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Take a more realistic example: Should we spend, say, a billion dollars a year to subsidize end-of-life health care for poor people? It would be, I think, a terrible mistake to settle this question without at least asking whether the recipients might prefer that we spend our billion dollars some other way — say by subsidizing their groceries or just giving them cash. If so, the difference in value between what they’re getting and what they could be getting (as measured by the recipients) is a deadweight loss. The bigger that deadweight loss, the more we should reconsider our spending priorities.

Now once again, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all of policy analysis. Even if poor people prefer subsidized groceries to subsidized health care, we might still choose to give them health care if, for example, we believe that they are less likely to make wise decisions about their own health care than about their own groceries, or if we’re afraid that subsidizing groceries (or handing out cash) is somehow more likely to invite fraud. But the bigger the deadweight loss, the more we should probably rethink those concerns, because the bigger the deadweight loss, the more opportunity there is to improve life for the recipients. That’s the first reason we should care about efficiency.

The second reason we should care about efficiency is that efficiency analysis strikes down political smokescreens. Like this:

Politician: Here’s my program to make the health care system work better by subsidizing health care for the poor.

Economist: Your program costs a billion dollars and delivers half a billion dollars worth of benefits. That’s inefficient.

Politician: So what?

Economist: Well, the “so what” is that maybe you could take that billion dollars and deliver a full billion dollars worth of benefits instead if you spent it a little differently. Why not just hand the cash out to poor people?

Politician: Because I don’t want to help all poor people. I only want to help sick poor people — and this is the only way I can think of to do that.

Economist: Ah. So your goal here is not to make the health care system work better after all. Instead it’s to transfer resources to sick poor people.

Politician: I guess so.

Economist: That’s fine. Now we can have a healthy debate about whether that’s what we want to do.

And now, you see, thanks to the economist’s insistence on thinking about efficiency, we end up having an honest debate about the politician’s real goal instead of a dishonest debate about the politician’s feigned goal. However the debate turns out, that’s a useful exercise.