
Air travel and health care got great for the wealthy and worse for everyone else - nutshell89
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/3/3/21154745/velvet-rope-economy-nelson-schwartz-book
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mech1234
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.

~~~
castyr3o9
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.

~~~
mech1234
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.

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

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_bxg1
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...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-reformed-
parts-1-2-ray-dalio)

~~~
_bxg1
*Gilded Age. Whoops.

------
dieselerator
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.

