How to make line formation more efficient?

Does this article suggest using a mirror and a razor blade?

If a line-placement market existed, you could pay the guy in front of you to leave, or take up a collection among the people behind you and then pay the guy in front to leave. But you don't because 1) social conventions make paying for a place in line awkward; 2) negotiating a price is a hassle; and 3) you're worried about the "free riders" behind you mooching off your investment. Because there is no market, you and the guy up front miss out on a mutually beneficial exchange, which is the precise economic definition of inefficiency.

Or perhaps 4) None of this has ever even occurred to you because you're not a living, breathing asshole.

how this works: slate pays some economist to write a bullshit 700-wd "column" every week to demonstrate to everyone why you hated economics majors in college and remind you to sell your copy of "freakonomics" so you never even have to look at it again

WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY ALWAYS NAMED STEVEN?

otm. landsburg's an idiot (xpost)

Author waits in a grocery checkout line, idling fingering the change in his pocket and wonders -- if I gave all my loose change to that blue-haired lady in front of me with her coin purse out, would she just fuck off and let me cut in front of her? Spends next three minutes wishing hard that it were true. Goes home and writes a brilliant** article for Slate magazine.

**No actual brilliance warranted or implied.

Actually, I have to give him credit - that water fountain is one of the greatest pieces of sophistry I have EVER read.

No I take that back. Good sophistry should at least appear to make sense.

if we assume a can opener, an economist stranded on a desert island would not starve while waiting to be rescued

Every time a new economist arrived on the island he would be placed ahead of Landsburg, which would be efficient because eventually Landsburg might just give up and die.

This is a bit of a joke, right? He kind of admits it, in his water-fountain example, when he says the ideal / "incentivized" situation is to approach the fountain right as the previous person stops drinking -- the competition to put yourself in that situation is currently known, in English, as a "line." He is just displacing your energy from an organized, predictable line to a coy watch-and-wait from a few feet farther away, which is ... kind of like privatizing Social Security, or something.

The swiftian joke possibility did cross my mind.

*checks calendar*

It's not April 1, so I have to assume this economist is an idiot.

surprise buttsecks to scare off others
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2387/1804215274_d15424172f.jpg

it's pretty funny but not as funny as that guy who wants voters to have to pass economics-literacy tests.

Is this the line for stabing that guy with a mechanical pencil? Right, thanks, I'll just go to the front.

what's slate.com?

how great would it be if his next piece is some high-strung hypothetical economic analysis of the inefficiencies of the guy that kicked his ass for cutting in line at the fountain.

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