“Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” – Peter Drucker
The other day I was watching the news, and the host asked his guest to comment on DOGE’s (Department of Government Efficiency) efforts to make our government more efficient (i.e. eliminate waste and fraud from our government). The guest began his argument against DOGE by stating that our government’s purpose should be based on “Empathy” rather than “Efficiency.” In other words, our government should be controlled by warm and fuzzy “Feelings” rather than rational and thoughtful “Reason.”
So, let’s examine his argument…
Empathy
“Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.” [1] In the language of human resources, “Empathy is the basis of emotional intelligence – an intuitive quality that allows us to take another’s perspective and feel what they are feeling.” [2]
I think most people would consider “Empathy” to be a desirable trait. We would hope that the application of “Empathy” to our government’s decision-making process would result in government programs designed to take care of its citizens. The guest suggested that it was “Empathy” that led to government programs to help educate our children and provide support for the homeless; however, he went on to suggest that these same programs could’ve never have been justified by using the cold-hearted calculations of “Efficiency.”
I think most people would agree that it is good to educate our children and to help the homeless get back on their feet. Therefore, if these programs were the result of “Empathy,” then “Empathy” must be good, and “Efficiency” must be bad, or so goes his argument.
However, “Empathy also has it’s dark side, particularly when it’s used to exploit people’s emotions… in the Machiavellian mind, empathy is a useful tool for manipulating and exploiting people.” [2] Doesn’t that sound familiar? After all, how many times have you heard politicians and the media use “Empathy” to generate feelings of fear and compassion to gaslight and manipulate your view of reality so they can extract money from your pocket!
Efficiency
“Efficiency is the ability to produce outputs with minimal waste, effort, time, and cost. Efficient processes lead to positive outcomes, such as reduced costs, increased productivity, and improved customer satisfaction.” [3]
I think most people would also consider “Efficiency” to be a desirable trait. It would be difficult to argue against improving processes to increase efficiency to achieve more valuable outcomes.
Since the US government is supposed to be working for the benefit of WE THE PEOPLE, I believe it is only right that we demand that our government implement processes that lead to valuable outcomes, such as reduced costs, increased productivity, and improved customer satisfaction – After all, WE THE PEOPLE ARE THE CUSTOMER! For this reason, I think that most people would also agree that “Efficiency” that results in processes that lead to valuable outcomes is good. Unless of course you happen to be a politician, bureaucrat, or a member of an NGO that has benefited from the waste and fraud that might be eliminated by “Efficiency.”
False Dichotomy
Creating a false dichotomy is a classic rhetorical device used to present a situation as “either / or” when there could be more possibilities to consider. In this case, the false dichotomy of either “Empathy” or “Efficiency” as being mutually exclusive choices, was used to exploit our emotions so we would choose “Empathy” and discard “Efficiency.”
I would argue that “Empathy” and “Efficiency” are not mutually exclusive qualities, in fact, I believe that “Empathy” and “Efficiency” should be used together to complement each other as we work to produce positive outcomes.
Our ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation (i.e. “Empathy”) may guide us to problems that need to be addressed, such as educating our children or providing support for the homeless; however, the solution to those problems requires processes that lead to valuable outcomes, such as reduced costs, increased productivity, and improved results (i.e. “Efficiency”). Unfortunately, our government’s modus operandi has been to use “Empathy” to justify spending large sums of taxpayer money to address these problems, some worthy and some not so worthy problems, without making sure that processes were in place that would lead to positive outcomes. Let’s look at two examples…
Education
In 1979, during President Carter’s Administration, Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act, which created the Department of Education to provide a stronger federal role in education.
Ironically, the first Department of Education was established in 1867; however, due to the public’s concerns about federal control over local schools, the Department of Education was “demoted” to the Office of Education a year later and was placed under the purview of the Department of the Interior and later the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Apparently, now was not the first time that US citizens expressed their concern about the federal government controlling our local schools!
Some of the Key Goals of our current Department of Education were stated as follows [3]:
· Strengthen the federal commitment to equal educational opportunities for all individuals.
· Supplement and complement state and local education.
· Encourage community engagement in education programs.
· Promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education through research and data collection.
· Improved coordination and management of federal education activities.
· Ensure equal access to educational opportunities and enforce statues prohibiting discrimination in programs and activities receiving federal funds.
I found it interesting that the Key Goals of the Department of Education did not make a commitment to produce positive educational outcomes for its “customers,” our children and their parents, by increasing our children’s capabilities in reading, writing, math and science! Failure to establish clear and meaningful goals has always been a recipe for failure in any enterprise – no wonder the Department of Education has failed our children.
Since 1979, American taxpayers have dumped $3 Trillion into the Department of Education. A recent report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 70% of 8th graders were below the proficient level in reading, and 72% were below the proficient level in math. By any definition, these results would be considered a failure, deserving of a big fat “F”!
Since we are talking about “Empathy,” then why don’t we insist that our politicians show some “Empathy” for our children who have spent 8 years of their short lives in a system that has failed to teach them how to be proficient at reading and math. (How in the world can these young people function in this world if they can’t read and do math?) It’s time to stop throwing money into an education system designed to benefit the teacher’s union and develop a new system focused on producing positive educational outcomes for our children!
Homelessness
If you’ve visited any of the major cities in the US during the past decade, especially Democrat controlled cities, then you’ve most likely witnessed the homeless problem firsthand; people living in tents on the city’s sidewalks, the open sale & use of drugs, people defecating in public, etc. It’s like a horror scene from a third-world country, but it’s here in the USA! I would think that anyone with an ounce of “Empathy” would want to help these homeless people get back on their feet. But the big question is how do you address the problem?
Unfortunately, as I stated earlier, the government’s modus operandi has been to use “Empathy” to justify spending large sums of taxpayer money to address problems without making sure that processes were in place that led to positive outcomes.
A case in point is California’s homeless problem. According to CBS News, during the five-year period from 2018 to 2023, California spent $24 Billion dollars to solve their homeless problem, and during that time the homeless population increased by 40%, from 128,777 in 2018 to more than 180,000 in 2023. Obviously, “Empathy” does not solve problems and throwing money at problems does not solve them either!
What is the Answer?
I would go back to the Peter Drucker quote at the beginning of this article, “Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
“Empathy” may identify problems that need to be addressed, but to be “Effective” we must agree upon the right things to do to solve the problems, then we must develop “Efficient” processes that will lead to positive outcomes, such as reduced costs, increased productivity, and improved customer satisfaction.
Easier said than done, but hopefully DOGE is taking a step in the right direction!
Postscript
Although I’m an ex-jock, every now and then I get nerdy and climb down a rabbit hole. While researching “Empathy” for this essay, I came upon an interesting article by Perry L. Glanzer posted on christianscholars.com, which compares “Empathy” and “Compassion” – let me share a few quotes from the article:
Empathy is a relatively new word that came into use in 1903 from a psychologist’s translation of a German word. It simply means: “The ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings, experience.” …one large study recently confirmed what most astute people already know: In general, women are better at this skill [empathy] than men – the skill being “the ability to recognize what another person is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their state of mind with an appropriate emotion.”
Compassion is a much older English word (used as early as 1340) and has a long history from the Latin of being associated with both God and the Christian tradition. It is defined as “The feeling or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines one to spare or to succor.”
Although both empathy and compassion involve a particular skill related to feelings or emotions, two key differences between empathy and compassion exist. First, compassion comes from another person’s legitimate suffering or distress whereas empathy involves relating to a variety of emotional states whether fallen or not. Second, compassion stimulates action to alleviate the need (emphasis mine).
I would argue that the Christian virtue of compassion requires, not surprisingly, both the feminine strength of empathy and the male concern with problem solving. In other words, empathy by itself is not a Christian virtue since it may be applied to fallen emotions, or it may not lead to action. Compassion produces action to address a problem of legitimate suffering or distress.
After reading this article, I would conclude that the gentlemen who made the argument that our government should rely on “Empathy” should have considered “Compassion” as his choice of virtues since it leads to action to address the problem!
Bonus
After I finished this essay, I came upon a transcript of Steve Jobs Muses on What’s Wrong with American Education (1995) posted on openculture.com. Since I kind of hammered the Department of Education in this essay, I thought I should share Steve Jobs thoughts on education with you, so you wouldn’t think I was a total Nazi:
I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.
I’ve been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn’t what the interview was supposed to be about, but it is what I care about a great deal.… The problem that we have in this country is that [parents] went away. [They] stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn’t have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids’ school. Schools became much more institutionalized, and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids’ education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control … is that the service level almost always goes down.
I’ve suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five-year-old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they’d start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you’d see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There’s no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years.… The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that’s like saying “Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody’s going to make a ten-thousand-dollar car.” I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the ten-thousand-dollar car area.
I’m sure if Steve Jobs was still alive today and expressed those same opinions on what’s wrong with American Education, the Left would cancel him and start burning their Apple computers and iPhones!
PS – I do own an Apple computer and iPhone!
The End
[1] Cambridge English Dictionary
[2] Psychology Today 7/21/2021 – Jane Adams Ph.D.
[3] Google Generative AI
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Roger thanks for another thought provoking article on a white hot topic. It is easy for me to believe our children and our grandchildren will need a lot more of empathy and compassion if we don’t get our spending as a country inline with our revenue. Best Les