In early September 2017, Amazon announced a competition among North American cities and regions to house the company’s second headquarters (HQ2). Amazon estimated that the “winner” would gain 50,000 jobs—a tempting prize. All told, 238 cities and regions hired high-priced consultants, developed offers full of costly perks for Amazon, wrote extensive and expensive proposals, and entered the competition. The proposals included amazing amounts of data about the cities, from demographic information to infrastructure plans to zoning codes, and many offered tax incentives, in some cases more than $2 billion. The mere cost of bidding was well into the millions of dollars. By January 2018, Amazon had shrunk the list of contenders to twenty finalists, and in November 2018 announced that it would split its second headquarters between Crystal City, a suburban neighborhood near Washington, D.C., and Long Island City, in Queens, New York. Reportedly, New York offered Amazon $1.7 billion in incentives, while Virginia and Arlington County offered $573 million.
Many critics have asked whether Amazon truly needed thirteen months and 238 bidders to arrive at the conclusion that it wanted to be located in New York and D.C., especially since it already had a significant presence in both places. Was Amazon’s competition nothing more than a charade aimed at generating publicity, collecting data on North American cities and regions to use in future projects, and driving up what New York and D.C. would pay? Even if there were five to ten real contenders, was there any reason to bother the other 200-plus bidders? Or did Amazon lead most of these cities and states to waste enormous amounts of time and money pursuing a dream where they had no chance of success? And for the winning bidders, was it worth $2 billion in subsidies to land HQ2?
The answers to these questions are clear. Amazon led cities and states to waste enormous amounts of money, time, and effort—money, time, and effort that could have been used to improve roads, schools, and health care in the “losing” communities. Amazon may well have benefited by having a third, fourth, and fifth bidder in the race to extract more money from New York and D.C., but the bottom 200-plus bidders added nothing to the company’s strategic ability to extract more dollars from the winning bidders. Moreover, any positive publicity the contest generated early on was likely canceled out by the criticism and ill will the company faced in the press and from the losing contestants.
Waste destroys value and makes society worse off. Amazon’s contest may have been legal, but it was far from value-enhancing. Waste—from the most normal kind, like buying products that you never use, to the type of wide-ranging, destructive waste created by companies and governments—is one of the key areas where we can apply what we’ve learned in earlier chapters to great effect for ourselves and the world.
DYSFUNCTIONAL SUBSIDIES FOR CORPORATIONS
Why are U.S. cities and states spending billions of dollars to compete with each other for jobs? Part of the answer is that states independently raise taxes for their own use. In addition, state-level politicians are elected by citizens of just their state and thus have little motivation to cooperate with other states. Many cities and states are also swayed by economists who have argued that tech firms raise wages and quality of life for all. However, a London School of Economics working paper by Tom Kemeny and Taner Osman found that tech jobs reduce real wages in cities because, for those working outside the tech sector, cost of living, including rent, rises faster than wages.1
Many in New York and D.C. viewed landing new Amazon headquarters as a victory—certainly, the politicians did. But at a cost of over $40,000 per job ($2.2 billion in combined tax subsidies divided by 50,000 jobs), was this a better investment than using the $2.2 billion on other, more critical community needs, such as schools, health care, housing, and other forms of job creation? Not to mention, when we add in the fact that many of the Amazon jobs would have gone to people who would have moved to the region from other locations, the cost per job for local residents rose far beyond $40,000.
In early 2018, more than six months before Amazon announced its decision, New York University professor Scott Galloway called the competition a “ruse” and a “con,” and predicted that the company would decide to locate HQ2 in either New York or Washington, D.C.2 Noting that its proximity to both Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s home and the capital made the D.C. area an obvious choice, Galloway said that “the game was over before it started”: it was clear to him that Amazon solicited bids from places it would never seriously consider to drive up tax breaks. Amazon’s decision to pick both New York and D.C. made Galloway look even more prescient than he would have hoped. While Galloway’s arguments can’t be proved, plenty of evidence suggests that the competition created by Amazon and perpetuated by cities, states, and Congress contributed to billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted.
This assessment would hold even if Amazon followed through on its agreement—but it didn’t. The effort and money New York spent to lure Amazon was a short-lived victory that soon turned to waste. New York’s bid and subsequent selection brought out predictable protests. Newly elected New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among those who opposed the deal based on the tax breaks and grants Amazon would have received. While Siena College released a poll showing that 58 percent of registered New York City voters backed the deal, on February 14, 2019, Amazon announced that it was withdrawing from its New York offer, stating that it requires “positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term.” Amazon further argued that “a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project.”3 Amazon didn’t try to renegotiate or resolve the conflict—it simply walked away. While a minority of New Yorkers celebrated the cancellation, many suffered the costs of being involved in such a wasteful adventure.
In a typical year, American cities and states spend tens of billions on tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move across state lines. In the last decade, Boeing, Ford, General Motors, Intel, Nike, Nissan, Royal Dutch Shell, and Tesla have each received subsidy packages worth over $1 billion to either move their headquarters or keep their headquarters from moving.4 In some cases, this is money that the “winning” bidder may not have needed to spend. Consider that New Jersey and Maryland reportedly offered $7 billion for HQ2, yet Amazon went with New York and D.C., where it already had a strong presence, based on more fundamental business-related criteria. In December 2019, less than a year after bowing out of New York, Amazon announced it was renting office space in Midtown Manhattan for more than 1,500 workers despite not having received financial incentives from the city or state. It was just a fraction of the 25,000 jobs Amazon had promised for Queens, to be sure, but the retailer was expected to continue expanding its footprint in the city over time—all without taxpayer subsidies.5
Perhaps the strangest version of this waste of taxpayer dollars is the “Border War” between Kansas and Missouri. For readers who don’t remember their U.S. geography, Kansas City, Missouri, lies very close to the border of these two states, with workers regularly commuting from one state to the other. In 2011, Kansas enticed AMC Entertainment to move across the border from Missouri with tens of millions of dollars in incentives. Soon after, Missouri retaliated by offering Applebee’s $12.5 million in incentives to move five miles east (and, with no long-term commitment in place, in 2015, Applebee’s moved again, to California!). In their competition for jobs and tax revenues, Kansas and Missouri have spent over $500 million luring companies across their border. No net new jobs have been created, but employees have faced problems such as longer commutes, upheaval, and the expense of moving.
Public funding of sports stadiums for privately held teams is another enormous waste of taxpayers’ money. This unfortunate trend began in 1953, when Milwaukee lured the Boston Braves Major League Baseball team with the offer of a new, publicly funded stadium. In 1959, the Braves were sold and relocated to Atlanta after the city paid $18 million to build the team a new stadium. For decades, by pitting cities against each other, owners of sports teams have persuaded civic leaders to pony up billions for renovations or new stadiums. The New York Yankees’ new stadium, completed in 2009, cost an estimated $2.5 billion, nearly $1.7 billion of which was financed by tax-exempt municipal bonds issued by the city of New York.6
The form of funding used by the city of New York, tax-exempt municipal bonds, is noteworthy. Not only would New York owe the principal and interest on the $1.7 billion, but the bondholders would not pay taxes on the revenue from the bonds, thus costing the federal government an estimated $431 million. Consequently, American citizens across the country are paying for the construction of Yankee Stadium. While $431 million is the leader for pro sports stadiums, federal subsidies were also provided to the Chicago Bears’ Soldier Field ($205 million), the New York Mets’ Citi Field ($185 million), and the Cincinnati Bengals’ Paul Brown Stadium ($164 million), among many others.7 Since 2000, federal taxpayers have lost $3.2 billion in sports stadiums subsidies from the use of tax-exempt municipal bonds, according to a Brookings Institution report.8
You might be thinking that the companies involved in this dysfunctional competition, and even the cities, regions, and states, are simply acting rationally. After all, a new sports team could revitalize a city. But there is little evidence that stadiums provide net benefit to local economies, the Brookings Institution argues. And there is certainly no clear economic justification for federal subsidies going to profit-making sports stadiums. Overall, taxpayers are providing corporate welfare to the very rich owners of corporations and sports teams.
Why do cities and states contribute to this waste? Politicians typically act like heroes when they land the new headquarters or stadium, and citizens feel like winners. This happens because they tend to focus on the short-term benefit of “winning” and ignore the opportunity costs inflicted on the community (lost funding for schools, hospitals, etc.) and long-term costs (debt). The common tendency of failing to make a wise trade-off by overly discounting the future for short-term benefits (at the expense of long-term benefits) makes the mistake all the more likely.
Beyond this short-term focus, three additional ingredients contribute to this type of waste.9
Social Dilemmas
In Chapter 3, I explained why someone would defect (choose the selfish rather than the cooperative option) in the prisoner’s dilemma game and noted that defection generally destroys value. Competition among cities, regions, and states within the United States for companies and sports teams is often more of a multiparty social dilemma than a two-party prisoner’s dilemma. If each city or state acts in its own self-interest in competing for the team, all of the cities and states end up with the same suboptimal result, one in which all taxpayers involved provide welfare to the owners of well-off, for-profit corporations.
This pattern illustrates the “tragedy of the commons,” a phenomenon documented by ecologist Garrett Hardin. Imagine a group of herdsmen who graze their cattle in a common pasture. Each herdsman would gain a short-term advantage from defecting on the other herdsmen by increasing the size of his herd and grazing the herd on the common pasture. But if too many herdsmen allow their animals to graze, the pasture eventually will be destroyed. The herdsmen are each better off grazing more cattle, but they are collectively better off limiting the total population of cattle to a sustainable level.10 Similarly, each locality vying to host Amazon’s HQ2 might appear to benefit from being the winner, but when they all compete and drive up the cost of winning, they all lose in the long run from the depleted public resources.
Want versus Should Conflicts
When municipalities compete for a sports team, their leaders often understand that they should instead spend their limited resources on schools, bridges, and hospitals. But like the smoker who wants another hit of an addictive substance, yet knows he should abstain to clear his lungs and live a longer life, municipalities too often pay attention to their short-term wants. Politicians benefit from meeting their constituents’ immediate desires and rarely suffer personally from pushing long-term debt onto the next generation. As is true for all of us, our wants too often dominate our shoulds, resulting in a pattern of destructive competition.
The Winner’s Curse
Imagine that you are competing in an auction against many bidders for a prize whose value is highly uncertain. Not surprisingly, the bidders have very different ideas about what the prize is worth. The “good” news is that you win the auction. Should you be happy? Ample research documents that you should not. When an item of uncertain value is being auctioned, the winning bidder is likely to overestimate the prize’s value in comparison to other bidders.11 This phenomenon is known as the winner’s curse. Bidders typically fail to recognize that the party who most overestimates the value of the prize is most likely to be the “winning” bidder.
Now let’s consider the case of cities estimating the value of a football team. As long as there is some uncertainty about its value, which there is likely to be, they could under- or overestimate its true value. The “winning” city is most likely to be the one with the most overly optimistic estimate of the team’s value. As a result, the winning bidder in such a highly uncertain auction with many bidders typically will pay more than the prize is worth.12
Defecting from the common good, overweighting what we want versus what we should do, and the winner’s curse account for much of the dysfunctional competition that occurs when governments compete. What can be done? Addressing the simplistic American assumption that competition is always good may be a smart place to start. The goal of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community (EEC), was to create an efficient competitive environment. Article 92 of the treaty defined four core freedoms across member countries—movement, capital, services, and goods—and declared that any aid granted by a specific country that distorts or threatens to distort competition within the community violates the treaty. The article served to limit dysfunctional competition across countries and promote efficient competition. By contrast, although U.S. states have a country in common, the American tendency to defer to states’ rights, combined with a naïve view of the unilateral benefits of competition, allows states to engage in dysfunctional competition with each other and creates enormous waste.
“We need a national truce, both within states and between states,” Amy Liu, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, argues. “There should be no more poaching of private companies with public funds.”13 Clearly, to adequately address this problem, the federal government would need to make changes aimed at preventing dysfunctional behavior at the state and municipal levels. One option would be for Congress to ban interstate competition, much as the 1957 Treaty of Rome did among European nations. If banning sounds overly restrictive, Congress could tax state or local incentives as a special kind of income, effectively taking away their benefits, as the recipient organization would have to pay whatever it gained to the federal government. Such a federal tax would motivate cities to change their development strategies to create new value rather than inefficiently stealing value from other cities.
Waste in the Food System
On New Year’s Day, 2019, I attended a vegan luncheon of the Boston Vegetarian Society with Rachel Atcheson. I had met Rachel in passing through other events connected to effective altruism and reducing animal suffering, but did not know her well. Rachel, who is in her late twenties, majored in philosophy at Boston University. She is a committed effective altruist and a central actor in the movement to reduce animal suffering. She previously worked for the Humane League and now works as deputy strategist for Eric Adams, the borough president of Brooklyn, New York. Her job is to position Brooklyn as a leader and advocate for health and wellness, with the not-so-hidden secondary objective of saving more animals by changing the eating habits of New York residents and visitors. Rachel is a nice, passionate activist. She is proud of her past dumpster diving, an activity aimed at reducing (or some might say consuming) waste by rescuing food discarded by restaurants.
The Boston Vegetarian Society met that day at a very good vegan restaurant called Grasshopper in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. There were about ten tables of eight in the restaurant for the sold-out seating of this private group. At our table of eight, large amounts of food were served family style, and there was much more of it than we could possibly eat, though I did my best. Consistent with the society’s waste-reduction values, at the end of the meal, the restaurant passed out takeout containers so that attendees could pack up some leftovers. Knowing that Marla, my spouse, had already planned to cook dinner that evening, I passed on taking any of the food home (otherwise, I would have been happy to do so). Rachel pleasantly made sure that her table companions had all they wanted, then made it clear she wasn’t going to let the leftovers go to waste. She filled four quart-sized containers full of food, including food from the table next to ours, and started thinking about which of her friends she’d share the abundance with that evening.
Rachel did this without conveying greediness, but rather a passion for keeping food from going to waste. Waste moves us away from value creation. The episode clearly captured an aspect of how Rachel leads her life, where veganism, utilitarianism, and waste reduction come together nicely. I admire Rachel, even if I don’t aim to match her lifestyle. I walked away from lunch with lots of insights about our shared interests, such as emerging plant-based food products, but my main impression from the lunch was watching someone truly strive to be better by reducing food waste.
Food waste is an enormous problem, and one that nice people contribute to without giving it much thought. And there is so much we can do. When so many people remain hungry—not just across the globe, but in our own communities—we should be bothered by the fact that nearly half of all food produced is wasted. When most of us think about food waste, we think about the uneaten food on our plate at the end of a meal.14 But there’s much more to it than that. Food waste is exacerbated by impulse buying, the large portions served in restaurants, spoilage, failing to consume food before it expires, and viewing buffets as “eat-as-much-as-you-can” rather than “eat-as-much-as-you-desire.”
For every one garbage can of waste you put out on the curb, seventy garbage cans of waste were made upstream just to make the waste in that one garbage can you put out on the curb.15 The world’s annual catch of fish and marine invertebrates is approximately 100 million metric tons, but only 20 percent is processed for food use. Approximately 30 percent of that 20 percent (we are now down to 6 percent) is consumed, and the rest is discarded as waste. Many species of fish and invertebrates are rarely used as food because they possess an undesirable flavor, color, or size.16
Fifty percent of U.S. land is used to produce food, and 30 percent of our energy resources are used to process the food. Yet farmers often throw away a third or more of their harvest simply because it fails to meet the public’s cosmetic standards. This produce is “discarded, perfectly edible, because [it’s] the wrong shape or size,” notes Tristram Stuart.17 Part of this waste is caused by Americans’ distorted notions of what a high-quality product should look like. Ugly, delicious heirloom tomatoes have only become desirable in the last decade; nearly tasteless, mass-produced tomatoes have been the norm in large part because they look good. We lose food during processing and transportation, and by overstocking the produce and meat sections of the supermarket. The blogger Harish, who specializes in quantifying information about the animal advocacy movement, notes:
Most vegans and vegetarians would agree that no animal should have to suffer or die for our food. But, even most omnivores would agree that there is something deeply wretched about inflicting lifelong pain and misery and finally death on an animal for food we are not going to eat.18
Many project a dramatic shortage of food as the world population grows to 9–10 billion by the middle of the century, with protein expected to be in particularly short supply. This is in part because the calories needed to feed animals amount to anywhere from four to a hundred times the calories that humans consume from the animal products.
More than any other food, beef highlights both the waste humans create and the opportunities that are available to reduce waste. I am sure you already know that beef isn’t good for you and is correlated with many of the worst diseases that threaten your life span. Worldwide, cows require 100 times the calorie input of the calories that they will eventually provide to humans, and 25 times as much protein as they will provide.19 (In the United States, due to the efficiency of the beef industry, these ratios are 40:1 and 16:1, respectively.)
Most animals and animal products are wasteful, but beef is an extreme case. The good news is that there are plans in place to create a less wasteful food system. A combination of health factors, environmental consideration, efficiency, and concerns about animal suffering have led to a dramatic growth in plant-based products, including meat substitutes—about 20 percent growth per year.20 All indications are that this growth will continue in the future. More dramatically, as we discussed in Chapter 1, the Good Food Movement is focused on creating new, better-tasting plant-based products, as well as “cultivated meat” (also called “clean meat,” “cell-based meat,” and “cultured meat”), a new technology that cultivates the tissue of an actual animal to produce meat without needing to feed, torture, or kill an animal. All of these advances waste far fewer calories and protein than conventional meat produced by killing an animal. The first cultivated meat burger was produced in 2013, and reasonably priced clean-meat products are five to fifteen years away.
There are nonprofit organizations that are encouraging the development of new plant-based and clean-meat products, such as the Good Food Institute. In addition, a growing number of venture capital organizations and famous entrepreneurs (including names like Gates, Branson, Brin, and Welch) see this industry as a potentially lucrative investment opportunity. Some of you may already be tired of my animal rights views, but one interesting aspect of the Good Food Movement is that its leaders, like Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute, have broadened their focus from just encouraging people to be vegetarian or vegan, to also shifting the balance of the foods consumed by flexitarians, reducetarians, and others. Getting people to eat in a more sustainable way requires the creation of great new products—ones that meat eaters will be happy to eat based on superior taste, cost, and convenience, in comparison to food that comes from ending the life of a sentient being.
One unique aspect of the venture capital world’s interest in good foods is their collaboration. In many industries, competing venture capital funds only coordinate when they invest in the same entrepreneurial venture. In the good foods world, many of the venture capitalists involved are vegan, and part of their focus is on reducing animal suffering and food waste. As a result of this social mission, they are coordinating to bring as many new products to market as possible. One vehicle for this coordination is the Glasswall Syndicate, which describes itself as a “large group (over 150) of venture capitalists, foundations, trusts, non-profits, and individual investors who share a similar investment thesis and want to accelerate mainstream adoption of products and services that will make a difference in the lives of animals [and] people, and that are better for the planet.”21 Glasswall members (I am one of them) invest in start-up plant-based and cultivated-meat companies, and actually root for entrepreneurs who are developing meat alternatives, even when they aren’t investing in the specific start-up.
If you think the market for good foods is limited, you might consider that Tyson Foods has invested in cultivated meat start-up Memphis Meats. Tyson currently produces about one-fifth of the chicken, beef, and pork in the United States. Tyson CEO and president Tom Hayes acknowledged that the investment “might seem counterintuitive,” but he explained that in a world with a growing population in need of protein, Tyson will have to figure out how to answer these demands in a sustainable way. Tyson previously invested in the plant-based meat alternative Beyond Meat.22 If the good food industry proves successful, Tyson wants to be at the table with access to new technology for creating the protein that consumers demand.
Of course, consumer-created waste goes well beyond food. More than half (58 percent) of the total energy produced in the United States is wasted due to other inefficiencies, such as wasted heat from power plants, vehicles, and lightbulbs.23 We can typically reduce such waste without making any personal sacrifice at all—in fact, our greater efficiency will save us money while making the world a slightly better place.
PARASITIC INTERMEDIARIES IN THE NONPROFIT WORLD
Imagine that your phone rings while you’re having dinner. You answer it, and the person on the other end tells you a moving story about some people in need of your financial help. We have all received such calls, and many of us have made donations. Clearly, my view is that you will make better charitable decisions when you aren’t considering just one organization over the telephone while wanting to get back to dinner. In fact, there is a very good chance that if you do make a donation, the money will be wasted.
When we give money over the phone, we are generally responding to an emotional appeal. This emotional appeal is exploited by parasitic intermediaries who work for profit-making organizations to scam people out of their money. A shockingly large amount of that money goes to the intermediary, and very little of it serves those who need help. One example is Help the Vets, a nationwide operation that solicits donations to fund veterans’ medical care, including breast cancer treatment, a suicide prevention program, and retreats for those recuperating from stress. Help the Vets makes emotional pleas to potential donors to help veterans, such as noting that for those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, “giving an arm and a leg isn’t simply a figure of speech—it’s a harsh reality.”24 The organization sounds as if it has the best of intentions, yet Federal Trade Commission chairman Joe Simons writes that evidence shows that Help the Vets, from 2014 to 2017, “spent more than 95 percent [of its incoming donations] paying its founder, fundraisers and expenses.”25
Many charities hire intermediaries, primarily telemarketing firms, to do their fundraising. Given that no one likes telephone solicitations, why does it remain such a common fundraising tool? For-profit companies know they can make money by taking on a task that not many charities enjoy. According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations are registered in the United States, twice as many as there were twenty years ago.26 (That’s too many; more on that below.) As these organizations compete for charitable dollars, professional solicitors manage to convince them that they are burdened with delivering services. In addition, they offer the charity money that seems to be a bonus on top of what they would earn if they tried to raise funds themselves. So, the charity accepts the intermediary’s offer of a small portion of the actual money that is raised. The charity focuses on its mission and ignores the fact that donors’ limited charitable dollars are being squandered. By paying employees low wages, the intermediaries make a bunch of money—often as much as 75 percent of what they raise. This process is technically legal, but it’s highly unethical. When people are tricked into believing that their money is primarily going to those who need it, but it’s actually profiting an organization not even mentioned in the sales pitch, it becomes clear that money is being wasted and that we need a better way to donate. Charities that participate in this process allow the intermediaries to create a wasteful enterprise that shrinks the overall charitable pie and manipulates uninformed contributors.
“If every charity reduced its fund-raising expenditures,” Janet Greenlee and Teresa Gordon note, “all would benefit from higher net proceeds; [but] if only one charity reduced its expenditures, the remaining charities would reap the benefits.”27 If all charities eliminated the use of such intermediaries, collectively, they would raise more money. When nonprofits hire such intermediaries, they are defecting in a social dilemma, reducing the amount of productive charitable dollars available to all groups. Nonprofits should see that the collective good requires them to say no to intermediaries that funnel profits for themselves. Because attempts to regulate the profit margins of professional fundraisers have been struck down by the courts, a more viable plan may be to continue to increase the transparency of charities’ spending habits.28
Parasitic intermediaries aren’t the only source of waste in the nonprofit world. Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer (a member of the Pulitzer Prize–winning team of reporters that exposed the Catholic Church’s cover-up of clergy sex abuse) tells the story of OneGoal, a nonprofit whose mission is to help disadvantaged students graduate from college.29 Pfeiffer argues that the problem with this new nonprofit is that it has the same goal as more than forty other Boston nonprofits. This duplication of effort adds up to waste: money spent unnecessarily on office space, operational inefficiencies, and staff competing for the same charitable contributions. It means time and money wasted on writing forty year-end reports, filing forty tax returns with the government, and having forty different fundraising efforts, often targeted at the same donors. In the for-profit sector, this type of inefficiency would lead some competing organizations to fail and go out of business and others to merge, but those market forces are not fully available for nonprofits. “One thing I see over and over again is duplication of effort—so many small organizations that are doing the same work or very similar work,” Marla Felcher (full disclosure: I am married to Marla), the founder of a women’s collective giving organization, the Philanthropy Connection, told Pfeiffer. “People say, ‘Oh, my nonprofit is different than that one,’ but if you’re on the outside, you don’t see the difference. . . . I think some of our smaller organizations would be best served by working more closely with or becoming part of a larger, better-established organization.” In the nonprofit world, waste adds up to solving fewer of the world’s problems.
In my industry, academia, there is a consistent and widespread need for more space. Many universities and colleges hold back on hiring new staff members, faculty, or visiting scholars not because they can’t afford to pay them, but because they don’t have enough offices available. Yet professors are often busy people who spend a lot of time outside of their offices. In addition, we refer to our bookshelves less and less as our world works in more digitized ways. Professors can and often do meet with others, check email, and write from home, cafes, libraries, and other remote locations. As a result, it is common for the majority of faculty offices to be empty even during the middle of the day in the middle of the semester. So, if we don’t use our offices fully, why don’t we share them? Other professionals who also work outside of their office a great deal, such as consultants, have moved toward “hoteling” (shared workspace) arrangements. Unfortunately, professors seem to accrue prestige based on their office, with wasted space and missed opportunities as the result.
THE WASTE WE CREATE
How did you ever acquire all of that stuff in your basement, garage, or attic? Too often, we make purchases based on our emotional response to them rather than on whether we will want to own them a short time later. We also often confuse waste reduction with negative judgments like “being cheap.” If we want to create more value, we should strive to see waste reduction as a useful way to make the world a bit better, while perhaps saving some resources along the way—moving toward that Pareto-efficient frontier depicted in Chapter 3.
There are many actions we can take to create less waste, and each of us is likely to see different opportunities. Some of us might think about the added fuel we use by driving an inefficient car, or driving when other means of travel are easily available. Some of us can do a better job of thinking ahead when we are about to make an impulse purchase. And some of us could buy a bit less food so that less ends up in the trash. But, overall, our willingness to confront our waste is likely to pave the way to value creation. In the next chapter, we will look at one of the most crucial assets that we waste—our time.