At the end of the Functional Programming HOWTO document (https://docs.python.org/3.7/howto/functional.html) the usage of reduce/lambda/for loops are compared and discussed. However, the example for reduce seems sub-optimal and thus the discussion is not that efficient. The example:

total = functools.reduce(lambda a, b: (0, a[1] + b[1]), items)[1]

could be changed to:

total = functools.reduce(lambda total, item: total + item[1], items, 0)

which is much more readable and is actually not much inferior to the loop one (though the sum approach is still more concise).

I think the existing code conveys the author's message better than the proposed revision.  The example isn't about efficiency; rather, it is about comparing several alternative formulations with this one being the weakest of the lost.  For emphasizing that point and not getting lost in a made-up example, the a[1] and b[1] style is more effective.

That's for the suggestion but I don't think it is a win.