Cult of Efficiency Book

'The Cult of Efficiency' is a heavy read, exploring less about the idea of efficiency itself and more of the political theory around concepts like accountability, public/private markets, and effectiveness in healthcare and education. If you're into democratic and political theory, this is probably a pretty useful book... but if you're looking for a sociological interrogation of the idea of efficiency and its cultish status (which is how the title and blurb sells it), the book really misses the mark.

To be entirely forthright, it's one of those books I really struggled to engage with. It often caused my mind to drift while my eyes continued to attempt to read. It's not that it's theory dense, per se (in that it doesn't necessarily make a huge conceptual advance in theoretical constructs, nor does it really rest on a lot of deep theoretical precursors), but it's just surprisingly conceptual, heady, and dry for something that was meant to originally be a public lecture. To be honest, I likely need to come back to this book later to really grok the intellectual contributions, as the first read didn't really engage.

That experience was a shame, because I think the book likely contains some really critical ideas. While efficiency is only really engaged in a very narrow sense (e.g., political appeals about efficiency in healthcare and education), the book tackles broader themes of accountability, the role of the state, and tensions in public and private marketplaces. In general, I think I was able to pull out a few key themes:

- Efficiency often becomes a problematic term, because we don't ground it in the question efficient /at/ /what/?
- A relentless pursuit for efficiency is often, actually, about renegotiating lines of accountability for the quality and cost-effectiveness of service provision.
- Governments are increasingly being asked to "get out of the delivery of services," but are much more subtly facing demands to ensure efficiency of service delivery (defined in many different, at times conflicting ways) through oversight roles. Hence, it's not about less government, just about government in different forms and with different ends.

I was left craving two things, though, from this book: one stylistic and one conceptual.

Stylistically, I really wish it was more engaging. The prose is very dense and the examples are twisted to be much more conceptual than they need to be. This is the kind of topic where explicit examples and compelling vignettes could do so much to ground the more heady theory. Yet, despite this originally being delivered as a series of lectures, it just doesn't translate into engaging prose on the page.

Conceptually, I felt a little cheated in the narrow focus in how efficiency was defined. Had I known Stein before I bought the book, I would have expected the political science tome as it was. But, from the title and descriptive blurbs, it really casts the question of 'efficiency' much more broadly, with education and healthcare as pragmatic examples (rather than light stepping stones towards democratic theory). This was simply a mistake on my part, but I also think that the true "cult of efficiency" book is yet to be written, exploring the ways that efficiency takes on all sorts of guises and disguises as an end in-and-of-itself, while actually perverting many of the real goals we hold near and dear.

All that said, this is a useful contribution to the political science corpus on governance, service delivery, and democratic theory. But, if you're looking for the book that really interrogates the 'cult of efficiency,' well, I haven't found it yet (recommendations welcome!).