Title: No Efficiency Without Institutional Design
Author: Professor Yasuhiko Nakashima, Computer Architecture, Division of Information Science
If you are reading this column, your boss is probably looking over your shoulder and telling you to stop playing around and get to work. For supervisors who have a fixed labor cost to spend, "efficiency = more work from subordinates at the same cost. On the other hand, for a subordinate who is hired by the hour, "efficiency = working in a high-cost workplace. For those with a fixed monthly salary, "efficiency = working as little as possible" is out of the question.
If we consider work efficiency in the context of gender equality, we assume that the ultimate goal is how to make time for personal and family life without reducing income, and that efficiency is changing the scale of work evaluation to achieve this goal. If I am correct so far, the solution that would bring supervisors and subordinates together would be to "stop paying monthly and hourly wages and start paying by the piece," which everyone has thought of at one time or another. The supervisor would lose nothing by simply paying for the scheduled amount of work, while the subordinate would receive a higher unit price and more extra time to complete the work quickly for the same pay.
The same applies to research. If research expenses are paid on a piece-rate basis (only the first research expenses after becoming a researcher are borrowed), taxpayers will not say that this is a waste of taxpayers' money, and part of the piece-rate payment can be used for the next research expenses or put aside as insurance in case of failure and the investment cannot be recovered. As in the case of companies, it will be necessary to balance high-risk research with revenue-generating research, so portfolio design will also be important. In the near future, a research fund management consulting company may be established.
Now, the astute reader should have noticed that there is an inherent difficulty with the above efficiency gains. No one, whether an employee or a researcher, can fairly estimate how much the results will translate into. It is not easy to determine that work that appears to be easy should actually be rewarded with a fair price (this is possible if the know-how of evaluation is accumulated, as is the case in certain countries, but this is currently impossible), and if the work is made more efficient through ingenuity, it will be considered easy work. Another dynamic is that without sufficient physical strength, it is difficult to set goals that are difficult to achieve. Needless to say, these two points were the reasons why the meritocratic system that companies competed to adopt came to a standstill.
Although there is nothing conclusive to say, it is generally true that the flip side of the above is that "both education and research will fail if they aim for efficiency. This is the last point I want to emphasize. The above article will take 100 minutes to write. I hope it will not be paid for by volume.
