Week 4 Lab: Lab 4 — The Wait Bill

Put a number on the waiting your system produces, three different ways, and then argue about which number you would be willing to publish.

15 March 2027

Before the lab#

Bring your Queue Census data — yours, or a classmate’s if your own queue turned out to be unmeasurable. We are going to put a price on it.

In the lab#

Costing, three ways. Take your queue’s total person-hours per day and cost it under three different valuations:

1. every hour valued identically, at the median local wage;
2. every hour valued at what that specific population plausibly earns;
3. every hour valued at zero, which is the valuation the organisation running the queue is currently, implicitly, using.

Write all three numbers on the board next to your queue’s name.

The argument. Then we have the argument the numbers force, and it is the first properly contested session of the semester. Valuation (2) is the economically orthodox one, and it will tell you to serve the wealthy first. Valuation (1) is the one most people’s instincts prefer, and it is not a measurement — it is a moral commitment wearing a spreadsheet. Valuation (3) is what almost every real system does, and it is not neutral either; it is the one that produces the 300,000 hours in the lecture.

You will be asked to state which you would put in a public report, and why. You may change your mind later in the semester — several people do, in both directions, usually around week 8 — but you have to commit today.

Afterwards#

Keep the three numbers. When you write the final design brief you will have to state what your queue optimises for, and this is the lab where most people first notice that they had been assuming an answer.

Act I ends here. Next week the discipline knob starts turning.