| ▲ | MangoToupe 8 hours ago |
| Interesting. The deregulation of airlines is already a case study of how deregulation tends to reduce competition and hurt consumers. I suppose we’ve just given up on the concept of trying to do anything but nakedly extract profit at any cost. You’d think shareholders would be pro-competition in the end, though—I certainly would prefer that. Edit: I mean short-term profits. As a shareholder I would prefer long-term profits via competition and diversification. |
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| ▲ | jdiff 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Monopoly by underhanded treachery offers better odds at long-term profits than a long, drawn-out competition on fair terms. |
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| ▲ | rjbwork 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >You’d think shareholders would be pro-competition in the end, though—I certainly would prefer that. The end game of capitalism is monopoly. Why would shareholders want competition that prevents them from extracting maximum profit? |
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| ▲ | panick21_ 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What are you talking about overall, deregulation of routes has not been bad for consumers. The opposite actually. |
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| ▲ | hedora 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s been a disaster. There are fewer routes, and flying is miserable, and getting worse every year. Crashes are way up this year. Airlines profits are basically zero per ticket. Adding $10 per trip would be some sort of fantasy land windfall for the shareholders. Deregulation badly broke this industry. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Safety is massively improved since the days of regulation. Fares are way down in real terms. Flying might be miserable, but that's because people realize they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much. Your comments remind me of the arguments Ma Bell gave to justify their monopoly. Oh noez, quality will suffer if there's telecom competition. Well, people ended up being willing to make the tradeoff. You did score a hit with airline profits being low. The whole purpose of regulation was to artificially inflate prices to ensure profits for airlines. | | |
| ▲ | ghaff 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much Basically. I have used a combination of miles and co-pays to upgrade to business trans-Pacific. But most of the time going from the east coast US to Europe (especially when I can do it without a red-eye to London), I end up thinking of all the nice stuff I could do with $5K at the cost of sort of a miserable flight. It's not that I couldn't splurge but there are other things I'd generally prefer to splurge on. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | One reason flights are more miserable is planes are more heavily loaded. Before deregulation, planes were usually ~50% full. Today in the US, it's about 84%. This is directly correlated with airfares. Were planes as sparsely loaded now as they were then then fares would be correspondingly higher. But in a deregulated environment there's a very strong incentive for increased economic efficiency to keep the fares competitive. |
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| ▲ | tavavex 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not sure if either you or the person you're replying to are correct about safety. The way I see it, safety is completely orthogonal to regulations about routes, passenger services and so on. Safety's been on a rough upward trend throughout history as technology improves. No matter what tools are given or taken away from airlines for extracting value from their passengers, I don't see how it impacts safety, since actual flying is its own separate thing. The one exception is rules on e.g. crew composition, maximum working hours for pilots, and so on. But in these cases, deregulation would hurt both. |
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| ▲ | panick21_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is pretty much false. If you compare inflation adjusted cost you now get a far better service for the same price, and you get access at a price that literally wasn't possible before. > and flying is miserable It isn't. I have flowing with budget airlines in Europe and its, basically fine. Not luxury but really its incredibly value. On the same price as you did before, you now get luxury. > Crashes are way up this year. What the fuck does 'this year' have to do with it when we are talking about something that happened in around the 1980s. Total safety is up massively, and per passenger safety is up by an absurd amount. Any counter-argument to this is literally not credible. > Airlines profits are basically zero per ticket. So capitalism works? Not sure what your point is. > Deregulation badly broke this industry. Based on what? |
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| ▲ | pfdietz 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > The deregulation of airlines is already a case study of how deregulation tends to reduce competition and hurt consumers. What the actual F? Deregulation of airlines was massively beneficial to consumers. "Base ticket prices have declined steadily since deregulation.[15] The inflation-adjusted 1982 constant dollar yield for airlines has fallen from 12.3 cents in 1978 to 7.9 cents in 1997,[16] and the inflation-adjusted real price of flying fell 44.9% from 1978 to 2011.[17] Along with a rising U.S. population[18] and the increasing demand of workforce mobility, these trends were some of the catalysts for dramatic expansion in passenger miles flown, increasing from 250 million passenger miles in 1978 to 750 million passenger miles in 2005.[19]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation |
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| ▲ | hedora 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How do the real price reductions compare to the rest of the world? Computers automated away a ton of airline jobs, and fuel economy has increased. Also, are those prices apples to apples with pre-deregulation tickets? Like, can I just walk up to the terminal, same day, pay that price, and get the equivalent of business class on the plane, and still pay 44% less than real 1978 prices? | |
| ▲ | MangoToupe 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Base ticket prices doesn’t seem like a great metric, not that I have a better trivial to measure metric off the top of my head (maybe leg room?), but competition has certainly gone down since deregulation. |
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