“The Kai Zen Principle” or “The Age of Wastefulness”

The ideas of the “kaizen” principle are something I feel strongly about. For me, wastefulness is not a virtue. I would rather agree that a healthy amount of thriftiness is.

We live in the age of wastefulness. Somehow or other, we seem to have slithered into it. Everything gets more complicated, including our problems. Then we solve our problems with complex strategies and end up with even more complicated problems. …

And so on, and so forth. There is a direct line from the rebound-Effekt to the Overkill.

Let us take a closer look at some of the social structures and areas that determine our lives. Here is an alphabetical list of what comes to mind spontaneously:

  • Administration
    We have three high-ranking levels of government: the EU, the BRD and the districts – and I am not even counting the UNO. Each of them has a parliament of considerable size with a huge governmental and administrative sector. In addition, we have plenty of communal levels.
  • Finances and taxation
    The question is asked all the time: why is the literature dealing with the German tax legislation more pages than the entire literature on tax concerning the rest of the world? Is it possible to be more complex than that? And the answer is always the same: YES!    
The number of tax advisors is currently a little more than 80,000. Each year, it rises by a few per cent. How many tax inspectors do we have?
  • Financial services and banks
    How many of the products offered by banks are still necessary for business? Which of them are in the public interest? And which of them are purely self-oriented and serve no purpose other than making a profit?    
And how are all those banks (district banks, mortgage banks, business banks, private banks,…) supposed to earn all the money they need?
  • Health
    The worst of all examples: health fond, compulsory and private insurances, doctor’s alliances, pharmacy associations and VSA. Everything has the most complex regulations. And no end to lobbyism.
  • Mobility and transport
  • Products are transported around half the world. Often, the transport routes are absurdities, the number of empty return voyages is high. In the daytime, a small town is airborne in Germany, cars have become high-speed vehicles full of high-end technology.
  • Pharmacy
    See my article on medicine …
  • Processes
    There is an inflation of rules and quality standards.
  • Rules, laws and justice
    All the time, we get new, longer, sometimes even conflicting and more and more incomprehensible legislation. Along with it, we get more and more verdicts and comments.
  • Social affairs and pensions
    Deutsche Rente and LVA, Riester and co, Hartz4 …
  • Streets and construction works
    We have the most traffic lights and traffic systems world-wide, tunnels even in cities, more and more bridges, roundways to avoid cities, no end to construction sites. …
  • Enterprises
    Chamber of Trade, Employer’s Liability Insurance Association…
  • Unions and lobbyism
    Interest groups from the ADAC to the central association for this and that. Once in a while, an umbrella association will get a little publicity, like a short time ago the Dehoga, but mostly they work unnoticed.
  • Insurances
    How much insurance does homo sapiens really need?
  • And much more …

All these things cause work and must be paid for. In our world, only a minority can afford to have such complex structures – and they, too, can only do so at the cost of the majority.

Do we really need all those things? I think the question is a purely rhetorical one and the answer is NO. A little more “Kaizen” would do us a lot of good. Both individually and collectively. To be sure, evolution does not work towards an end, but I cannot believe that it will permit inefficient systems in the long run.

Wastefulness is human and great fun. Maybe all we will have to do is find the right areas for wastefulness.

🙂 I have some nice ideas, and I can think of beautiful activities.

The only thing I would need is more time. Yet, time has become a rare commodity.

RMD
(Translated by EG)

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