This is something that i’ve noticed in my job as an industrial farmer.
When growing chickpeas we use an special implement to cut the chickpea plant at a certain stage of growth to accelerate the drying process. By doing this you stop the natural cycle of the plant and thus the grain does not develop as much as it would by just letting it complete it’s cycle. But the grain dries much faster and is ready to be harvested earlier.
So why do we do this? It’s because the grain prices are better the sooner you harvest, so you make more profit by using more fuel to cut the plant and losing production. So every grower is racing others to harvest as soon as possible (some even start planting much earlier than the ideal date) and losing a lot of actual grain production by doing so.
So in summary; we use an extra implement, use extra fuel (imagine the amount of fuel used in tens of thousands of hectares…) AND get less yields because the market incentivizes us to do it.
EDIT: Forgot to say that by not accelerating the harvest process, you risk that grain buyers bins reach their max capacity and no one buys your grain!
Recruitment under capitalism is incredibly inefficient as well. People should not need to apply to hundreds of jobs over months and months, doing absolutely zero real work in the meantime, just to get an interview. There should be some way to automate things so that an average candidate can tell a website they’re looking for jobs of certain types, fill in their info once, and then companies who are looking for that type of candidate automatically get an easy, manageable list of 2-5 people who have the qualifications they’re looking for. Doing things this way, the automated system can put each candidate on the market for no more than maybe 10 jobs at a time, and if they are picked for none of these 10 jobs, there could be some type of fallback guaranteed job available that you are automatically recruited into if you give the OK.
The stress, dread and anguish this causes unemployed workers is a feature, not a bug. If you are desperate for a job, you’ll accept lower wages for more labour. That’s also partly why employers create a bunch of hoops for candidates to jump through. Raises desperation and creates a sunken cost mentality to the worker if at the end the employer reveals the position is not as advertised.
When i read the concept about “reserve army of labour” (kinda cringy name ngl) it all clicked, wages can’t go up if there is an entire army of unemployed willing to do the same work for less. The demand/supply argument that libertarians like to make is irrelevant when there is a huge supply of unemployed available.
in a perfect world :(