Hacker News Reader

Comment by nojs | Hacker News Reader

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back.

> Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute

Except what would actually happen is everyone who wants a widget stands around “not in the queue” until the person being served is finished, at which point there’s a mad rush to be the next person served. So basically the same thing that happens when there’s no queue :D

Classic economist solution!

View on HN

Yeah, seems dumb "economist" thinking. The idea that "if someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits" is a absurd on two fronts.The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible. Maybe you are allergic to chocolate. Maybe mince pies make you gag.

Also, optimising for queue length only makes any sense in the described scenario if all stalls are owned by a single entity.

I'm not even going to touch the "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" stupidity.

Of course the position "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" is ridiculous at face value.

But if you are a bit more generous with its intentions, then there is something that really chimes with me about it.

I work in engineering support to oil and gas operations (but I'm sure this is applicable to many industries), and we have quarterly workplans and pretty fixed budgets. Of course our budget-holder typically asks us to do more work than we are able to deliver, so I will often have to say "this job does not make the priority list for next quarter, but we can do it the quarter after next?".

However, I've found a pretty good rule of thumb is that if a job was not high priority enough to win a place on the next quarter's to-do list then by the time the following quarter comes around, it will probably get bumped off the priority list by something else higher priority. In other words, our limited budget means there is always some 'cut-off point' where work that looks important is still not quite high enough priority (compared to our other work) to ever get done.

It is easy to 'form a long queue' by saying yes to work and letting it sit on our to-do list forever, but just slightly too low down to ever get done. But in our industry at least, there's a small overhead involved in just keeping that work around and passing the ownership of the task from person to person.

A more realistic rephrasing could be "if you're adding something to your todo list and it's not high enough priority to bump anything else, consider how much inefficiency it will cause long-term by it just sitting in your queue for months"

Maybe a little silly for your personal todo lists, but I think the idea has some applicability at a larger scale.

I think sometimes a "black hole" is exactly what's needed for these requests. OK, sure, it's noted, and that's what we'll do if we somehow have nothing better to do.

I remember attending a lecture about how to do well in the academic world well back at university decades ago, where the lecturer quoted another (famous) researcher who had a personal rule for incoming requests. Either he did it now or he did it never. Now is not literally now, but close.

Just saying no and not pretending that you might do can also be helpful in other ways. For instance, you or someone else might then realize that to get something like this done, it needs to be made much easier to do.

I've personally just finished planting 450 meters of windbreaking bushes around my orchard. Now, I should have done that four years ago - but I came up with a fancier plan, to put it on top of an embankment, and it would get rid of some of the traffic noise, and I had a guy with lots of soil in spare - great plan, except that person was really slow to respond and was actually depending on another person, and I had to get the municipality to agree, and... as it turns out, the required level of social energy to push this through was just not happening for me in my spare time. So after four years, my wife made me scrap the idea, then I almost immediately realized that hey, I could just plant the damn bushes, and here we are, a few months later, and they're out there and looking great, eight different species, future homes of birds and other wildlife.

Exactly, it does not make sense at all. The "queue" is not the main thing and "buying" is the main thing. The "economist" thinking here is akin to "Lets not make everyone rich, lets make everyone poor"

> The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible.

If there continuously is a queue, the stall owner doesn’t lose a sale when somebody walks away, and, if the owner is smart, doesn’t lose any produce, as they shouldn’t prepare more than they can, at maximum speed, sell before closing time.

It's also a bizarre example, because there's already a very simple solution from fast food.

Sometimes you can serve customers about as quickly as it takes for them to order and pay (e.g. hotdogs) and then there's typically no queue, or if you can't keep up and the queue is intolerably long like in this example, then they take your order and give you a number which gets called out when you're done.

This is exactly how a popular food truck would work at a fair, and you don't wait in a queue for ages, you mill around a bit and you come back when your food's ready.

I thought he was going to say that each new person goes in front of the person currently being served. This would motivate people to complete their orders as fast as possible.

I hope my ignorance can be forgiven, but every time I see economist lit it comes off as incredibly reductive. There's always something (like the secondary fight-night line you mention) that seems intuitively obvious to me but gets glossed over. Am I just ignorant?

> Am I just ignorant?

No. Economics academia is an "emperor's new clothes" field. They generate enormous amounts of dense, complex-sounding literature, and most if it is as you describe. It's never practical.

Sometimes there are interesting models that help to understand things that happened in the past, but as a field, economics seems unable to predict anything that will happen in the future (even on a fundamental level) and therefore can't seem to graduate to the level of science.

And if you are able to do that most likely you will find yourself in a hedge fund but not in the academia.

It's like this because they start from postulates that are contrary to reality. The idea that elements in an economic systems act in a rational way, or that there is an "invisible hand" that drives the markets, or that the markets operate in equilibrium, these are all ad hoc ideas that have no basis in reality. I classify it more like a kind of economic theology.

Yeah, that rational markets bit I keep hearing about sounds more like an example of proof that the markets we have are not rational. Like; "IF the markets WERE rational, they would probably do thing" and then thing is something that is observably not happening.

The purpose of economics is to explain complex interaction between systems. Analogy is a powerful communication tool. Such phrases allow us to communicate and reason about systems.

The concepts raise the standard of policy development. Consider how much easier it is to discuss a proposal thanks to 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. Those few words serve as a shorthand for a dynamic. Without it you might need to spend half an hour stepping people through the dynamic each time you wanted to refer to it, and you would lose people along the way.

Assuming the rationality of economic actors goes wrong primarily because economists don’t know what “rationality” is and come up with weird accounts for what “rational” behavior would be under given circumstances. They aren’t talking about “rational” behavior in the sense laymen use the term.

The “invisible hand” is also something that actually does exist and is straightforward to explain. It’s the tendency individuals making decisions in their own self-interest to find others with compatible self-interest as the motivation to make a trade. Every mutually self-interested transaction adds up to a total gain for the overall economy because each side makes the trade precisely because they judge the other’s offer to be of higher value to them. The key to demystifying the observation is the insight that “value” is a judgement made by individuals in relation to their own lives, not some inherent property that can be determined apart from individuals value judgements.

Economics is an extremely political science, a lot of common knowledge about what economists believe/predict/do is probably wrong. There is about as much visibility into what economics actually predicts as into physics, mathematics or any other science.

Most economics is quoted to try and score points in political debates where the lines are already drawn, conclusions already reached and people are mainly looking for tools to push their preferred solution. In such an environment, you might expect to see an enormous amount of very low quality economics content - probably full of motivated reasoning if you look for it.

It doesn't say much about the state of the field, more about how hard it is to find the field in amongst the dross. Eg, it is reasonably clear that most people writing about about Marxism or Keynesianism haven't read Marx or Keynes wrote.

The article should have clarified one more assumption: In a Landsburg's queue, it is compulsory for everyone arriving at the scene to *join the queue immediately*. Otherwise, people would just swarm around the head of the queue, fighting to join the queue as soon as the current customer gets served. In the following discussions, I assume such swarms are successfully prohibited.

# For those who end up going home

For those who end up going home, a traditional queue is still more efficient.

In a Landsburg's queue, if you decided to go home, it must be that there has been too many people joined the queue ("the queue got full"). *Their arrival takes time*. You would have waited for quite some time when you decided to bail out.

A traditional queue, on the other hand, allows those who end up going home to choose to do so immediately upon arriving at the scene. You arrive at the scene, look at the queue, judge that it would take unacceptably long period of time before you can get served ("it's currently full"), and decide to go home. You never join the queue. You wait for zero seconds.

# Arranging early arrivals is important *Filtering for fans.* In the book _The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life_, Landsburg himself stated that some businesses would prefer to serve fanatic patrons over mediocre customers. In an ordinary queue, customers can prove their loyalty by *arranging to arrive early*. On the other hand, by attaching the probability of getting served directly to the probabilistic nature of when one arrives, a Landsburg's queue does not allow/support proving patronage with early arrivals.

*An ordinary queue is an auction.* One of the main arguments that Landsburg proposed is that an ordinary, first-in-first-out queue is inefficient because it is not a market. I disagree to some extent. Let's re-examine the act of arranging early arrivals. By arriving early, you sacrifice the liberty of arranging the day's tasks liberally, often risking postponing a couple of other chores to the next day and/or losing opportunities for spending the morning somewhere else. This *cost of flexibility and opportunity* is a bid[^1] for guarantee/priority of service. Yes, it's still not a market where you trade spots in the queue, but its auction-like nature makes it a much closer implementation than Landsburg's queue.

[^1]: Well, it's technically a payment, since you don't get your money back should you lose the auction (i.e., decide to bail out from the queue). However, since it's not a game of chance, I can't call it a gamble either.

> In a Landsburg's queue, it is compulsory for everyone arriving at the scene to join the queue immediately. Otherwise, people would just swarm around the head of the queue, fighting to join the queue as soon as the current customer gets served. In the following discussions, I assume such swarms are successfully prohibited.

That’s still a non-physical solution because you can’t actually operationalize that rule.

Tim Hartford addresses this: “ the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps”

He’s using it to explain reverse logic, and then moves onto the more practical application in a todo list (discussed elsewhere in the comment tree).

I just feel bad for the one ‘good actor’ who is never going get a coffee at the Christmas market.

Yeah - the stalls have the same capacity, the same consumer demand is present, but now we have fights!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com