This book began as a refusal. The refusal was simple: to keep producing inside systems whose only consistent output was the perpetuation of themselves. The refusal was also, more uncomfortably, a confession. I was good at producing inside those systems. The confession is what made the book necessary.
Purposeless Efficiency is the first of five volumes. It examines what efficiency means once it has been severed from any external purpose — once the metric is the meaning. The remaining volumes will treat what comes after the severance: the institutions that survive it, the ones that do not, and what an honest economic order might look like once we admit the mistake.
Reader, I assume you have already noticed the symptoms. The book is for the reader who has stopped pretending the symptoms are accidental.