I have written a lot about misleading, or even meaningless words ("The Most Misleading Word", "Luxury and Necessity") and talked at great length about the way in which these poor definitions are used to mislead or to guide us into incorrect assumptions ("Protean Terminology", "Semantic Games", "Confucius, Aedes Aegypti, Pluto, Sub-Species, Conservatives and Republicans", "Misunderstanding Arbitrary Definitions"), but apparently in all my writing I have only scratched the surface, as I continue to find new examples of the same error. For example, I just recently wrote ("A Brief Thought on Poverty") about the way in which the intentional blurring of the line between true poverty and simply belonging to the lower class is often abused to make it seem lowering subsidies to the lower class will result in starvation. (Though I wrote on this before, see "We Have Won the "War on Poverty"".)  And, more recently, I was reminded of another error I discussed once before ("The High Cost of Not Wasting Food") while watching a cooking show on television.

It is the perpetual "stand by" story for newscasters, especially on cooking and food related programs, whenever they want to feel they are performing a civic duty and need to feel elevated above mere entertainment, they will dedicate a segment, perhaps an entire show, to denouncing the waste of food. Perhaps they will highlight the "freegan" movement, silly eco-hipsters who live on food they scrounge from four star dumpsters. Or maybe they will show mounds of "perfectly edible" food thrown out by supermarkets or restaurants or food processors. There are countless variations, though the message is always the same: "We waste too much food."

In a way it is kind of funny, newscasters feeling so clever for repeating the old standby of every frustrated mother: "There are kids starving in Ethiopia, so you better clean your plate." But repeat it they do, and feel so special for doing it. Sadly, no one ever stops them to ask them the question muttered by so many surly children "How does it help them if I eat my broccoli?" (That one got me in some trouble throughout my youth.) Or, even better, and more practical, "Well, why don't you send them the food I don't eat?"

While it is amusing to imagine newscasters being stumped by the responses of moderately clever elementary schoolers, there is actually a lesson here, or more than one. In part the lesson actually is just the same as that voiced by frustrated children, but the rest is a bit more complicated, containing a slightly more sophisticated mix of economics and linguistics, but in the end they both point to the same truth, that "waste" is a term which means nothing without a very clear context, and what some see as waste is often something else entirely. Or, to be more brief, sometimes what you see is not all the truth there is. (Cf "Two Perspectives", "Bad Economics Part 11", "Problematic Arguments", "Why"Negative" Economic Indicators Are A Good Thing", "Monetary Issues Made Simple Part I".)

Let us look at an example of waste, and see what I mean when I say that what is obvious may not be all there is to understand. The milling of wood, turning raw timber, relatively uniform segments of tree trunks, into boards, is a process where waste is relatively easy to measure, or, to be more precise -- as "waste" is an emotionally charged term -- the amount of material lost is easy to determine. All we have to do is measure the total volume of wood fed in and compare it to the amount lost as scraps or sawdust, as such material is, for the most part, unusable. (For purposes of this essay, we will ignore the commercial uses of sawdust, and assume sawdust is simply lost.)

There are any number of ways to turn wood into boards, and all of them produce some amount of waste. As we are starting with a generally round cross section and trying to cut it into rectangular objects, obviously some loss will occur no matter how we proceed. Those rounded sections which need to be sheared off will be wasted no matter how we work. Where the amount of loss varies is in the process we choose to cut the remaining material into planks. Manual methods, such as pit saws, tend to produce the least sawdust, and the greatest number of planks, but they are much slower. Circular saws and other automatic milling methods create more sawdust but tend to be much faster.

So, the question is, why would we choose a method which produces so much more waste material? If we can produce board with 80% efficiency, why produce them with only 40%? Why accept that waste?

The answer is that waste is not the sole measure of productivity. If we need to produce 100 boards an hour, an automated mill can do so with only 4 laborers (for example), while manual work may require 10 or 20 times as much labor. So, while we double the waste of lumber, the manual process "wastes" 10 or 20 times as much labor. Even if we are not interested in speed of processing, the manual method is still much more labor intensive, and will always require more laborers than an automated solution.

And that is where these examples of waste often fall apart. They focus on one type of resource, be it food or wood or metal or oil, and ignore other resources such as time, or labor. Sometimes they even ignore the waste of other physical resources, such as electric cars that save oil, but use up tons of nickel and lithium and other rare minerals that environmentalists usually demand we conserve. (And, as batteries do have a limited functional life, it is not even a "one time investment", those batteries will need regular replacement.)

That trade off, which is so rarely recognized, is why the term "waste" is so meaningless. Waste would only exist if one sacrificed a good for no benefit, giving up something when the same goal could be achieved without that sacrifice. In other words, when there are, say, two ways to make a car, both identical in every respect, but one using 2 tons of steel and one using 3 tons. If we then chose the three ton solution, that would be waste. But that would also be economic suicide. if such a choice were made, the individual would be choosing to give away goods, to sacrifice profits, and would soon be driven from the market by competitors.

What critics call waste is actual an economic decision, a tradeoff, with which the critic disagrees. If we throw away food because it may be spoiled, deciding it is more cost effective to simply replace everything rather than use manpower and time to pick through it to find what is and is not still useful*, that is an economic decision, and consumers and the market will decide whether or not we chose right. What it si not, is waste. We have chosen to sacrifice some usable food in order to save time and labor, to pick the alternate route, could, if we were to use the critics' terminology be seen as a waste of labor.

But the critics will not recognize that there is anything like cost-benefit analysis, or that tradeoffs can make sense other than the solution they choose. Like those who declare nature an "absolute good", or proclaim they have identified the perfect solution, these critics are convinced that anything other than picking through the refuse heap looking at every slimy, rotten bit to see if some of it could be saved is wasteful. ("Absolute Values", "The Right Way", "The Inherent Disappointment of Authoritarianism") And that is the problem with such arguments, they not only refuse to recognize that there are many ways to approach a question, they refuse to recognize there is a question at all. They do not want to let the market decide, because they already have, and anything other than their own prejudices must be wrong. ("Misunderstanding the Market",  "Utopianism and Disaster", "The Threat of Perfection", "Life Is Not Fair - And Trying To Make It So Makes Things Worse")

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* There is a subsidiary issue here, which makes waste worse. It might be possible for those throwing away food which is simply a day or two old, to offset the charges of "waste" by giving that food to the homeless, to shelters or others. However, should anyone become ill after eating that food, doubtless the liability cases following, for not just those made sick, but those made fearful they might be sick -- don't laugh, similar cases for fear of exposure to radiation and chemicals have won -- would bankrupt he company, so giving away food with even the slightest risk is itself too risky, in a legal sense. (See "The Perversion of Liability Law" and "The "Right To Sue" As Our Only Right". See also "Real Life and Regulation", "The End of Private Action" and "Business Licensing and Regulation" for a few brief mentions of the many silly health regulations governing food donations to the homeless and other absurd interventions.)