Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares
project-syndicate.org
project-syndicate.org
Friends with whom I discuss this proposal often say that many obese people cannot help being overweight – they just have a different metabolism from the rest of us.
To expand on the author's take on why this argument is weak, take for example nearsighted people. Nearsightedness is partly hereditary; similar to obesity, it can be exacerbated by certain choices, but some people are just bound to be nearsighted. Nearsightedness means paying for glasses (at least the deductible) and often paying a huge premium for sunglasses. Simply put: life isn't fair, and people are already paying different expenses just because of conditions they were born with.
Tony Webber, a former chief economist for the Australian airline Qantas, has pointed out that, since 2000, the average weight of adult passengers on its planes has increased by two kilos. For a large, modern aircraft like the Airbus A380, that means that an extra $472 of fuel has to be burned on a flight from Sydney to London.
That said, is such an initiative necessary, cost-saving, or beneficial to the customer? An Airbus A380 holds about 600 passengers. That comes out to about $0.75 per passenger per 2 kilograms.
A pretty average American man weights about 85kg. A very light American man (bottom 5%) weighs about 65kg. A very heavy American man (top 5%) weighs about 115kg. (Pulling data from this chart). This means that the lightest 5% of men would pay about $7.50 less for a Sydney-London flight than average, and the heaviest 5% of men would pay about $11.75 more. On a shorter, domestic flight like Chicago-NYC, those figures work out to maybe a $5 difference in ticket price between a 65kg man and a 115kg man - and that's not even counting in the extra costs associated with spending time on weighing passengers!
So with that taken into account, I don't think that this is the best idea. Maybe extremely heavy people who are literally spilling over into the seat next to them should be forced to purchase two seats or upgrade to a roomier first class seat, because it's not fair for the poor guy sitting next to him. But the weight-to-fuel-price argument seems to not be strong enough. Maybe it'll be worth revisiting if fuel prices climb significantly.
This! Every time I fly I'm nervous to see who I'll be sitting next to. I'm already cramped in my seat and I really don't need somebody else's fat (I don't mean to be rude here) taking my space. Not to mention invading my personal space. And then there's the matter of hygiene or lack there of. Airlines should really be doing what you are suggesting here.
Weight of its 467 passengers ex luggage, assuming 80kg average: 37.3 metric tons.
That 442 tons has to move as a whole regardless of how lean your diet is. So when you're paying for your flight ticket, extremely little of it is about moving the meat in your body. After all the overheads (salaries, fees, whatnot), whatever's left of the ticket that's paying for jet fuel has less than 10% of it spent on shifting your meat.
Extra luggage is more work for the airline - handlers, check-in staff, tracking, lost baggage recovery. It also means much longer queues resulting in poorer service for everyone. Extra meat weight is a trivial amount of work for the airline to deal with - it moves itself around and consumes the same resources as the 'little people'.
where does that figure come from?
> Extra luggage is more work for the airline
Extra pieces: maybe. Excess weight: nope.
I've been charged up to E100 for 3kg of luggage overweight (23kg allowed, my suitcase had 26kg). That didn't make sense to me when I looked at the guy behind me in the queue, who easily had 40kg more than me on his hips.
It's the pricing structure that is completely out of proportion and that needs to be brought back to something reasonable.
Really? It's the first two lines of my comment, specifically spaced out to make it clearer.
As for the other issue, excess weight is easy to convince the public about, especially now that they're doing more of the 'please standardise your luggage' where individual pieces also get weight limits (as you found).
Does the student have to pay more money at the gate in order to return home? If that student does not have the money, does the student have to leave luggage behind in order to make up for the weight? Will that be bad publicity for the airline?
Or the other way: suppose someone has a round-trip ticket from Australia to Maine to fulfill a dream of hiking part of the Appalachian trail. During the hike, that person loses 20 pounds. Does the airline reimburse the person for lost weight? And if so, is it in dollars or euro? If not, is this rightly seen as a penny grabbing method by the airliners?
If someone buys three bottles of wine at duty free (about 12 pounds) before flying back to Australia, will the gate agent charge them for the extra weight?
All-in-all, it seems like a bad idea for the airlines, and for relatively little money per flight.
Not a good idea at all
This right here. Also, storage space for cargo is quite limited and packed full in comparison to the space used in the passenger cabin and you can easily and more safely accommodate 35kilos more "meat bags" than a couple of 35 kilo big, heavy suitcase that don't fit under the seat or into the overheads.
I was in Vietnam 5 years ago. I didn't see any fat people. Look at photos/documentaries of Africa. No fat people.
To take it to the extreme, there were no fat people in Auschwitz. That is not to say that it was good in any way and that people should starve, but just that it is not impossible to be normal for anyone, you just have to try.
There is a lot of evidence that obesity is mostly hereditary/predetermined and not a choice. That's the great thing in this area of science: Everybody proofs everything all the time. No one's wiser.
> To take it to the extreme, there were no fat people in Auschwitz. That is not to say that it was good in any way and that people should starve, but just that it is not impossible to be normal for anyone, you just have to try.
So, you state that one can be lean by being forcefully starved (Auschwitz), then state that you don't think this is a good idea and then state "but it is not impossible to be normal for anyone" - well: You didn't provide an example for "normal". This people in Auschwitz were starving. Food-related diseases (and all other diseases) were on an all-time high. People were dying all the time. This is not an example of "normal", this is an example that the human body is able to withstand many, many forms of abuse until it breaks.
You would help this discussion if you were able to provide examples of big groups of obese people (there are always outliers) which were able to get lean without starving (starving is really, really bad for your body). Thanks.
edit: I've missed the part about Vietnam/Africa before. If you didn't see any fat people in Vietnam then you probably didn't look hard enough. I was there and I've seen them. Africa: Documentaries on Africa usually focus on the really poor parts of Africa. People starve there too, so: See above. (Also: There is the case of hunger obesity where you get really obese because or starvation. Try Google, but beware of shocking results)
As well your examples are very weak and can be beaten in minutes using google:
* http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15954744/ns/health-diet_and_nutr... - deciding about Africa from 0.01% of its population (specifically Bushmen that are usually covered in documentaries). I don't know.
* http://www.vietnewsonline.vn/News/Society/Health/9483/Childh...
Good thing I'm at a startup trying to help people eat healthy and in reasonable portions without feeling unduly hungry.
Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. A diet that significantly increases blood sugar will, in many people, cause a high insulin response and cause fat to be stored and only glucose to be burned.
Essentially you're looking at this from the wrong way. For the body to grow in any manner, hormones are required (c.f. growth hormones during puberty). And for the body to have grown, excess calories must have been consumed. What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. See Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes, Insulin Resistance, etc.
So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place.
Disclaimer: I've been eating Low-Carb/High-Fat diet that brought my steadily worsening weight issue to a much more healthy level (91kg to 75kg) through control of my blood sugar and appetite.
The study didn't fail to do so, so therefore I didn't.
>Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left.
This is a myth as far as western society is concerned. No one in western society not near-death from anorexia needs to concern themselves with this.
http://www.weightwatchers.com/util/art/index_art.aspx?tabnum...
> What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not.
This is not true, you've been reading too much keto literature on leptin.
I say this as someone who is a proponent of low-carb diets as a way of promoting satiety and controlling caloric intake.
>So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place.
I have a whole team of nutritionists working with us, as well as my own personal experience and research, I've gathered quite a bit of experience.
Let me lay out a few things for you.
Low-carb works, anecdotally (key modifier here), because it happens to push people into eating almost no empty calories. In a diet simply absent bread, sugar, and other empty calories, virtually everything you eat is contributing your satiety as well as your overall health.
That alone will allow you to eat far less and feel fuller. Taking it that much further and saying that the entire leptin hypothesis along with the keto diet usually associated with it is somehow responsible for weight-loss when that loss could be explained purely in terms of eating healthier in general, is unscientific and unproven.
Control for people who don't eat empty/junk calories versus people who stay strictly keto, and we'll have a better idea of what impact blood sugar and leptin have on the matter.
I don't deny that insulin resistance has a long-term impact on health, but I sincerely doubt it has much, if anything, to do with short-term weight loss.
The tricky part is in making it easier to eat less than you burn.
Eating healthier food that better sates you inside some kind of structure will help you accomplish that.
Our product will solve all of those problems as well as take the pain out of meal planning even for people not trying to necessarily lose weight.
Calories in/out is just extreme oversimplification that doesn't help in the slightest and causes people to starve themselves needlessly because of bad intuition, also risking their health and ultimately achieving the opposite of the desired effect.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723464
Our product accounts for a great deal of factors, don't conflate my over-simplistic agreement with the OP for a lack of dedicated research into how we actually plan to help others.
Macronutrients and their impact on satiety are core to our product and to helping people eat healthier.
Other people: keep my username bookmarked for future updates, I'll be posting the product on HN once we're ready for more publicity.
Good luck on your weight loss whether you end up a user of our product or not.
Generally, yes, you are technically correct. What I hate about where this train of thought often leads is: it is not human, at all. It ultimately makes all fat people look like lazy, greedy and stupid slobs because hey, the answer is sooo simple and totally obvious, right? 100% calories in vs. out!
What you completely fail to realize is the squishy human part that makes a lot of people eat way too much and not move around enough. Food and food addiction (mild or heavy) can be very powerful escape mechanisms for underlying psychological problems and once you are caught in that downward spiral, it can be very difficult to find a way out of e.g. depressions AND on top of that shedding all that excess weight with potentially life-long damage already done to your tissue and skin.
With fat shaming being a very widely accepted form of discrimination, it will take a LOT of courage and strength to lift oneself out of that hole, so I don't find it that surprising that a lot of people can ultimately not change and they hardly get any sympathy or healthy, positive encouragement, quite on the contrary, a lot of additional toxic shame.
So there definitely is a lot more to this.
It's unreasonable to expect every human being to possess the knowledge of a nutritionist just to manage their own diets.
Hopefully the product I'm working on will level the playing field.
Your comment is the worst I've read on HN in a while. I think I threw up a little in my mouth.
Does any additional cost to a company mean that it can treat its customers differently?
We must have a society where the equality of people is incontrovertible, and we make accommodations for the fact. That a thin small woman weighing 50Kg is worth the same as a muscular or fat person weighing 100kg.
To ask one to pay more for a service because of what they are is unequal treatment.
The people weighing less are charged more than they would be otherwise, so that everyone has the same price.
But their arbitrary birth characteristics that make them under the average weight should not entitle them to benefit in "proportion" nor equally should the characteristics of another cause them to be disadvantaged proportionally.
I would prefer a society where neither the state, nor private citizens, were able to reward birth-lottery success at the expense of birth-lottery failure.
And im not talking about genetics. Being muscular or fat, a result of a series of choices (no doubt), is still a result of birth lottery. So you had a single mum in a por community that fed you cheap fast food?
Do members disadvantaged communities (who are more overweight and unhealthy than the average) have their disadvantage compounded by being responsible for their parents and community?
As said in another post, life is not fair. If we take your point to the extreme, society should even out the disadvantages that come from having below-average intelligence.
I believe in this instance, the benefits of equality outweight the costs.
If we believe that a "free" market would distribute prices differently so that lighter people paid less and you believe the free market price is fair. Then some small ecnomic harm is occuring, to those who pay more.
The social cost of rectifying this small harm however is, i think, considerable. It makes transportation harder for poorer people and perhaps those that need transport the most. And so on.
In this case, i think the $500 extra /flight can be distributed across the couple hundred passengers without much to-do.
Then the line can very well remain drawn where it already is drawn: same price for everyone. Also, see top comment with an estimation how little price difference there would be between "petite" and "overweight". It would cost the airlines a lot more to implement this and then prices for everyone would be higher plus it will add a lot humiliation on top of the shenanigans the TSA is already putting you through.
This whole idea is nothing but minutiae and micro-managing, being lost in details and on top of that very unrealistic when you think about implementing it.
Also, I am surprised how quickly all human rights and rights of equal treatment suddenly seem to stop existing when it is about "fat people".
I had a bike bag weighing 27kg and a second piece weighing 15kg. Well under the 46kg I could take on for no charge.
The airline (Qantas) wanted to charge me an overweight charge for the bike bag - but were happy for me to park in front of the counter for 5 minutes while I moved heavy items between bags to balance them out.
I didn't really care; it was a financial motivation to keep my weights at an easier to manage level.
I imagine that overweight bags require different workers, who might be on a different pay scale - and so there is a cost to moving 27+15kg vs 22kg+20kg.
A reason to impose penalty on luggage weight is that it affects what people bring aboard: penalties might entice you to leave some luggage at home; they won't entice you to leave your rolls of fat on the ground.
But companies won't start selling airfares by the kg: for it to be workable, you'd need a clear pricing scheme, and that's not in their best interest.
It seems that people are ready to give up the last bit of dignity as soon as they enter an airport; if a company could offer a substantial discount in exchange for paying by the kg, many people would cope with it. Not everyone, but enough people to sustain an airline company.
The reason why it won't happen is because their pricing scheme is already optimized to extract the last dime each traveler is willing to pay. Introducing a weight variable would mess that system up.
But anyway, I used to work in a call centre doing anonymous cold-calling social surveys for government. One survey had a section on sexual abuse and rape - and a few of us found it odd that some respondants would open up their private lives answering these questions, sometimes in a fair amount of detail, but still balk at the standard demographic section at the end where they are asked their income bracket. Some magic numbers are more significant than others.
This is an incredibly bad idea and it would be a PR and commercial disaster for any airline or airport that would introduce such a scheme.
... because as we all know, there is no cost whatsoever in handling large amounts of luggage. Which do you think would cost more: 100kg per person, with fat people who had little luggage, or 100kg per person, 50kg in person, and 50kg is excess luggage.
As a tall man, I hate this stupid point. I can't help the fact that I'm tall. I'm perhaps 10-15kg overweight, but if I go below 110kg, I am unhealthy. I already have to pay more to get a seat that doesn't screw me up - a seat that still doesn't fit me properly. Meanwhile Ms Slight Asian Woman is getting a much more comfortable seat. She's getting a better service for the same price.
The thing is, it's swings and roundabouts, and wanting to charge people a 'fat fee' is oversimplistic.
Well even you admit that you require a special seat and that "Ms Slight Asian Woman" gets comfortable in a normal seat - so there is a reason for the price difference. Anyway this sort of things are best left to market competition, if it's efficient to charge for baggage more than body weight then the companies or if the decision hurts their image they will figure it out.
But i wonder how tall you are for setting your healthy lower weight limit at 110kg. I am 175cm at 70kg and I am not skinny. So allowing an extra cm per kilo you would have to be 210cm. Which is entirely possible.
I also have a fairly broad frame - skinny/narrow guys my height don't have the same weight issues. If I'm at 100kg, I look a little emaciated and at 95kg my gut is concave and you can count ribs - I know this because I had a nervous breakdown in my youth and these were the weights I hit these points at.
It's also one of the reasons I hate people applying the BMI to individuals - it's meant to describe populations, not individuals, despite popular misuse... but I should leave that hobby horse in the stable.
That said, it will be bad argument to say that it will punish the people for more weight, because at current price they are actually punishing underweighted and have them pay for the overweighted. ( poor fellas, they are underweighted and have to pay for it too. )
So should people who are muscular be exempt? Do we do it based on height vs muscle or body fat percentage?
Unless we consider this, there's no way to do it fairly without punishing people for things either they can't control or would in other contexts be a good thing.
I'm sure that can be discussed, focusing on this detracts from the article's main point.
> I mean, what about people who are muscular?
They're completely irrelevant, this is not about people being healthy versus not healthy, this is about weight being a direct driver of costs for airlines.
> So should people who are muscular be exempt?
No, why should they be>
> Do we do it based on height vs muscle or body fat percentage?
No, "we do it" based on weight.
> Unless we consider this, there's no way to do it fairly
How's it not fair to say "baseline of Xkg total (person + baggages), surcharge is Y/kg extra"?
Would you have disabled people pay a huge amount for their wheelchair? How is discriminating based on sex or height or build any different? Some people naturally gain muscles at a much faster rate than others. What makes it okay to discriminate against those people?
Having a society where people are not discriminated against based on factors they cannot control is far, far more important than private profit.
Right now, it's unfair to the skinnier among us, where the prices for overweight luggage and overweight pax do not compare at all. People search all kinds of justification why being obese is ok and needs to receive special attention. I do not argue with that.
But: please explain to me why I should pay E100 for 3kg overweight, while the obese person on the seat next to me pays nothing for a 40kg weight difference. How is that fair?
Regarding what you call "discrimination":
It's really really easy to exempt the obvious (wheelchair etc.) from the bill. No one is asking to become inhumane or discriminate. Where did you get that idea from? This is not about private profit but about the conceived asymmetry in the pricing structure.
The fact is that irrespective of body content (ie fat or muscle), what counts for the economics of the airline is the total weight. Heavier the passengers and the luggage, more fuel is burnt, and the costs correspondingly go up.
I agree with you, however, that the 75 kg choice is pretty arbitrary. I wonder, though, if tickets online can be initially issued at price ex "weight-rate". Everyone would then stand with their luggage on the scales, and pay $k for every kilo (without any limit, per se). To me, that seems more "fair" without setting arbitrary limits that might carry discriminatory or racist overtones.
Now, you can claim that we shouldn't expose people to the humiliation of being weighed at the airport and I agree with that and thus, it might just be best to divide the added cost among the passengers like we do today.
But apart from that, the fairness argument seems deeply flawed to me. I guess that I am quite the capitalist (even though I'm from Scandinavia) but it doesn't seem fair to me to force the other passengers to share that persons extra cost.