The other day I was tripped up at work because we increased what we count as the cost of administering a loan. This is an internal cost, only partly offset by closing fees. It has no effect on anything but our own measure of profitability. I had noticed that the amortization period had dropped, but I did not see that the cost had gone up as well. Of course, this was flagged on the first loan that I wrote after the increase. As I was grumbling at myself for missing that crucial detail, one of my co-workers piped up saying that these costs always increase every April. “But they could go down,” she mused, “as we introduce efficiencies.”
This last was spoken in emphasis. There were bold italics on that word, like it was the Holy Grail. And maybe it is for business…
However, the realists in the world tend to question Grails of all sorts. I mean, it’s just a damn cup. The whole quest thing was a bunch of be-knighted ding-dongs, chasing dreams of eternity and glory. And that’s not far off how I feel about “efficiencies”.
There is so much that is not analyzed in this. To begin with, why do we have an internal cost ascribed to each loan? I suppose we want to keep track of goods and labor spent on our products. But there is no true evaluation of how our general costs of doing business are divided up across all the accounts. This cost is simply tied to the dollar amount of the account, which is not at all a mark of effort expended. Some accounts take a lot of massaging, and some customers need a lot of hand-holding. These are not necessarily the high dollar loans, but those “cost” us more to administer, by our reckoning. In my experience, the small loans are the ones I am constantly fiddling with, but they “cost” us less. To my mind, it would make more sense to just tally up the costs incurred in a period and divide them evenly across the board. It would be more accurate, anyway. But maybe this number isn’t concerned with accuracy.
But then, even if the number is accurate, why is it increasing every year? By quite a lot this year. There have been small increases in legal fees and recording fees, but those are charged directly to the customer. We just serve as a pass-through. Costs us nothing, generates no revenue. But I don’t recall getting a large raise, and I am the chief internal cost in administering a loan in our bank. If my wages didn’t jump upward, then I really can’t see why we are saying that it costs us more to administer a loan this year than it did last year. All this seems to show that the number smacked on that cost is more or less make-believe.
I think it’s the increase that is important. The illusion of growth. This is much the same phenomenon as annual increases in rent, especially on dwellings, but also on businesses that rent their premises. My bookstore’s rent went up about 3.5% each year for no increase in what I was buying from my landlord. No more floor-space billowing out of the corners. No better maintenance. (Truly, maintenance was rather thin on the ground…) Not even an extra parking space or two. So why did rent increase? Because centuries ago, the rentier class, not satisfied with merely forcing people to pay for a place to live, decided that rent would periodically increase so they could take more money from those who had nothing. Today’s rentier class writes annual increases into their leases, so they can take in more revenue each year and maintain an illusion of growth — though there has been no change in either the product they provide, the rented space, nor in the number of people paying rent. Of course, this is not just to make the balance books black. They also take in more money each year — for no additional investment or effort. Just because they write the rules of ownership…
I’m not sure why my employers think that their internal costs of business increase every year. As I said, my wages haven’t increased… and my wages are the actual cost of business in commercial lending. So it’s not happening. But it also doesn’t even make sense. It doesn’t make us look good on paper. Same number of loans, higher costs? That’s the opposite of growth. I think this increase is just a knee jerk response. Because annual increase is the assumption in the modern word, it is the common wisdom handed down from the days of Enclosure. If we are not growing, then there are no profits. If there are no profits, then there is no capital accumulation. If there is no capital accumulation, there is no need for banks. (There is also no rentier class…) Our entire culture is predicated on annual increase. Without it, capitalism falls apart. Which just goes to show how much of a fake and forgery this system is. There has been no increase in land… but look at all the wealth this little magic trick has generated.
And this brings me back to efficiencies. Business folks slather this word all over their proposals and budgetary plans. The goal of every administrator is efficiency. It’s even become plural recently, though the noun doesn’t lend itself to multiplicity. Two efficiencies is still just efficiency. But we must grow everything, even our labels. So… efficiencies.
But what is this thing titans of industry so desire? My co-worker was italicizing the word. It was clearly exciting. But what does it mean? What does it mean for her? (And me…)
Does it mean that material costs have been lowered? Not at all. We spend more material resources on administering a loan these days than we ever have, computers notwithstanding. Or maybe we spend more precisely because of computers. Computers cost a whole lot more in material and maintenance than recording everything in ledgers. In the digital age, the material cost of business has increased and complexified beyond imagining. Entirely new divisions of industry have been heaped onto the material cost of lending. Seems to me to be the opposite of efficient, but we still call digitalizing the business model, “efficiency”. Why?
Because computers depress labor costs. That is the chief meaning of efficiency in the business jargon world. Increasing productivity while lowering wages. Material costs, transportation, manufacturing processes — aside from labor, few costs of any business venture are especially elastic. (We don’t have any more land…) Efficiency, the reduced cost of business, is not going to be found in the material realm. In fact, “efficiencies” usually incur increased resource use. Logic dictates that any production gains will use up more resources. Those resource costs may be shifted to other parts of the ledger, onto other peoples and places, but the cost remains. Even in the digital age. Especially in the digital age. It costs much more to do business now than it ever has. So, no, efficiencies are not about reducing material costs. Efficiency is about reducing the only elastic cost of doing business, the cost of labor.
That is what efficiency is all about. Forcing more work out of every wage-hour. Eliminating jobs done by humans, handing off those tasks to machines. (An accounting trick if there ever was one… machinery takes far more wage hours than a human doing the job directly. But the cost is spread all over the globe.) Management is nothing but finding ways to pay less for labor, while increasing productivity, increasing efficiency. And efficiency is taking wages from wage-earners, simple as that. Efficiency, like all forms of rent, is a tool to extract wealth from the laboring classes — in the form of living time — in order to funnel it upwards to the owners and their well-paid managerial lackeys.
My co-worker is a case in point. She has been in this job for decades. (I can’t imagine a more depressing story of a life…) She is not salaried, and her paid wage hours are fixed at 40 per week. She spends at least 40 hours a week in the office. She does not earn overtime. Yet she has a laptop and regularly works into the evening and most weekend days. I have often heard her complaining that her system log-in must rest for two hours after an eight-hour shift — because this lock-out period interferes with the work she feels she needs to do. She has also reported working at two in the morning. Frequently. (I don’t know how you could stay awake to do her supremely uninteresting job at that time of night…) This is all unpaid labor. This is the apex of efficiency, getting the most work for the lowest labor cost, nothing.
When she reverently whispered that word, “efficiencies”, I couldn’t help but think “But that’s how they’re stealing your life from you!”. Working at 2am. For no wages. That’s what efficiency means for her. For me, it means piling all the loans on my desk with no increase in the time I have to process them, never mind increased wages. Efficiency also means increased oversight and reporting, always resulting in more work and processing time for each loan — for no more wages, though also no more productive output…
This unproductive wage-time is apparently a growing problem for the rentier class.
The professional-managerial class is tying itself into knots these days over AI and its potential for job elimination. Reporting and oversight, the former tools of efficiency gains — and the bread and butter of the PMC — are being turned over to machinery. In the name of efficiency, of course. I guess there is no more efficiency to be bled from the labor class, now that most of our financialized industry no longer requires much in the way of labor. So, now management is losing the favor of the elites. Managers are suffering efficiencies now. From their frantic tone, you’d think this was a new thing, a novel threat to society. But no… this is exactly the same threat that capitalists have been leveling at the world for centuries. It’s just that it’s now affecting the erstwhile infantry of efficiency, the people who used to wield the sword in the master’s name. Efficiency has come for their salaries now, and they are sputtering in rage and betrayal.
But the real headline in efficiency these days is the farce going on in Washington. The Department of Government Efficiency. (Has anyone spent five seconds parsing out the internal logic of that name? I’m pretty sure that in the dictionary under “oxymoron” it reads “See DOGE”.) Here we have the real world logic of efficiency laid bare. Under the moron administration, all the people who do the work of public service, that is the people who do the labor of government, the only actual reason we have government, are all being fired — by the leaders of government (and one or two extraneous sycophants). Hundreds of thousands are already jobless. Whole divisions no longer exist. For example, there is no federal government body that can aid cities with testing for lead in drinking water now. Head Start, the federal program that assists low income families in getting their kids ready for school, is currently unfunded, resulting in the loss of jobs across the nation, including several here in my small town. There are rumors of federal employees showing up for work only to find that their access badges have been deactivated overnight — with no explanation whatsoever.
Undoubtedly, there is an idealogical motive in these firings. Nobody who carries a gun has been fired. Prisons are still well staffed, though most of those have already been privatized, I suppose. But I haven’t heard that weapons research is losing its funding. (Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs are still posting job advertisements…) These jobs that harm people are still safe from efficiency. The jobs that are subject to efficiency cuts “just happen” to be within programs that help and protect people, particularly from the effects of living in an age of “efficiency”. But the brute discrimination is not only against the type of work that is being done. It is also just the fact that there are people being paid — sometimes quite well, often not much at all — to do work. And this is unacceptable to the sort of business-minded, rentier-class people who are now in charge. There must be efficiency — that is, work done and no wages paid.
It doesn’t take much insight to see that this word, efficiency, is a euphemism for slavery. So when my coworker reverentially whispered “efficiencies”, all sorts of chilling alarms were triggered in my body.
I don’t want to be efficient. I want to do a good job and be paid accordingly. I also want to be left alone, to be able to do my job well without all the oversight of management, looking for ways to squeeze more production out of my flat wages. Truthfully, I don’t want there to be more production. I want production of all kinds to be down-sized to fit within planetary boundaries. And in an ideal world there would be no wage work at all — because there would be no blood-sucking rentier class making us do their work and then making us pay for what our labors have produced.
Even more so, I don’t want there to be efficiencies in public service. I want the people who are working to take care of us all, who are working to make our lives safer, healthier, stronger, and happier, I want those people to be able to do good work and to be paid accordingly. That said, in an ideal world there would be no need for government to fill those roles. There would be no need to protect us from the ravages of efficiency and all the other weapons in the rentier class toolkit. In the best world, they would all lose their jobs because jobs, especially those jobs that are put in place by law to protect us from the rentier class, wouldn’t be necessary. However, that’s not this world… and those jobs are absolutely essential.
Much as all this terrifies me, I do find it amusing to run out the end-game of all this DOGE-ing. Today, I read that AI will be employed to fire people, ratcheting up the hemorrhaging of public service. So what happens when there are no public sector jobs? Will there be a need for government at all? Aren’t these morons removing their own base of power and influence? If there is no public sector work to fund and administer, then there is no need for government.
Seems to me that all efficiency will eventually, maybe quite quickly, undermine the whole system. If there are no people doing the work, then there is no work done. Nothing produced. On the other side of the equation, when there are no wages earned, then there is no spending. Nothing bought or sold. Efficiency erodes away the foundations of capitalism.
But then, that is the nature of capitalism itself. It consumes itself. A system of one-way wealth transfer will always collapse — because eventually there is nothing left to transfer. But when the wealth is all meaningless paper and bits and bytes, when real world work and resource use are churned into rent revenues, at the collapse, there is nothing of value left. The end-game of monetary wealth accumulation is implosion into the void, probably sucking a good many of its closely dependent lives with it into oblivion.
If I were in the rentier class, I might be a bit worried about the logic of efficiency. But then I would never be in the rentier class. I am not that stupid.
I understand that wealth concentration ends in disaster. I understand that there is no continual growth in a finite world (We have no more land…). I understand that costs do not go up magically on their own but are put in place by human conventions. And I really understand that we have already entered the end-game.
All these drastically increasing costs, the shift toward desperate authoritarianism, the inhumane brutality of efficiencies — these are all symptoms, not causes. And they are symptoms of the precarity of the rentier class. Because their rent revenues are not increasing. They can not pay down their debts. And there is nobody left to bleed.
Only fools still believe.
Unfortunately, the fools are in charge now…
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 
Hear, hear!
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