On Sacred Inefficiency

On Sacred Inefficiency
Deuteronomy 24: 1-22

Just once in my life I had to give someone the sack because we needed to economize in the seminary and we saw a post we could terminate without too much loss to the enterprise’s efficiency. The person had worked for the seminary for many years and was a good friend of it, but terminating this position seemed necessary. A catchphrase emerged from the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” In other words, you can get (say) foreign policy right, but it will get you nowhere with the people of the United States unless you get the economy right—that is, unless people have a sense that they are doing well, that they can make ends meet, and that they are doing a bit better than they were a decade ago or than their parents did. It’s an exaggeration to say that this is the only thing that matters to people, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Analogously, every company has to make the “bottom line” its priority. It always has to look for “economies” that will enable it to make more money...