THE EFFICIENCY IMPERATIVE 447  Science & Society, Vol. 68, No. 4, Winter 2004–2005, 447–474 447 The Efficiency Imperative: Five Questions EDWARD TVERDEK ABSTRACT: To oppose capitalism often means to oppose the economic principles that it promotes, nominally at least. Radi- cal environmentalists and a number of Marxists share a special disdain for one of those key principles: economic efficiency. A closer examination of their misgivings, however, suggests that their estimation of the concept is constrained by the role they believe it plays in capitalist production — a nexus between effi- ciency’s descriptive understanding and its prescriptive value that needs to be severed if the latter is to be fairly appraised. Once we jettison the notion (held by market advocates) that efficiency is a universal imperative of production that capitalism perfects, as well as the notion (held by many radical environmentalists and Marxists) that it is part and parcel of capitalism’s drive toward crisis and self-destruction, we are left with a disarmingly mundane proposition: post-capitalist economies ought to produce effi- ciently, other normative considerations permitting. I F SOMETHING IS WORTH DOING, is it worth doing better? Specifically, is it worth doing more efficiently — yielding a greater output of whatever it is we are aiming at per unit of input or, simi- larly, a constant output with increasingly fewer inputs? Many people would likely answer “yes” to this question; many of those might con- sider it too obviously true to muster much more than this reflexive assent. Anti-capitalists of various stripes, on the other hand, are not so quick to endorse an unqualified embrace of efficiency, at least not as the term is used to describe economic activity. They point to what they see as the peculiar excesses of a slavish devotion to “the bottom line” in capitalist societies: cost–benefit analyses employing bizarre algorithms to quantify the value of a human life in dollar terms;