Older Adults Are Inefficient. Come and Get Us, Elon!

Is efficiency, the principle being enforced by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as desirable as Elon Musk would have us believe? If you’re working on an assembly line, your boss thinks so. Or if you work in an electronic sweatshop, your every move monitored, you may think you’re there to code software or design video games, but the fact is that you’re there to maximize your employer’s profits—if you’re an efficient worker, that is.

If The Trump Economy could speak, it would insist that it’s normal to live and work in this way. It’s just the way things are. Efficiency, productivity, and greed are good. Or at least they’re natural.

Human nature

I’ve never been one to opine about human nature. To arrive at a succinct definition of what it means to be human, you’d need a vast laboratory in which to conduct experiments that hold many factors constant, eliminate possible confounders, and identify the variables that remain. But no laboratory on Earth is capable of structuring, much less carrying out, such an experiment. The laboratory of history itself isn’t large enough or neutral enough to do that either.

When I think about what makes us human, I turn to the discoveries made by members of a very different discipline: cultural anthropology. Without naming names (okay, I lied: Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ruth Benedict, and Paul Farmer are among my faves), anthropologists have found enormous variability in human attitudes, beliefs, and practices across the globe.

We all have families, but these are defined differently from place to place. We all have sex, but the who, when, and how vary widely from culture to culture, as well as within cultures. We all have what passes for economies, but they aren’t all based on the relationship between labor and capital.

So let me return to my question du jour: Are we efficient by nature, or is efficiency a quality that’s inherent to business? And here’s another: Is the federal government a business? Do we want it to be? If we did, downsizing the federal workforce and eliminating entire agencies would make a certain kind of sick sense. Government as nothing more than a site of productivity and profit maximization.

But guess who will need to pay the piper? Who will bear the brunt of all the cuts by chainsaw being enacted daily by DOGE?

Vulnerable yet interdependent

Remember when Mitt Romney, during his presidential run in 2012, expressed his disapproval of the 46 percent of the U.S. population who were dependent on the government? That number, no doubt, included low-income retirees living on their Social Security checks; people on Medicaid or Medicare, including those with disabilities; and people living in public housing or receiving Food Stamps. And let’s not forget veterans.

Romney was a fairly typical American conservative, espousing self-reliance, an entrepreneurial mindset, and a distinctly anti-labor position. But smashing the federal government to smithereens wasn’t part of his plan. And anyway, Obama won a second term, so we’ll never know how far Romney might have gone in pursuing the usual “small government” vision that’s a hallmark of American conservatism. One that didn’t start with Trump. Or Musk.

Romney’s 46 percent are Trump’s “losers.” And 46 has since swelled to a larger percentage, partly due to the ageing of the population. There are more of us on Social Security and Medicare compared to 2012, plus we’re living longer. Making these programs efficient again—uh, they never were—would not only involve cutting their budgets but bumping millions of people from their hard-won income and benefits as they age.

I can’t prove what I’m about to say, but I have a sense that the Trump administration is trying to weaken, deprive, impoverish, and demoralize the most vulnerable members of our society, including us oldsters, with the exception of the wealthy among us. With Musk at the helm of that effort, the federal government is abrogating its responsibilities to millions of losers who haven’t gotten the memo: You’re on your own, kid. Go forage for food. Become a ragpicker. Sell your wares on the street, unless you’re up for deportation, of course. Or, if you’ve got gumption, start a business.

What does it mean to be human?

Freed from the so-called logic of the American workplace and the political-economic system that enforces it, we’d have a shot at being truly human. What’s that, you may well ask? I propose that we start with our most obvious qualities.

We’re social animals, and as such, we enjoy the company of other humans. We like having fun. We like wasting time with our friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Or on social media (present company excepted).

We’re a creative species. From Stone Age tools to the internet and from the Mayan pyramids to Beethoven, we build, invent, compose, write poetry, and problem-solve to beat the band.

We lean toward cooperation and interdependence as we strive to realize the public good.

And at our best, we love our neighbors as ourselves. Not just our immediate families, as important as these are, and not just the person we’re crazy about at the moment, but the strangers we pass on the street, the cashiers who ring up our groceries, and our fellow commuters on the train. Not just our compatriots, but our fellow humans on every continent.

So, Elon, I hope you’ll wake up one day soon and see the errors of your ways, not that I’m holding my breath. But take it from me. Older adults, and human beings at every age and stage, come to think of it, aren’t designed to be efficient. We’re designed for love, creativity, and solidarity. So come and get us, if you dare.