Pluralistic: Inefficiency is bad, actually (11 Sep 2026)

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-13)

• Cory Doctorow argues that allowing adversaries to define key economic terms like “efficiency” and “growth” is a tactical blunder that leads to political and economic losses, benefiting concentrated corporate power at the expense of labor and societal resilience.
• He contends that the neoclassical economic definition of “efficiency” (e.g., in antitrust) is often indistinguishable from “brittleness” or “cheating,” citing examples like fragile supply chains during the pandemic and “enshittification” where firms degrade products for “growth.”
• Drawing on Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Common Good Economy,” Doctorow advocates reclaiming “productivity” to mean “making things that we need more of” (e.g., housing, green tech, public services) rather than merely “making more things” or financialized “growth.”
• He criticizes Canadian PM Mark Carney’s rhetoric of “rupture” for failing to deliver genuine “Carneyism,” exemplified by proposals to replace civil servants with “defective LLMs” in the name of efficiency, which Doctorow warns will only erode public trust and societal capacity.
• The practical takeaway is that to build a productive, resilient economy, society must smash corporate power, define its own terms for progress, and invest in public sector excellence rather than accepting narrow, corporate-serving definitions of efficiency.