The Efficiency Gap

 I’ve just completed a paper that asks a simple but uncomfortable question:

What if America’s health, climate, housing, and workforce crises are not separate problems—but symptoms of the same systemic efficiency failure?

Across public systems, success is often measured by activity: services delivered, emergencies managed, outputs produced. Yet when recovery is absent, systems do not stabilize—they compensate. Over time, that compensation burns through people, landscapes, and public budgets while underlying conditions worsen.

In this paper, I argue that:

• Chronic illness, wildfire severity, housing instability, and workforce attrition reflect shared breakdowns in recovery capacity
   
• Choice without functional access is not a real choice, even in democratic systems.
   
• Efficiency is not austerity—it is the ability of systems to convert investment into durable, regenerative outcomes.
   
• Resilience depends on recovery, coordination, and upstream design, not constant throughput.t
   

The work draws on systems science, resilience engineering, planetary health research, and public administration to articulate an integrated, theory-stage framework through Wildfire Resilient Landscapes. The framework focuses on how people, communities, and ecosystems function as interconnected systems governed by shared principles.

This paper synthesizes existing research rather than presenting new empirical findings. Its purpose is diagnostic: to offer a shared lens for understanding why many well-funded systems still struggle to deliver stability, dignity, and long-term capacity.

If you work in policy, public administration, environmental management, public health, or systems thinking, I welcome your thoughts and dialogue.