Life — June 5, 1931 — page 11: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "The Efficiency Expert Goes To Heaven" This satirical cartoon mocks the early 20th-century "efficiency expert" craze—consultants who applied industrial management principles to optimize costs and productivity everywhere. The joke: an efficiency expert arrives in Heaven and immediately begins offering cost-cutting suggestions to angels and saints. He proposes eliminating expensive feather wings, replacing harp strings with cheaper wire, using electric lights instead of halos, and negotiating lower wages for the "angel chorus." The satire targets how efficiency-obsessed business consultants of the era applied ruthless cost-cutting logic to inappropriate domains—suggesting that even sacred, spiritual realms couldn't escape their intrusive "rationalization." The expert's inability to recognize Heaven's incompatibility with penny-pinching reflects contemporary anxiety about unrestrained commercialism and mechanization corrupting all aspects of life.