When Efficiency Becomes a Threat

Why Market Logic Can’t Fix What It Breaks: The Case Against Efficiency as a Universal Good

There are certain cultural propositions so deeply woven into the fabric of modern life that they pass without question. To challenge them is to risk social heresy. Two of these are private property and the free market. They are not just economic tools but moral commitments, invoked in courtrooms, campaign speeches, and zoning meetings with near-religious weight.

But what happens when the logic of these propositions ceases to serve the public good? What happens when they begin producing harm—not by malfunction, but by following their own rules too well?

Let’s start with property. In nature, nothing is owned. Ownership is a cultural invention. It depends on recognition, enforcement, and—ultimately—exclusion. Private property, unlike a commons or public space, is defined by its boundaries and its gatekeepers. It confers not only rights of use but the power to deny use. We’ve extended this logic from land and goods to ideas, genes, and software. That shift has carried with it a certain kind of violence—not always visible, but deeply consequential.

The market is often described as neutral. In theory, it’s a simple mechanism of exchange. Buyers and sellers meet, supply and demand settle the price, and efficiency emerges through competition. But markets don’t just distribute goods—they concentrate power. As more efficient firms outcompete the rest, the logic favors consolidation. Big-box stores replace corner shops. Corporate landlords replace local owners. The winners write the rules, and those rules rarely make room for equity.

Historically, governments stepped in to balance the field. They imposed antitrust laws, inspected meatpacking plants, and banned lead in paint—not to stifle the market, but to civilize it. Trade barriers and tariffs, zoning laws and price controls—all were tools to buffer the vulnerable from the volatility of unfettered competition.

Neoliberalism dismantled that scaffold. Its advocates insist that regulation is inefficiency, and that privatization will produce leaner, smarter, more innovative solutions to every social problem—from water delivery to schooling. They argued that markets could do what governments could not: adapt, economize, and self-correct. All we had to do was get out of their way.

But the promise of efficiency has come at a steep price. And in many domains, efficiency has become the wrong question.

Not everything that matters can be priced. Not every essential function performs better under competition. And when markets fail in these spaces, the failure is not academic—it is lethal.

Consider healthcare. In a privatized system, care is denied not because it’s unavailable, but because it’s unprofitable. Hospitals close in rural communities not because they lack patients, but because those patients can’t pay. Insurance companies optimize reimbursement systems rather than healing. The result is not efficient. It’s extractive. What so-called efficiencies really do is shift risk to those least equipped to bear it.

Public education suffers a parallel fate. When schools are judged by test scores and cost-per-pupil ratios, they begin to resemble factories more than communities. Charter systems cherry-pick students. Underfunded public schools spiral into decline. Teachers burn out under managerial regimes that measure more than they support. The language of markets turns education from a shared good into a personal investment—one many families can’t afford to make.

Environmental protections fare no better. Market logic treats ecosystems as resource pools, not living systems. It assigns value only when something is harvested or destroyed. Forests are valued as timber, not as climate regulators or watersheds. Fish are priced per pound, not per ecological role. And the costs of pollution—lung disease, acid rain, ocean acidification—are pushed off the ledger entirely. There is no place on a balance sheet for planetary stability.

The same logic is applied to housing. Homes become assets. Neighborhoods become investment zones. Developers optimize for return, not community. Affordable housing is seen as unprofitable—so in cities full of empty units, homelessness rises. And risk is redistributed yet again—not eliminated—landing on those already priced out.

Even disaster response is warped. Contracts go to private firms that deliver too little, too late—if at all. Infrastructure maintenance is outsourced until it collapses. Efficiency cuts muscle and calls it fat.

And in elder care and disability services, privatization means lower wages for caregivers and more bureaucracy for families. Quality declines because dignity isn’t efficient and compassion isn’t billable. Because the market places little worth on things it cannot quantify or commodify, care work—largely performed by women, often women of color—remains chronically undervalued.

None of this is accidental. These are the outcomes of systems behaving as designed—pursuing efficiency where what’s needed is care, justice, resilience, or community.

Markets optimize for profit, not well-being. Competition excludes those who can’t keep pace—or were never allowed to start the race. Efficiency flattens time, preferring short-term gain over long-term responsibility or future consequences.

There are domains where markets may work well. But there are others where applying market logic is not just inappropriate—it is dangerous.

Public goods exist precisely because markets fail in these spaces. We don’t build fire departments or national parks because they’re efficient. We build them because they protect things we can’t afford to lose.

In political ecology, we’ve long studied how systems fall apart—and who bears the cost. We’ve also examined communities where private property and markets are not central to life: mutual aid groups, Indigenous commons, community land trusts, cooperatives. These aren’t romantic throwbacks. They offer real, functioning alternatives—models that place care, rather than market logic, at the center of collective life. They invite us to reimagine what’s possible: to resist, and to rebuild.

What we’re living through now is not just a crisis of budgets or policy. It’s a deeper reckoning with what we value, how we measure success, and who gets to decide.

The question before us is this: Do we want a government that worships efficiency—or one committed to the common good? Do we want a state that serves all its people—or just the wealthy and well-insured? Do we want systems that provide care—or systems that punish need? If we still believe in government of the people, by the people, and for the people—then it’s time to fight for it.

Suggested Readings

Bambra, Clare. Health Divides: Where You Live Can Kill You. Bristol: Policy Press, 2016.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press, 2018.

Geronimus, Arline T. Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023.

Greenberg, James B. “The Tragedy of Commoditization: The Political Ecology of the Colorado River Delta’s Destruction.” Research in Economic Anthropology 19 (1998): 133–149.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Park, Thomas K., and James B. Greenberg, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: A Political Ecology Approach to Society and Nature. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020.

Sparke, Matthew, and Shanti Vilas. Neoliberal Disease: How US Politics Sabotaged Public Health and Fueled COVID-19. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022.

Weaver, Thomas, James B. Greenberg, Anne Browning-Aiken, and William Alexander, eds. Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico: Structures, Struggles, and Futures. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012.