5 ms·

> 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, intui

by nojs 5y ago

> 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!

alignItems 5y ago
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.
blorgle 5y ago
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.
- iamthemonster 5y ago
  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.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    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.
  - olau 5y ago
    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.
- ngc248 5y ago
  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"
- Someone 5y ago
  > 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.
pksebben 5y ago
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?
- smt88 5y ago
  > 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.
  - double_nan 5y ago
    And if you are able to do that most likely you will find yourself in a hedge fund but not in the academia.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    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.
    - pksebben 5y ago
      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.
    - cturner 5y ago
Kluny 5y ago
Yeah - the stalls have the same capacity, the same consumer demand is present, but now we have fights!
iamthemonster 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
NLips 5y ago
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).
tslmy 5y ago
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.
- SilasX 5y ago
  > 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.
steveylang 5y ago
I just feel bad for the one ‘good actor’ who is never going get a coffee at the Christmas market.

by nojs 5y ago

alignItems 5y ago

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.

blorgle 5y ago

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.

iamthemonster 5y ago
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.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  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.
- olau 5y ago
  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.
ngc248 5y ago
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"
Someone 5y ago
> 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.

pksebben 5y ago

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?

smt88 5y ago
> 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.
- double_nan 5y ago
  And if you are able to do that most likely you will find yourself in a hedge fund but not in the academia.
- coliveira 5y ago
  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.
  - pksebben 5y ago
    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.
  - cturner 5y ago

Kluny 5y ago

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

iamthemonster 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

NLips 5y ago

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).

tslmy 5y ago

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.

SilasX 5y ago
> 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.

steveylang 5y ago

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