Author Archives: Kevin L

Teachers’ Day Celebrations. Too bad the highlight was something more intellectual. While I had lunch with a couple of classmates (Pei Shan, Yu Shan, Yong Xian, Peng Sing and Jiahao), Pei Shan started talking about ‘The Time Travelers’ Wife‘ (by Audrey Niffenegger) and that got me talking about the Concept of Time I have formulated almost exactly a year ago. I thought it was a very simple illustration of time but I was fully aware of its limitations. I was expecting Yong Xian (who does Physics H3) to be like one of the first to comprehend my model and start questioning its validity. Well, she kind of disappointed me. But anyway, I thought of a question for myself to ponder over on my way home.

In my model, the entire spatial dimension is encapsulated in the Time dimension and this presents a problem. It conflicts with Einstein’s postulations of time slowing down for one experiencing high speed. Einstein’s model is such that any object would constantly traverse at the speed of light, except when it is at rest, all of the object’s speed is focused on travelling along the time axis, which would mean that it experiences the full force of time. When the object is in motion however, it begins to traverse in the spatial dimension with some speed as well, this speed is then deducted from the Time dimension and this makes the time slow down for the object experiencing motion. Since time itself travels at the light speed, once an object attains light speed in the spatial dimension, time for it stops and thus that’s the fastest it can go. This model doesn’t fit into my concept of time because my over-simplified model assumes everything to be traversing in time at the same speed (ie. everything in reality, on the ball is traveling along the exist of time at light speed). That’s to say that my model conflicts with Special Relativity. That’s the question I was expecting Yong Xian to ask but too bad – I thought of it myself.

In a bid to reconcile my model of time with cases of Special Relativity, I have to make a little modification. I make a bold claim that the ball of reality is rubbery, and therefore can be subjected to distortion. I apologize for imitating Einstein when it comes to the use of geometric distortion to circumvent problems of temporal-spatial convergence in cases of Special Relativity – I must say it’s really useful. When stuff in reality is subjected to motion (ie. traversing spatial dimension), it stretches the surface of reality. The way it stretch is such that the point of reality that the object at motion is on, moves against the direction of the axis of time. Relatively, as long as the object is not at light speed, the net movement is still forward in time, but the experience of time will be slower, slower than the rest of reality. The rest of reality continues moving along the time exist at the same way, albeit with projections protruding from it as a result of stuff speeding through space. Because the speed of light is so fast, our normal kind of travelling, even the speed of sound, would only produce little ‘humps’ on the surface of reality. To produce a ‘projection’ would require objects to be traveling at speeds that particles in particle-accelerators move.

The ball of reality at that vertex stretches out such that the corresponding value on the time-axis remains constant for any object at the speed of light.

The ball of reality is like a rubber ball, thus the name for the hypothesis of this model of time. The distortions that this rubber ball is capable of ensures that not all parts of reality moves at the same speed along time, and thus internalizes the whole of Special Relativity. As the object decelerates, it returns back to the rest of reality and thus experience everything like others. Essentially, the existence of the object is lengthened in terms of a God’s perspective but for itself, because of the slowing down of time, its motion within the frame of reference is also slowed down and thus it experiences effectively no difference. The Einstein’s method of moving into the future would involve stretching reality such that time stops for you for a while, and so the rest of reality tumbles on far from you along the time axis. When you return to the rest of reality, you are suddenly allowing yourself to speed through all the time that the rest of reality has already traverse and then getting back in touch with the rest of reality. Your experience of time is less than the others, and you successfully moves to reality, but in a way that’s within the constraints of the model. In this sense, time travel forward is still plausible, though not in the way others would normally conceive.

Armed with such a visualization, I challenged myself once more by thinking about what happens if the object tries to move faster than light in spatial dimension. Einstein would say it’s impossible because the speed can only be shared between the spatial and the time dimension and there’s a ‘conservation of speed’ that limits the total speed in all dimensions to that of light speed. I suspect that if you travel faster than light, there’s a chance you can move against the direction of the time axis, but you will tear the rubber ball of reality. Or perhaps, you’ll just lift yourself off the rubber ball because it can no longer stretch beyond that and enter a void. The elasticity of the rubber ball is thus limited by this constrain on speed. Unfortunately, we can’t think of it in the sense of elasticity because if you continually travel at light speed, you are effectively stretching the surface of reality infinitely – then comes the question of what is light and how it actually manifest on this rubber ball. To account for all that, I must say that time cannot stop for any object besides light. If an object is to travel at light speed, it’ll have to behave like light, which means it has to vanish from the axis of time, and exist only in spatial reality. That being said, anything that stretches the ball infinitely would leave this uni-directional dimension and exist solely in the spatial dimension. Therefore, to exist in both time and space, the object must only tend towards light speed and will never attain it. Here, the limitations of having space encapsulated in time presents a problem – one needs to be able to accommodate the notion that spatial reality is indeed contained in the ball but in some other sense just as time in felt to be contained in our space (ie. they contain each other and it really only depends on perspective; which is why I highlighted this issue as a bias that my means of visualization would pose). Hence, to cease existing in temporal dimension means the object (as well as all light we experience) are not contained in this rubber ball model.

Having said all that, I must stress that the ‘Rubber Ball Hypothesis’ is not a scientific theory but a proposed visualization of what is time and how it works and a plausible model in explaining the impossibility of time travel. I welcome modifications to overcome the existing limitations and biasness that is inherent in the model even if it’s in the expense of complicating the geometrical visualization of the model.

For the first time in my life, a thumbdrive failed me, causing majority of the files inside to become corrupted and unusable. Worst still, it’s my latest 2GB Imation Flash Drive – FlashGo. Even the 64MB USB Flash drive that I bought more than 5 years ago is still working well for me. More than 500MB of my data are wiped out, not deleted or lost but simply corrupted – it doesn’t really make much difference actually. I bought this drive for a price of 50 bucks, which was quite a steal and I got it right at the beginning of the year. I didn’t expect it to screw up that early in its life. This is a disaster. Compounding on my problems is the fact that most of the files inside are single copy files that I downloaded from the net, like my academic notes and also some important summaries I have compiled myself.

This is freaking ridiculous, I wonder if I can sue the manufacturer for this. Forget it, I won’t have enough energy to settle such a matter in court. But there’s something important I learnt. All the files which I have decided to share with friends, uploading them online or sending them out to people were in most sense, retrievable. It really pays to be kind and I sort of learnt this lesson many times over in my entire life. Good thing most of the time I was on the ‘lucky’ side, where I did help people and benefit from it, rather than to grief in retrospect that I should have been kind.

Start looking for people to copy the files from…

It’s amazing how ill-developed our memories are when we were young, or perhaps we just have terrible memory capacity. My sister (Let’s call her Jib) who was working on the Soundcard from Creative for her Project Work, expressed awe in the fact that Sound Blaster came out only after I (her brother) was born. She thought that everything was already rather hi-tech by the time we (our recent cohort) were born. I told her it wasn’t, as I remember the times when my mother was using Windows 3.1 and we had the huge 5.25-inch floppy disks for storing minute bytes of stuff. After that…

Jib: I only remembered the times when we had Windows 93…
Vib: There’s no such thing as Windows 93…
Jib: Erm, oh, it’s Windows 98…
Vib: Nope, it’s Windows 95 -_____________-||

Well, this brings back lame memories about the times we had to use the DOS command prompt to kickstart safe mode whenever the computer hanged and we had this really cool game which was 3D, but we have to use the DOS command prompt to start it and soon we got tired of typing long strings of commands that we gave up playing the game altogether. By the way, for anyone who didn’t realise, DOS stands for ‘Dirty Operating System’, it was not invented by Bill Gates. It was originally an OS invented by a firm known as ‘Spyglass’, and named Q-DOS (for Quick-Dirty Operating System) and Bill Gates bought the license from them and modified it a little before renaming it as MS-DOS. Glad we got this dirt off our XPs.

Kwang Guan asked me if I am a lifehacker (actually he simply implied that I am a lifehacker in our conversation) and I told him I am not. In fact, I am only introduced to this concept a couple of days back and wouldn’t have the sort of free time to study time saving techniques (pretty paradoxical huh?). While I only got to know about lifehacking and all those lame nonsense, I seem to have been following their sort of philosophy in the way I do things since a couple of years ago.

I still can’t be too sure what’s lifehacking but I know some ways of organizing life, saving time and maximizing productivity like:

Reading notes when you are on the bus

Writing reminders on a notepad so that you don’t forget

Getting a TV book (just whatever book you like) which you read only during TV programme commercial breaks

Conning yourself into working like crazy in school by believing you will be slacking when you get home

Reading lecture notes during lectures so that you don’t have to go through them at home

Sending good ideas to the future using futureme.org so that they won’t be lost while you are occupied with the present reality

Emailing yourself reminders to email important people or send out important letters so that you do that immediately when you check your inbox the next time

Get your hands on a book whenever you go out, you never know when you have a short break to read a couple of lines

Turning on the TV only when there’s something on which you want to watch; try hard not to channel-surf

Try not to get a facebook account if Yi Da tells you to do it…

Alternatively, if you already have an account, deactivate it…

These are life-saving techniques sometimes, at least the lifehackers think so.

Perhaps influenced by Yi Da, but more because of my curiosity about Singapore’s history, National Day Holidays seems appropriately (though not necessarily meaningfully) spent on reading Mr Ngiam Tong Dow’s book. Rather than to review his book in this entry, I would say I am choosing to thank the book for the sort of thinking I have been forced into and the insights I have gained about Singapore. Reading the book, I do sense a rather strong nostalgia, which strange enough, I felt I share. Never been in favour of public sector jobs, never even ever been a administration career, and in fact never been into the society, I must admit it feels extremely weird to feel the excitement of nation building as I flipped through Ngiam Tong Dow’s personal reflections of the policies he have contributed and participated in implementing. Maybe that’s what’s pushing Yi Da towards his goal.

For me, the book has offered me valuable information about the past of Singapore, the stories of how our forefathers built and transformed Singapore. Because our nation is so small, I believe the core of the transformation can only lie within the public sector, the civil service. The vision of our leaders, was important but perhaps overemphasized in our social studies syllabuses. I am interested in the thought processes, the things that were going through the minds of the administrators, the policy-makers and those who implement the policies at those points of time. Our leaders often offer us the most pragmatic explanation that the perspective of a rational governor can give – forcing us down with the weight of undeniable logic. I thought that if we look deeper into the concerns of our government, the emotional tirades they might be going through within themselves, we can get a better picture of how the system erected came to be so sound and steady.

Going through the book really makes me appreciate our achievements better, and more forgiving towards any blunders that our state has committed, but I observe this particular recurring idea that I thought is important. We can no longer look back into the past to learn what to do in the future and we (as in Singapore and its rulers) must look into the future in the way we have done, in the past. Change must be better accepted. During the time of independence, the organization of the public sector was built upon the simple stuff left from the colonial government and the flexibility offered to the public service administrators were immense. I have decided that the idea that administrators are inflexible and rigid only came about in recent decades when the system stabilized and people became too comfortable. Today, the huge structure we have erected is producing difficulties within the system. The tradition we have laid down have become a burden to people today (which very much parallel some other institution’s student council as far as I know).

On talents I think the monopoly on talents that our public sector have is something very real. As I flip through the scholarship brochures of the major scholarship providing bodies in our nation (most of which, in fact almost all of which are public service), I realized our ‘local talents’, are all tied up in the public service. I saw one Cambridge Masters Economist in the police force, probably already served pass his bond period; and there’s also those engineers from top international universities, working on administrative stuff. Of course, I am not saying they are not suited for the job or that they would have greater opportunities outside public service; but the point is that the system should not be aiming to produce a couple of really top people and then putting them into public service, while peripheral achievers (nice term for those who fail to make it to the extreme top) fail to be educated in top universities (because they have no money), stifling their opportunities. My point? Spread the funds out, let more people who truly deserves it enjoy overseas education (with subsidies) and make the gradient uphill less steep.

The existing situation is such that there’s this pile that goes all the way to the top and it probably can only accommodate a few person. Everyone fights to climb up the pile because no one is allowed to be in-between and then finally the ‘few’ are selected and poof, even those who are almost reaching now have to be on par with those who are right at the bottom.

Thai Police makes their staff wear Hello Kitty armbands for flouting minor laws as a means to shame them. It is to ensure discipline. The use of shame in Asian society as a means of punishment have become useful so much so that we are already at risk of desensitizing our people – probably accounting for ever-increasing shameless acts (which I shall not elaborate).

When I was a child, there were a couple of stuff I held in firm belief, which in retrospect, would send me giggles.

The Salvation Army exist to salvage unwanted toys

Albert Einstein’s hairstylist is named Robert J. Van de Graaff

Adolf Hitler & Charlie Chaplin were brothers

English dragons were predecessors of dinosaurs; Chinese dragons are predecessors of Man

Arabs invented Algebra, so Chinese invented Calculus

PAP is a giant chain kindergarten operating business that provided pre-school education to masses

Windows is to Microsoft like Apple is to Macrohard (I was waiting for this name to appear on the papers)

If you had landed properly on your feet, committing suicide by jumping off high buildings would be quite a feat

If you put enough ice into a cup of water to make it cold enough, you can get a huge lump of ice the size of the cup

Rocks are harder than stones

If you flap your hands really fast, you can fly

I seriously think I was once an idiot.

I don’t have a knack for criticizing things I have learnt. Most of the criticisms are learnt from other books or articles and then reproduced in my own words when they are deemed consistent with my logic. The same is very true for economics – sometimes I discover an enlightening piece of critique, which I go on to extend its analogies, examples and finding more evidence to substantiate its claims. Other times I reject it with a joke about its relevance and decide that there are lunatics around the world anyway. That being said, I seem to form a double standard when I meet with something prescribed in the holy document known as the ‘syllabus’. Just as the responsible, unquestioning syllabus-following teacher, I suppress any doubts I have about the knowledge to be passed on to the next generation and blindly follow the examiner remarks made by UCLES.

Lately, I have begun to wonder if I have been doing the right thing. No doubt my abilities in Sciences and limited scope of exploration in the field has empowered me insufficiently for the duty of pointing out the mistakes of our mentors. I did, however, point out problems with the knowledge we were taught when I was doing Primary School sciences because I was really interested in them in the past. The discouragement I got later (teachers told me to ignore my outside readings) played a rather critical role in limiting my personal exploration. Yet in the field of Geography, and perhaps also Literature, I have been constantly encouraged to explore and challenge the limits of analysis of the ‘experts’. Teachers welcomed fresh perspectives on old issues, exploration of new interpretations on old poems no matter how well-studied they have been. In retrospect, these great teachers I got were more of exceptions than rule. But I guess I have been lucky.

More than 20 months ago, the subject of Economics trotted along into my life. It is a wonderful subject that intersects several disciplines that I have always been interested in – Moral Philosophy, Social Issues, Multiple Agent Interactions (or Social Networks as I used to know it as), Anthropology and perhaps even Logic. Some say it’s ‘common sense made difficult’ but the dynamic nature of what truly constitutes common sense in today’s world makes theorizations of this social construct rather vital in our study of many other things. The tools of Economics, ‘Marginal Analysis’, ‘Demand & Supply Curves’, and convenient assumptions of ‘perfect rationality’ & ‘ceteris paribus‘ came to me easily because I knew what the subject seek to study and thus the things it needs to get models working. As a social science, I expected a degree of self-exploration bestow upon me by teachers that would be similar to that of Geography. I expect fresh analysis in the subject, previously unexplored to be welcomed and heralded as an indication of precocious abilities. Yet truth have been otherwise since I was connected into the Economics circuit in the Academia. I am not sure whether this is restricted to the rather closed education system, merely my College, or that it applies to the whole of Singapore (though I am very confident it doesn’t apply throughout the entire field itself globally – or it should surely have crumbled quite thoroughly).

When asked to cite factors of a particular phenomenon, or concept (such as demand), an answer that is not previously laid down would quickly be dismissed as implausible, irrelevant or at best, insignificant – true common sense was never evoked in the process. Just take for example the concept of demand. All factors of demand (as well as its elasticity) have to be non-price. I have, however, decided to evoke common sense and realized from this small-scale activity that the concept has to be much more complex than it is currently practiced. Say the demand of a good starts rising and rising because of a non-price factor initially. We have learnt that this will merely caused translation of the demand function. But thinking about it: Won’t the changes in units of the y-axis have any effect on the elasticity? In other words, if demand for something rises (say because of fashion), the elasticity will also change once the price starts climbing. In actuality, changes to demand is not so simple and changes between elasticity and the function itself cannot possibly be isolated concepts. If such fundamental common sense is not even expected of us, how can students, or even teachers be trusted to analyze concepts that involves even more variables. Ceteris Paribus must be challenged sufficiently and not ignored. I have seen economics teachers highlighting that Ceteris Paribus is not a significant thing to question because it is hard to quantify changes in the real world.

Yet these discussions I attempted above would be easily considered heresy in my classroom or lecture theater. At best, they are thought to be ‘divergent’ thinking that should be left to the break-time discussion and limited just to that time. When examinations come, be prepared to fail if you attempt to explore these territories charted during coffee breaks. I have come to realized, that our education promotes nothing close to the pursuit of knowledge. It merely tries to ‘train’, ‘instill’, ‘inculcate’ (do note that other synonyms includes ‘brainwash’, ‘persuade’, ‘coerce’) people into model agents that would promote growth in the economy and possibly stability in the society. Thinkers can just suffer similar fate as Socrates or Galileo Galilei. Education systems did not progress beyond the ancient times of Church’s reign although social cultures did. I therefore, disagree with the idea of having an education system that teaches beyond the 3 ‘R’s (wRiting, Reading and aRithmetic). Schooling and the pursuit of knowledge should have little to do with each other besides the fact that the former leads to (or at least allows for) the latter.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. – Mark Twain

I didn’t have the intention of using the quote but it just seem to fit into today’s entry so nicely. But there’s one thing I cannot agree with Mark Twain in the quote. It would be too kind to simply tolerate the nonsense that our schooling is doing to us.

I love Economics but I can take on almost any job related to the subject, except teaching the subject itself. The thing about teaching Economics is that it bears a very high risk of misleading students and possibly even scaring them away from the subject. For me, as most of the knowledge on Economics is self-taught and I realised from this process that the inconsistency evident in the subject with a mixed of both quantitative & qualitative explanations that are incoherent makes it hard for a teacher to present the subject or to ‘teach’ it in the traditional sense. One must first appreciate the inherent flaws in the study of the subject, understand how the assumptions affect the fragile equilibria that textbooks claim to exist before working on the inner substance that would involve a lot of critical analysis. I therefore, refer to this whole body of theoretical knowledge as ‘Textbook Economics’.

One who qualifies as the messenger of ‘Textbook Economics’ (ie. an economics teacher) usually satisfy a few characteristic that prevents them from becoming true economist. Of course, I am making the assumption that economics teacher are working on the same things as economist (though often they are not). Teachers, as we have come to realised, is focused on maximizing the results of students and thus work based on the assessment. The bias-ness towards ‘Textbook Economics’ of our syllabus inevitably force teachers to mislead students on the subject more easily. Students would see the subject in a perspective that render the subject rather unreasonable and in some sense, overly elitist about the mathematical abilities of economic agents. At the back of their minds, they have a whole set of notions that drives them to believe that assumptions always saves the day – if the theory doesn’t work, it is because the assumptions have collapsed. The joke is that in our essay answers, this happens most of the time and eventually, what you get is a subject that generates useless models that makes wrong predictions and then get students to tell people how wrong the concepts are.

That is all about ‘Textbook Economics’. What our teachers have not revealed to us, is the beauty of the dream of an economist, the construction of models that enables us to study a gigantic network of interactions that has been with mankind since societies were formed. We are not told how to make use of the conceptual foundations to create tools for our analysis. Instead, we are forced fed pure opinions, much like the way science force-feeds conceptual truths that have no bearings on the physical world itself. But unlike science, Economics’ search for truth has not been a smooth one and revolutions in the subject has reduced it to a state of confusion. Still, it’s a good time to be in the subject of Economics because we now have sufficient computing power to model many realities that we have not been able to study in the past. These realities are scenarios that can potentially refute fundamental theories and allow us to eliminate a couple of axioms of the subject.

‘Textbook Economics’ pushes the responsibility of tearing down the nonsense presented by traditional theories of Economics to the students who find it hard to criticize the subject both due to their own immaturity when first exposed to the subject and also because of the cultural taboo of questioning authority (especially academic authority in the education system). In Singapore, it takes a curious mind and stubborn character to push for truths in academia. For Economics, being a subject that’s inherently unstable to begin with, the problem is harder to solve. Products of ‘Textbook Economics’ who have excelled in traditional assessments would thus have the characteristic of being detached from the knowledge, presenting a double standard with regards to the knowledge he presents and the truth he believes in. At the same time, they may delve into deeper nonsense if they make no attempt to question what they are learning.

‘Textbook Economics’ erects a high barrier to the real world. It is hard to get out of the comfortable position of mathematical precision coupled with a strong set of ‘morally sound’ arguments about free market (all the stuff about Parento Optimality – which is in fact never obtained although the averages comes close); and combined with a set of assumptions that can be easily pushed out as the scapegoat for any failure in predictions, ‘Textbook Economics’ is not vulnerable to assaults from newcomers into the subject. The ivory tower that houses it stays firm but is situated far from reality – though the practical useless-ness of ‘Textbook Economics’ is not fully understood and appreciated. Problems with ‘Textbook Economics’ operate at levels of microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomically, transport costs and irrationality or non-mathematical rationality of agents hinder the operation of the market. Ignorance of temporal dimension is another major blow to economic analysis that even Human Geographers have long realised (and thus decide to make use of their own social analysis tools and indicators instead) Macroeconomically, once the stupidity of agents get out of hand (too many people are irrational), the equilibrium system collapse because people over-react or under-react to changing conditions, producing thermostat-like oscillations in the system that never comes to rest.

I have essentially explained the implications of ‘Textbook Economics’ in our education of the subject and perhaps also why many students simply hate Economics. To pen down something about the world that you do not believe in is really hard – worse still for a person like me, who even knows that what I am to pen down during my Economics paper, is simply to satisfy the whims and fancies of examiners, assessors and my teachers, rather than for an inquiry into the subject in concern.

The following is an economic analysis of the experience at National Library presented in Lee Kong Chian’s Shelves.

The use for price mechanism as a means of resource allocation have been well understood by economists and commoners (at least in the intuitive sense) and the old library reference section system, whereby people with the money would willingly bring more stuff to the library, deposit them into the lockers that came in 20-cents or 50-cents variations and then enter the sections they desire with only the authorized materials. Those who are not willing to spend the money would not bring unauthorized materials and stick to just few pieces of plain paper when they need to go into the reference sections. There’s a couple of advantage to this system – it places a little barrier (the cost of the locker) between using the locker and not using it, thus allowing for excess capacity most of the time unless there is high demand for the lockers. We can also argue that the capacity of the reference section is reached when all the lockers are used because the barrier means that only those willing and able to use the lockers and yet with unauthorized items are admitted into the section. Those who don’t want to pay are kept out while those who didn’t bring unauthorized materials are welcomed since they pose no trouble to the library and the fact that they are compromising with the rules shows that they genuinely wants to make proper use of the library.

Removing the paid locker system is a major blow to this properly laid down resource allocation mechanism. People who are going to central lending but don’t want to carry their bags around can utilize excess capacity when demand has not peaked, without incurring any cost. Others who don’t want to pay and willing to leave their stuff at home now have the incentive to bring their stuff and use the lockers since they are free, unleashing excess demand that would otherwise not have existed. In both cases, there is free-ridership because of the cost-free lockers. Increasingly often, people who are willing and able to pay and thus urgently need to use the reference library is now unable to do it because they are carrying unauthorized materials. In the past, such case would be much rarer because the barrier strips the system of excess demand and allocates resources properly, allowing the full capacity to be utilized only under very high demand conditions. The removal of the price mechanism from the picture creates great inconvenience and the cost we save from the lockers now translate to additional trips made to the lockers after discovering more and more items are actually unauthorized – in the past, the security guards understand that there’s a cost incurred for the lockers and thus would be helpful in picking out unauthorized stuff from you before you use the lockers (now they only do that after you locked up everything and go to the checkpoint).

The result of the policy? A over-utilization of the lockers and under-utilization of the reference library. Lockers are over utilized by free-riders who are not genuinely using the reference library or would otherwise have not need to use the lockers and the reference library is under-utilized because most locker users are not sincere about using the reference library and some don’t use it at all. Those who truly want to use it but arrived late (peak capacity of lockers utilized) are barred from using the reference library. Removing the price mechanism has removed an assessment of how much individuals need to use the reference library and made lives much more difficult for security guards who have to argue with library-goers who are unable to find available lockers. The strict rules governing the items authorized in the reference library is actually not the issue, although it is fully responsible for the need to ration locker spaces using the price mechanism. However, once the market is created, resource allocation have to be optimal and given the existing system, it is not.

The greatest joke about this issue is that there’s no market failure. We are able to extort a fee from people using the lockers and thus it need not be provided as a public good. Since when the price mechanism is utilized, there’s no [obvious] external cost & benefits, there’s no externalities to speak of. In other words, the inefficient resource allocation is purely a result of stubborn, uneconomic people implementing rather brainless policies. A thing to note is that the cost of the lockers is not dynamic but fixed and thus there’s no supply=demand kind of graph to sketch. People can always argue that 20-cents and 50-cents are too low for anyone to respond drastically and that we should be glad we are not charged the money because even with the fee, the scenario would still be the same and we are back to square one. That’s not true. Even if the eventual situation one is faced with, one can be sure that a lot of the locker users are much more genuine users (assuming there’s a continuum of false researcher to genuine ones) than for the case without the price mechanism in place.

I am no neoclassical economist. While I advocate the use of the market-style resource allocation method, I don’t think that the result of the system would be close to Parento Optimal equilibrium because of limitations such as unwilling people who doesn’t know they need to pay for the lockers before they had gone to the library. Imperfections exist but still, it beats the senseless, information-less system that is created when the price mechanism is removed.