Effective policy vs efficient politics

I spend a lot of my time in countries where the word for politics is the same as the one for policy. Usually you can tell pretty easily from the context, and there is at least some overlap.




More troubling, at least for an ex-scientist, is that in many of these same countries, there's no distinction between "effective" and "efficient" - two words with vastly different meanings in English. They both get translated/interpreted as some version of "efficacious".

A lot of the time, in the work...