Saturday, May 01, 2010

The queue

...is the most basic unit of civilization.

It's all there: the social contract, Pareto optimality, the principle of fairness, the power of norms. All the frustration and safety of the democratic process.

You can tell so much about a nation by the way its people stand in lines.

3 comments:

Roy said...

never thought of it that way. I always seem to complain about it

km said...

Queue pasa?

hopscotch said...

...and how sometimes the queues are so many and so close together that they look like a crowd, a potential for chaos...