The queue

Where we have resource scarcity, the modern answer is to use money. For most people, saving up the large amounts of cash required for big purchases like a house would take far too long. Rental markets have a similar issue in some respects as well. In Stockholm where rent controls are in place, a common complaint is that it can take years to gain access to a house. The USSR was often maligned for its “bread queues”. But are queues really that bad? They are seen as a source of waste and inefficiency – why be in a queue when you could be doing anything else? 

Here in the UK, the queue is seen as something of a national sport and queueing etiquette is a large part of the national identity, somehow despite our embrace of money and debt in much of our day to day lives. Just two years ago, the death of the monarch Queen Elizabeth II attracted huge numbers of mourners and so the creation a queue which reached 10 miles long (although certain sections of the queue were sparser than others…) to pay their respects – a queue which developed a sort of identity of its own with some giving it amusing names such as the “QE II”.

Here in the UK at least then, the queue has a sort of dualism about it. It is both good and evil. Nobody really enjoys standing in a queue, especially if it seems avoidable. Nevertheless we can take some level of joy in the concept and the etiquette.

In defence of the queue, I would say it has a few things going for it: namely, it is fair, it is a manifestation of “fair play”. A fair queue does not really care how much money you have, you just have to wait. While I’m sure there are a good number of queues going which do not honour this and allow the wealthy to pay to skip the wait, in principle the queue is egalitarian in nature. A good queue is usually often transparent – you know where you are in it whereas wealth creates secrecy and a lack of clarity for many.

Meanwhile money is not totally free from being a waste of time, either. If you don’t have enough money, one option you might take is to save up. Saving up takes time, maybe as much as you might wait in a queue for. Of course the financial system has a sort of cheat code for this saving problem: the loan. A bank can effectively create money to give it to you (with some constraints around reserve levels, etc.), so long as you commit to paying it back. You can have what you want now so long as you’re willing to pay back even more in the future. Surely the queue is defeated here as an economic construct.

But is it? 

What if we queued instead of paid?

Imagine we’ve abolished money and all scarce resources are now accessed by queuing for them. We improve the system somewhat by implementing a virtual queueing system at least so people don’t have to physically stand in line for everything. That part is fairly obvious. But somebody needs a roof over their head today, they can’t just wait in a permanent state of homelessness for their place in the queue to come up in a decade from now.

Is there some way we could justify putting somebody up the queue? The main drawback of doing so is it is unfair to everyone else in the queue. Doing this means that they have to wait even longer than they would have done otherwise. But what if that didn’t have to happen. What if we had an equivalent to a loan that we could apply to a queue? The answer turns out to be relatively straightforward: you can skip the queue so long as you commit to working to create the same resource you’re accessing, and enough of it that not only is your own usage covered but also a little more such that the queue is actually sped up by you taking this agreement to skip the queue in exchange for your labour.

However we can quickly point out some drawbacks in such a system: if I want to buy a loaf of bread, is it then very efficient for me to go in and only produce two loaves of bread – not to mention the training of many millions of people who would want to do this. And of course not everyone is suited for every occupation to begin with. What if the employer or the conditions are unsuitable? Are you then stuck in a sort of debt bondage? 

Exchange in a queuing system

Therefore a system of exchange becomes desirable. We want to be in a situation where somebody can specialise in baking bread in order to pay off their house but again without “money” as such and with the option to access any resource they wish merely by queueing fairly for it. Perhaps we want to express something like “one average house is worth approximately 100,000 loaves of bread”. So perhaps instead of having an obligation to work at this specific organisation to create this exact resource, what the worker actually receives is then a kind of liability token, a record of their obligation to pay off the debt to society in general. Employers can offer to pay off this liability at some rate which is advertised in a similar way to regular employment – only instead of earning money, you only pay off your debts where they were taken by skipping the queues. 

How should the pay be decided? Perhaps one way is to determine this based off of the length of the queue. The length of the queue is, after all, essentially just a proxy for the supply/demand equilibrium so should be a perfectly sound pricing mechanism. This measure can also be used to determine the exchange rate between goods and services and hence how many liability tokens somebody takes on for skipping the queue less how long they’ve already waited in the queue.

Similarly if not enough people want to do a job because it is unpleasant or difficult, then we can safely assume that the queue will get longer assuming demand remains the same. But this should then push up the reward for anyone willing to work in this industry as the price for that labour is tied to the length of the queue. Hence the length of any of these queues should reach an equilibrium level which represents the balance between supply and demand. In essence then there are two prices: the liability price (from skipping the queue) and the patience price (from waiting in the queue)

Conclusion

This is probably enough for now, but I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on how we can replicate some fundamental aspects of the economy using an alien system.

We discussed the nature and culture of queues, how queues could be naively used to create a sort of economic system and the drawbacks as well as a potential solution to this by using a liability token based system of exchange. There are still a number of potential issues with this as with any other potential system. What do you think they are?