If you are inefficient, you have a right to be afraid of the consequences.”
― Murad S. Shah

“I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“People suffering from insecurity and intellectual deficiency thrive on constant vilification; rarely engaging in a communication based on sound reasoning.”
― Amitav Chowdhury

“We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient, and which Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a lack of" national efficiency," are less visible) less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated.

We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little.”
― Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management

“In basic microeconomics textbooks, even when welfare gets attention, it is in the domain of efficient outcomes. Redistribution through taxes is first introduced as a big ‘no go’ domain with concepts of deadweight loss.

However, inefficiency out of market behaviour and market outcomes is plainly ignored and overlooked. Approximately, $600 million daily is needed to feed every extremely poor person, yet about $2.75 billion value of food is wasted every day, according to Food and Agriculture Organization. Consequently, 9 million people die every year from hunger while one-third of all food is wasted. This gross inefficiency in economic resources is not captured or discussed. According to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, globally, per capita food supply increased from about 2,200 kcal per day in the early 1960s to more than 2,903 kcal per day by 2014. But under capitalism, the market allocates goods including even food to only those who can pay its price. It does not make a difference whether the willingness to pay is less than the price due to ‘preference’ or due to ‘poverty’. Yet, mainstream economics claims consumer sovereignty.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“If your business is anything like our exemplar firm, or indeed like most companies we have worked with, the projects you have committed to complete represent over 100 percent of your carrying capacity. This can have surprising effects on the length of time each project takes to complete. For instance, imagine a project that will take a skilled software developer six months to complete. The lead time to completion if this person is working full-time on the project is six months. Divide this person’s time between four projects, however, and three-quarters of the time, each project is being ignored by the person. The lead time to completion of all four projects stretches to two years! Delays like this can be deadly in a world where speed matters.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty

“Decentralization makes technology more complicated and further out of reach for basic users, rather than simpler and more accessible.

While it’s possible to fix this by adding new layers that can speed things up, doing so makes the whole system more centralized, which defeats the purpose.”
― Harvard Business Review, Web3: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review