Customer Reviews

Efficient Society: Why Canada is as Close to Utopia as It Gets

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the only book I have ever read that I could truly say imposed a radical change on my political beliefs. The brilliance of this book is that it takes a very simple idea and demonstrates how it applies to so many distinct areas of modern political dispute, all the while undercutting most of the traditional political debates, and by doing so makes you wonder "why hadn't I thought that way about it before?"

The idea in question is that of the "collective action problem". In essence this is a situation where if everyone acts according to their own self interest, everyone ends up worse off than they would have been if they had accepted a compromise instead. Collective action problems cause inefficiencies, hence the title of the book. Heath's point is that a great many of the institutions in our societies can be explained, and more importantly justified, as means for avoiding falling into collective action problems.

So rather than thinking of a social welfare system or a public health care system as justified on moral grounds (equality, fairness), we should really see these institutions for what they are: means of promoting efficiency by avoiding collective action problems. In other words, what we tend to pay for through coercive taxation are things that, if we were left to pay for individually through the free market, would cause collective action problems and result in inefficiencies and wastage. So far from being a justification for heartless exploitation, it turns out that efficiency is a moral value that is central to our lives and institutions, and most importantly can be used to justify many government programs.

So if you ever wondered whether those people who claim that government is necessarily inefficient were right, Heath's book will prove to you beyond all shadow of doubt that they are mistaken and that government is in fact the central efficiency promoting institution in the modern world.

I recently read THE EFFICIENT SOCIETY, at the advice of a friend. The introduction and conclusion present the central ideas of the book: i.e., that Canada is much better off than most Canadians think, because we efficiently make the best of a combination of market economics and government programs. None of these, in itself, is perfect or ideal; but the coombination is the best mix that we can get at this time, yielding a high quality of life (ranked no. 1 for many years in UN rankings, and close to the top in the last year or so (I wrote this in Feb. 2003).
The problem is that all of this, with a few key illustrative examples, fits into 20-30 pages. The book is close to 300 pages. The author has written an excellent essay, with a provocative idea; he should have kept it to an essay. Instead, he has padded it out to a book. Much of this book details simplistic or pedantic presentations of "general ideas" about key concepts (e.g., a tedious chapter on the history of efficiency that regurgitates boiler plate bits about Aristotle, Taylor and Gilbreth the early efficiency experts, and a badly potted synopsis of Vilfredo Pareto. In effect, 250 pages or so represent badly prepared tidbits or hors d'ouevres that sound very much like the half-baked musings of a junior philosophy lecturer.
Little more is written to tell us more about the Canadian situation. Much is left out: nothing on foreign relations, not much on export markets or economic relations with other countries, particularly the U.S., nothing about the froth (the play on anti-Americanism, the play on Federalism and natioanl unity) that passes for political thinking and strategic poicy thrusts in this country.
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Read the intro and conclusion of this book, get a general idea of its main argument, check the index, and then read up on some of the details yourself.

This book gives a quick overview of Canadian values, and summarizes the perspective of a new type of society emerging in Canada. The concept of a society built not around liberty or equality, but rather, just making as many people happy as possible.

An excellent addition to my collection.

This is one of the best books I've ever read, and the only book I've ever been moved to write an Amazon review for.

As the first reviewer said, it's really not about Canada. It's really about economics. It explains economics in a way that a bright non-economist can understand, and does so from a non-market-fundamentalist perspective. It's a primer for why and how the free market works, and those few places that it doesn't.

It sounds mundane, but it's amazing.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

Reads like a philosophy textbook. As a U.S. citizen very discouraged by the backward conservative direction of much of U.S. society, I agree that Canada has evolved into a more livable and "efficient" society. Basically, this is the author's point, and he builds his thesis with much discussion of political philosophy. He makes his argument well, although with maybe a little redundancy from time to time. There are some flaws, including a glaring error in history when he states that the Jamestown colony of 1607 was in Massachusetts (which of course was actually in Virginia), and mentioned "pilgrims" related to this colony, when there were definitely no pilgrims - they were in Massachusetts. Hopefully these errors can be excused as poor editing, and the author knew better. But, although this injected a little doubt into my view of the accuracy of the author's research, I still enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in comparative political philosophies. It does bash the U.S. to some extent, but considering the size and outright bad policies of the U.S. conservative movement, it is well deserved. I deducted one star for the bothersome mistake in colonial history of North America.

the author examines a number of social and economic issues using the prisoner's dilemma. it's a good book for people interested in sociology and economics