Inefficiency Quotes

There is an intrinsic linkage between socialism and economic inefficiency. ~ Peter L. Berger

Inefficiency is to be our safeguard against despotism. ~ Garry Wills

Unlike national markets, which tend to be supported by domestic regulatory and political institutions, global markets are only 'weakly embedded'. There is no global lender of last resort, no global safety net, and of course, no global democracy. In other words, global markets suffer from weak governance, and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy. ~ Dani Rodrik

He had a notebook. He took notes in it. It was always useful. And them Sybil, gods bless her, had brought him this fifteen-function imp which did so many other things, although as far as he could see at least ten of its functions consisted of apologizing for its inefficiency in the other five. ~ Terry Pratchett

When you go to bed whenever and allow yourself to get up whenever, you reward your brain for continued laziness and inefficiency. ~ Steve Pavlina

Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer's biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food. ~ Jared Diamond

I have a problem,' said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. 'I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers' collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?' 'Yes, of course.' 'Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists? ~ Adam Roberts

The common belief that everyone can do anything if they just try hard enough is a formula for inefficiency at best and for complete failure at worst. ~ W.J. King

Effective project leaders focus on people, product, and process - in that order. Without the right people, nothing gets built. Without a laser focus on product value, extraneous activities creep in. Without a minimum process framework, there can be inefficiency and possibly a little chaos. ~ Jim Highsmith

I've never been satisfied with myself, ever. But I feel good about myself, because I'm truthful. I don't corrupt myself. I'm also a perfectionist. I'm very impatient. I've got energy and drive and I can't stand inefficiency in people. And I can't stand dumb people. Why surround yourself with people who are going to tie you down? I don't suffer fools. ~ Jack LaLanne

Anarchy [is] necessarily consequent to inefficiency. ~ Thomas Jefferson

There's a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint. We're in a world that's very fast, so things that slow you for a minute-give you pause-are good. ~ Glenn Ligon

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

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known. ~ Noam Chomsky

Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency. ~ Isaac Asimov

Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency. ~ Robert A. Caro

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. ~ Albert Ellis

I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the very competition that has made this system so productive. I saw Texas ranchers, hit by drought, demanding government-guaranteed loans; giant milk cooperatives lobbying for higher price supports; major airlines fighting deregulation to preserve their monopoly status; giant companies like Lockheed seeking federal assistance to rescue them from sheer inefficiency; bankers, like David Rockefeller, demanding government bailouts to protect them from their ill-conceived investments; network executives, like William Paley of CBS, fighting to preserve regulatory restrictions and to block the emergence of competitive cable and pay TV. And always, such gentlemen proclaimed their devotion to free enterprise and their opposition to the arbitrary intervention into our economic life by the state. Except, of course, for their own case, which was always unique and which was justified by their immense concern for the public interest. ~ William E. Simon

I'm the kind of guy who turns my fan on in winter, only to then go and add another blanket on top of my bed. I practice inefficiency even while I sleep, so I'll be prepared to one day be a politician. ~ Jarod Kintz

Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency. ~ Eric Ambler

People were growing resentful of bureaucrats whose first mission in life seemed to be protecting their own jobs by keeping expensive programs alive long after their usefulness had expired. They were losing respect for politicians who kept voting for open-ended welfare programs riddled with fraud and inefficiency that kept generation after generation of families dependent on the dole. And they were growing mistrustful of the self-appointed intellectual elite back in Washington who claimed to know better than the people of America did how to run their lives, their businesses, and their communities. ~ Ronald Reagan

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

Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless). ~ Bernard Crick

No doubt exists that rent seeking in general leads to serious inefficiencies in this direct sense, but its indirect damage is even worse. Drawing the bulk of intelligent and energetic people in society into activity that has no social product, or may have a negative social product, is more important in explaining the stagnation of these societies than the direct social cost of the rent seeking. ~ Gordon Tullock

The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organising production and distribution and culture will emerge. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

The thing about markets, and I think the thing people don't understand about that, is markets are not kind, but they're very efficient. So when the marketplace determines an inefficiency in the system, it corrects that, and a market system that's left alone will reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. ~ Randy Neugebauer

Learning requires inefficiency. ~ Deborah Blum

That is why any general, however wrong he may be--take Napoleon, to avoid the politics of mere contemporary examples--must believe in himself to be successful, or dupe himself into such a belief. Indeed, that is the main job of all politicians who, through their own inefficiency, muddle nations into war. If they do not fool themselves into the assumption that they are God-fearing idealists, they will never get the millions who must pay for their damage to believe the same thing, and they will lose the war. ~ J. Jefferson Farjeon

I loathed poverty and I would have liked to put my hands on the party who said that poverty is an honorable estate. It is an indication of inefficiency and nothing more. There is nothing honorable or fine about it. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life. ~ Aldous Huxley

All the alleged key causes of SOE [State-Owned Enterprise] inefficiency the principal-agent problem, the free-rider problem and the soft budget constraint are, while real, not unique to state-owned enterprises. Large private-sector firms with dispersed ownership also suffer from the principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem. So, in these two areas, forms of ownership do matter, but the critical divide is not between state and private ownership it is between concentrated and dispersed ownerships. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

You have no idea how much of the inefficiency of mankind comes from thinking about the wrong-doings of others, and of ourselves. There is nothing more miserable than to feel that by some mistake in life you have not amounted to what you might have, and that your misfortunes all hinge on that mistake. ~ Emma Curtis Hopkins

We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy. ~ Evgeny Morozov

We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency. ~ Eamon De Valera

Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not in it frequently found together, and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two. ~ Edmund S. Morgan

President Lyndon Johnson's 10 point formula for success:
1. Learn to remember names. Inefficiency at this point may indicate that your interest is not sufficiently outgoing.
2. Be a comfortable person so there is no strain in being with you. Be an old-shoe, old-hat kind of individual.
3. Acquire the quality of relaxed easy-going so that things do not ruffle you.
4. Don't be egotistical. Guard against the impression that you know it all.
5. Cultivate the quality of being interesting so people will get something of value from their association with you.
6. Study to get the "scratchy" elements out of your personality, even those of which you may be unconscious.
7. Sincerely attempt to heal, on an honest Christian basis, every msiunderstanding you have had or now have. Drain off your grievances.
8. Practice liking people until you learn to do so genuinely.
9. Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone's achievement, or express sympathy in sorrow or disappointment.
10. Give spiritual strength to people, and they will give genuine affection to you. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Instead of raising taxes as some would insist, we need to reduce waste and inefficiency in government. ~ Tim Murphy

The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed. ~ E.F. Schumacher

In the happy land of elegant code and pretty rainbows, there lives a spoil-sport monster called inefficiency. ~ Marijn Haverbeke

Investing capital in the free market creates innovation, businesses, jobs and economic growth. Investing capital in the government creates more bureaucracy, more paperwork and inefficiency. ~ Michael Ramirez

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job. ~ Michael Lewis

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science. ~ Thomas Sowell

The real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality. ~ Margaret Thatcher

South Africa does not have a poverty problem. Poverty is a result of denialism of the way corruption taxes poor people, the inefficiencies that undermine poor people's opportunities and our refusal to admit that we are part of the problem. ~ Mamphela Ramphele

Even if your company's financial condition can withstand the inefficiency of quality service, your brand likely won't. ~ Jim Blasingame

We accept, without sufficient consideration, a system that breeds inefficiencies and actually encourages the creation of shortages. ~ Jacque Fresco

Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I'm wasting their time and when I find it, I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it. ~ Rands

The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners are alike appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality. The one word that no foreigner can avoid learning is mañana. ~ George Orwell

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed. ~ Henry David Thoreau

My mother's illness fitted into this protest against the treatment of the sick who could not pay, the inefficiency of commercialism, the waste, the extravagance, and the poverty. ~ Ellen Wilkinson

The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Sometimes the sadness seems almost unbearable, the problems unsolvable, the wounds unhealable. This has taught me one of the greatest lessons: the tension between inefficiency and faithfulness. The assurance that I must obey and be faithful, only to what He has asked of me, even when tangible, earthly results or successes are not seen. ~ Katie J. Davis

Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - that flexibility can spell inefficiency and disaster. ~ Kathryn Minshew

I do, however, struggle to reconcile what medicine has taught me so well with the very reasons that drew me to it in the first place. I want to cry for those in whose bellies I find disseminated tumors, but cannot for fear of being unable to see clearly enough to sew them closed. I want to sit and linger with my patients, but know that such inefficiency would never work in the clinical world. I want to be able to soothe my patients' suffering without the burden of knowing the inexorable future of their diseases. ~ Pauline W. Chen

In this country protection has always, to some extent, existed; but at some times it has been efficient, and at others not; and our tendency toward freedom or slavery has always been in the direct ratio of its efficiency or inefficiency. ~ Henry Charles Carey

Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency. ~ Peter Joseph

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency. ~ Paul Samuelson

The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry. ~ Marcia Angell

What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits - in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of private initiative - was too high. Most of these criticisms are demonstrably false. ~ Tony Judt

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information. ~ Al Gore

Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations! ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Where there is no rest there is energy.
Where there is no disruption there is normality.
Where there is no profit there is bankruptcy.
Where there is no gain there is insolvency.
Where there is no injury there is safety.
Where there is no team there is individuality.
Where there is no hindrance there is opportunity.
Where there is no injury there is safety.
Where there is no sense there is inefficiency.
Where there is no failiure there is competency.
Where there is no decline there is industry.
Where there is no strength there is infirmity.
Where there is no idleness there is activity.
Where there is no weakness there is intensity.
Where there is no failiure there is industry.
Where there is no leadership there is anarchy.
Where there is no repetition there is originality.
Where there is no increase there is deficiency.
Where there is no ignorance there is capacity.
Where there is no impotence there is ability.
Where there is no falseness there is authenticity.
Where there is no excellence there is mediocrity.
Where there is no mistake there is quality.
Where there is no amatuer there is ingenuity.
Where there is no error there is mastery.
Where there is no defect there is virtuosity. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

OLD, adj. In that stage of usefulness which is not inconsistent with general inefficiency, as an "old man". Discredited by lapse of time and offensive to the popular taste, as an "old" book. ~ Ambrose Bierce

A lot of opportunities in life tend to last a short while, due to some temporary inefficiency ... For each of us, really good investment opportunities aren't going to come along too often and won't last too long, so you've got to be ready to act and have a prepared mind. ~ Charlie Munger

As an economy measures performance in terms of the creation of money, people become a major source of inefficiency. ~ David Korten

Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated. ~ Seth Shostak

In this context, I believe it is an imperative for the new President to select and install his team as quickly as possible, and this does not imply that he must or should appoint members of the 'other' party to his Cabinet, which could contribute to inaction and inefficiency. ~ Richard V. Allen

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

It is time to cut out the mountains of waste and inefficiency and duplication in the federal government. ~ Mitt Romney

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency. ~ Eugene McCarthy

There is no remedy for the inefficiency of public management. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

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

Watch with awe and amazement at how quickly an engineer will become totally annoyed by inefficiency. ~ Rands

The inefficiency of drill and the uncertainty of education are the "palpable" proof that man is an animal endowed with a soul- that is, with freedom. This is why every true upbringing is essentially self-upbringing and a negation of drill. The aim of true upbringing is not to change a man directly ( because , strictly speaking, that is not possible) but to incite an inner stream of experiences and to cause an inner decision to the benefit of good by means of example, advice, sight, or the like. Beyond that, man cannot be changed, only his behavior may be changed, and that could be feigned or temporary. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Father expected a good deal of God. He didn't actually accuse God of inefficiency, but when he prayed his tone was loud and angry, like that of a dissatisfied guest in a carelessly managed hotel. ~ Clarence Day

An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty. ~ Eugene McCarthy

A vital function of the free market is to penalize inefficiency and misjudgment and to reward efficiency and good judgment. By distorting economic calculations and creating illusory profits, inflation will destroy this function. ~ Henry Hazlitt

He could hear church bells as he drowsed, both from the civil station and from the missionaries out beyond the slaughter house--different bells and rung with
different intent, for one set was calling firmly to Anglo-India, and the other feebly to mankind.
He did not object to the first set; the other he ignored, knowing their inefficiency. ~ E. M. Forster

Wall Street sees a social fabric or social contract as inefficiencies, which need to be removed. ~ David Korten

There are only two qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency; and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient. ~ Josh Billings

The harm done by the FDA does not result from defects in the people in charge - unless it be a defect to be human. Many have been able and devoted civil servants. However, social, political, and economic pressures determine the behavior of the people supposedly in charge of a government agency to a far greater extent than they determine its behavior. No doubt there are exceptions, but they are rare - almost as rare as barking cats. That does not mean that effective reform is impossible. But it requires taking account of the political laws governing the behavior of government agencies, not simply berating officials for inefficiency and waste or questioning their motives and urging them to do better. The ~ Milton Friedman

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Only the schools' inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25. ~ George Leonard

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time. ~ Matt Ridley

Well, people are like that too. THey create a false door - to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority - and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is bare rock... And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth - their true self reasserts itself. ~ Agatha Christie

Those who use the word 'anarchy' to mean disorder or misrule, are not in correct. If they regard government as necessary, if they think that we could not live without Whitehall or the White House directing our affairs, if they think politicians are essential to our well-being and that we could not behave socially without policemen, they are right in assuming that anarchy means the opposite to what government guarantees. But those who take the reverse opinion, and consider government to be tyranny, are right too in considering anarchy, no government, to be liberty. If government is the maintenance of privilege and exploitation
and inefficiency of distribution its tool then only anarchy is order. ~ Albert Meltzer

Such philosophical musings risk inviting depression or inefficiency. Better just to fix the problem and move on to the next one. It's all part of being a service provider at the end of the line. ~ Katrina Firlik

However, creativity is not so much about efficiency, but rather about inefficiency. ~ Wouter Boon

Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government
in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player. ~ Milton Friedman

She lay awake at night, wondering what she ought to do. Life terrified her. She had a child's capacity for happiness, but also a child's fear, a child's inefficiency. When existence was a holiday, none could be more rapturously happy; but when there was business to be done, plans to be made, decisions taken, she was simply lost and terrified. ~ Aldous Huxley