The other day when my wife was sick, I ducked into one of those national chain drugstores to pick up some COVID tests for her. The whole thing should have taken two minutes — I could see the jawns right there behind the counter! But since there were only one or two people working in the whole, messy store, I had to walk around the place and flag down an employee. He was busy sweeping something up over by the candy section, surrounded by boxes of stuff that needed to be stocked. I felt really bad for this dude, this lone sentry staving off the entropy in the aisles while also trying to perform something like customer service.
We see this all the time – one worker tasked to hold multiple jobs, just because they can. All under the guise of efficiency.
So can we just talk about efficiency for a second, y’all? In a lot of spaces, efficiency is treated as a moral imperative. Our politics is currently loaded with efficiency talk lately — alongside bloat and fat and waste. But in a time in which so many things we want or need can be satisfied quickly via an app, perhaps we’ve become too hostile to the social necessity of inefficiency.
The study we cite in our episode showed that Black folks are three to five times as likely to be audited, as are lower-income folks, in part because people’s zip codes seem to play a role in the algorithms the agency uses to identify tax cheats. (All together now: housing segregation in everything.) And if you’re the backlogged IRS, auditing rich people with more complicated (and, uh, obfuscated) financial pictures requires a lot of time and specialized staffing. Auditing someone who makes far less only requires sending an envelope in the mail; if that person doesn’t respond, the IRS just holds on to any potential refund. Easy-peezy. Efficient.
The thing is, part of the reason there was such a push in recent years to beef up the IRS’s staffing was because running the IRS efficiently came with a huge social cost. So when the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency is laying off thousands of government workers across agencies – like people who help airports run smoothly, and ensure flying is safe, and research cancer and opioid addiction treatment for veterans, and respond to the bird flu outbreak, and secure the nation’s arsenal of nuclear weapons(in the case of the last two, those folks might already have their jobs back) – in the name of being more efficient, we should take step back and ask: are we willing to pay the other, unavoidable human costs that come with it?
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ON THE POD
Jireh Deng
Altadena was the site of the Eaton fire, one of two major wildfires in Los Angeles County in January. The wind and flames destroyed more than 9,000 structures — and with them, the long-tenured Black community in the town. As efforts to recover and rebuild the town are underway, many residents are left wondering, what of their community will remain?
I just got done tearing through the most recent season of Mo, the Netflix show based loosely on the life of the comedian Mo Amer. In the show, Amer plays a Palestinian American living in Houston, Texas — he code-switches between Arabic, Spanish, and A.A.V.E. — who has to navigate family dynamics and the cold, unfeeling bureaucracy that constrains his life as an undocumented, stateless citizen. But I promise you it’s not nearly as heavy as it sounds — Amer’s comedic impulse is to lean into the absurdity of his situation. And not for nothing, but the show treats prayer with a genuine, humanistic respect that’s jarring — it’s rarely seen on popular television, and even rarer to see it done so movingly. (Our play-cousins at Pop Culture Happy Hour recently revisited their conversation about the show’s first season, which you should definitely holler at.)
Until next time — be easy.
~g.
Written by Gene Dembyand editedby Dalia Mortada
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