Air travel and health care got great for the wealthy and worse for everyone else | Hacker News Reader

Air travel and health care got great for the wealthy and worse for everyone else

vox.com

48 pointsnutshell899 comments

Air travel got way cheaper and more popular over the last two or three decades. Some of this is deregulation and technological innovation enabling lower fuel costs. Much more of this is because customers almost always choose the lowest cost airfare over all other choices. This is a constant pressure to reduce cost and features of the flight and reflects what the average coach customer actually wants. It is nothing to be mad about. Airlines are a low-margin industry, which in my mind trends towards nonexploitative.

If you look at proportions of revenue and costs, the premium seats of an airplane subsidize the cheap seats. And they get to the destination maybe 5 minutes earlier if they disembark first.

That's just a race to the bottom, people will choose the cheaper seat / airline when they see the prices in a list. However, I think it would be different if they saw the leg room difference and amenities. Also, short flight flyers dominate the markets and they care less about being packed into a dirty shoebox with no amenities for two hours to pay $5 less on a ticket.

A race to the bottom seems like it is a pretty good thing in this case.

People are reasonably well-informed of the difference between the different levels of seating. To pretend otherwise is to claim ignorance of how many up-sell screens every airline tries to push in front of you during ticket purchase. Seating information is built-in to the ticket purchase process, and there are also third-party websites available just for the purpose of telling you about seating.

"Premium economy" tickets still cost less than the cheapest tickets did in the past.

>short flight flyers dominate the markets

There are different planes for different lengths, I think.

One problem is no one is paying for the externalities of air pollution and noise pollution and fuel resource extraction issues of soil and water pollution until decades later, and in the USA government subsidizes air travel to rural areas and smaller airports. The alternative is maybe we do not need to travel so much and do not have to make it cheaper for people in rural areas to travel by plane.

If the people who run the society never have to deal with its problems, the problems will never be fixed.

This is unrestrained capitalism's natural progression. Just look at the Guilded Age. Capitalism increases the total size of the pie (GDP) but at the same time actively shifts its concentration more and more towards the top (those who already have ownership, instead of those who simply work). Without balancing mechanisms keeping that new wealth distributed, this is simply what you get.

After the Great Depression, and then doubly so after the rise of Communism as western countries were trying to keep their citizens from having any reason to go down that path, we had a golden age of capitalist societies that also had appetites for social investment. With nothing over the past 50 years really keeping that a priority for the rich, we've started sinking back into a pre-depression structure.

A more thorough analysis (which has been posted on HN before I think): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-refo...

*Gilded Age. Whoops.

tl;dr

The article is a book review/author interview.

The author of the book has a grievance. Rich people can pay to avoid waiting, inconvenience, and hassle. It isn't fair. the author also expresses the opinion this leads to much resentment in the have nots.

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