> But the cost of flying had already been falling before deregulation, and it kept falling after at about the same rate.
What a bizarre argument, that absolutely demands more examination than a throwaway line upon which the entire premise of the piece hinges.
There’s lots of reasons why fares would be falling in the early days that you wouldn’t expect to continue for decades. Yet the author seems content to pretend there’s some mysterious factor that causes prices to fall for decades that we can infer from just a few year’s data. From first principles, you should always expect that regulation increases prices and the burden of proof is to argue why it would not. Embarrassing that the author is a professor and didn’t bother making a proper argument.
A key argument that led to deregulators winning is showing that intra-state fares—which were not federally regulated—were about 40% cheaper than one might expect when comparing to interstate. Anyway, there are articles that go into various reasons why deregulation very probably substantially decreases fares.
What a bizarre argument, that absolutely demands more examination than a throwaway line upon which the entire premise of the piece hinges.
There’s lots of reasons why fares would be falling in the early days that you wouldn’t expect to continue for decades. Yet the author seems content to pretend there’s some mysterious factor that causes prices to fall for decades that we can infer from just a few year’s data. From first principles, you should always expect that regulation increases prices and the burden of proof is to argue why it would not. Embarrassing that the author is a professor and didn’t bother making a proper argument.
A key argument that led to deregulators winning is showing that intra-state fares—which were not federally regulated—were about 40% cheaper than one might expect when comparing to interstate. Anyway, there are articles that go into various reasons why deregulation very probably substantially decreases fares.