I was giving a lecture today, in a room where the lights were very bright.

The screen my presentation was on was almost invisible against the glare and a student asked if I could turn the lights down. No problem, this seems like a perfectly reasonable request. I walked over to the light switch and stopped. The lights must stay on.

Seems a little harsh you may think, but this wasn't my choice.

Some time ago, probably when nobody noticed, a team of engineers changed the light fittings in many of the lecture rooms and labs removing any switches or dimmers. They were replaced by little holes, which, if you had the special key, allowed you to dim the lights. But me, being only a lecturer, the one who is actually using the room for the purpose to which it was intended, has been given no key and will never be given a key. Nobody has a key. The lights stay on – super bright and uncontrollable.

They will turn themselves off completely if nothing in the room moves for a while - something that happens eerily often in the corridor outside my office.

No control.

No choice.

Decisions made on our behalf by people who do not have to live by those decisions.

No doubt there are reasons for this but these were never given (although I have so far been unable to think of any reason whatsoever somebody would make it impossible to turn lights down in a lecture room).

Decisions are made, things are done.

What we really need, every now and again, is for a group of managers, politicians or economists to sit around a table at a meeting that has been scheduled to run for two hours and for one of them to say, right at the start,

"We shouldn't really do anything. Why don't we go and play golf?"

And for everybody to agree.

Not convinced?

In 2004, Edward Prescott and Finn Kydland won the Nobel prize for economics for a theory which basically stated that the less governments do to manipulate the economy, the better that economy functioned. It didn't matter which system you lived under, capitalist, communist, republic, monarchy... what mattered was that the people knew how the system worked and that it didn't change in any way which stopped them from knowing this.

Given any system which did not change to fast, society (people) would find a way to live with it, thrive and be successful. It was the acts of government themselves which caused the problems.

But of course people in power just can't stop asserting that power.

And to the man or woman who stopped me dimming the lights:

Stop. Go and play golf. I'd rather your salary was paid for you to just enjoy yourself, than for you to do anything else at all.