There was a lunar eclipse last night. Where I am, the sky was overcast, so we couldn't see it. Even so, pedagogical opportunities like these arise seldom enough that I sat my 3 year old daughter down to explain to her the difference between an umbra and a penumbra. If you recall from your fifth grade astronomy class, the umbra is the region of complete occlusion. It's the full shadow, where the entire light source is obscured. The penumbra is the region of partial occlusion, where the foreign object is only partly covering the light source. Last night's eclipse created a penumbral region on the moon.
It occurred to me as I was attempting to explain this to a child whose attention was fixed on the necklace she was alternately creating and destroying—rather than what her completely, wholly, and utterly fascinating daddy was saying—is that it's pretty easy to see regulatory umbra: black-letter OSHA regulations can be parsed and obeyed, ATF fun police commands are available for perusal, even the PPACA is written down and given how much time has elapsed since it was passed, possibly even read by now. What we might more easily miss are the contours of the regulatory penumbra.
Every now and again, some joker will round up a hard copy of the Federal Register (the collection of regulations issued from DC) and pose in a photograph standing next to it. The puny human is dwarfed by the mighty stacks of dot-matrix printed paper, but even such stunts are a little misleading. If you're ever in my neck of the woods, hit me up and I'll take you to the Jefferson Reading Room at the LoC and we can take a gawk at the non-photo-op version together. It's been some time since I've done the pilgrimage, and I often get a belly chuckle out of opening to a (quasi-)random page to find some gem some long-forgotten rep used to roll a constituent's log oh so long ago. Still, the FedReg (as no one on Earth calls it) is small potatoes compared to the voluminous pile that constitutes the sundry state, county, and local ordinances that "govern" commerce throughout America. Regressively (and aggressively, and repressively), I might add.
What these skeins of interference represent to the bit of me steeped in public choice economics is orgiastic rent-seeking threaded in the weft of American society. Favored constituents plead the sovereign for slime-drenched special favors and with a twinkling of a gilt pen, hey-presto, incumbent hairdressers (to pick some low-hanging fruit) are granted a state-protected oligopoly. Of course, this quite naturally implies that should some enterprising kid seek to hang a shingle of her own, the list of available wildcat profession shrinks with each and every entreaty. And if the stories of cops shutting down kids' lemonade stands represent systemic trends rather than isolated incidents, then the lessons start early.
The regulatory umbra looks at the entrepreneurship trammeled by existing interference. It is large and ominous enough. The regulatory penumbra constitutes those efforts likely to attract the interference of a Bernie of overseers. I casually estimate that it blots out the whole of the sun.
Taking risks is already not particularly euvoluntary. Including a guillotine on hair trigger does not make it more so.
Showing posts with label incentives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label incentives. Show all posts
Monday, September 28, 2015
Friday, April 3, 2015
Incentives
Can incentives be coercive?
If by coercive we mean "induce people to do something they would not otherwise do" then all incentives seems coercive. But that's a dumb definition (IMHO) of coercive.
Here's a three part definition of "incentives" I had not seen before.
And that led me to this quite interesting paper. A little too dismissive of Olson, but an interesting treatment of incentives.
If by coercive we mean "induce people to do something they would not otherwise do" then all incentives seems coercive. But that's a dumb definition (IMHO) of coercive.
Here's a three part definition of "incentives" I had not seen before.
And that led me to this quite interesting paper. A little too dismissive of Olson, but an interesting treatment of incentives.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Sustainability
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
PB Shelley, "Ozymandias"
"Sustainability" is a platitude. But it can be useful platitude when it warns of broken accountability mechanisms. Fossil fuels aren't "sustainable" in a technological sense, but prices provide an adequate feedback mechanism to let consumers know when relative scarcity changes. Prices encourage people to develop alternatives. Feeble promises of Utopia lack such feedback mechanisms.
Truck, barter, and exchange is sustainable (when valuable information isn't throttled). Political kayfabe isn't.
"This too shall pass" means something different to euvoluntary exchange than it does to political coercion.
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
PB Shelley, "Ozymandias"
"Sustainability" is a platitude. But it can be useful platitude when it warns of broken accountability mechanisms. Fossil fuels aren't "sustainable" in a technological sense, but prices provide an adequate feedback mechanism to let consumers know when relative scarcity changes. Prices encourage people to develop alternatives. Feeble promises of Utopia lack such feedback mechanisms.
Truck, barter, and exchange is sustainable (when valuable information isn't throttled). Political kayfabe isn't.
"This too shall pass" means something different to euvoluntary exchange than it does to political coercion.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Monday's Child is Full of Alchian and Allen
If you're a reader here at EE, the probability that you also read Kids Prefer Cheese approaches 1 in the limit. So it's almost guaranteed that you've borne witness to this week's Monday's Child. However, if you're like me, you may not necessarily click on each of Mike's links. I know, I know: it's breaking kayfabe of me to admit that, but time is scarce etc. etc. I think it's fair to say though that this little fellow here should be a good one to exercise the ol' EWOT.
ICY didn't RTWT, Colorado is mulling a state-mandated pre-wedding education course. Regret, I imagine is the EE condition engaged here. Divorce rates seem to be evidence of ex post regret, res ipsa loquitor. How can marriage be euvoluntary if people get a few years in and then huck it all?
The economics are pretty straightforward: ceteris paribus, adding a fixed cost to something raises the relative price of the low-quality good. Alchian and Allen made the case for apples and lobsters, saying that orchards and Maine lobstermen would be more prone to shipping the good stuff out given shipping costs. Of course, if you've had a pint of cider fresh from the press or a bowl of l-bisque fresh from the bay, you might recognize the empirical flaw (that A&A themselves readily admitted in their textbook) in the theory. Still, the incentives here are pretty plain: raise the relative price of marriage, and you can expect to see some substitution on one or more margins: more cohabitation, more out-of-state ceremonies (inter alia, naturally). More single parenthood?
Of course, with single parenthood, ceteris is not parebus since the relative private cost of oral contraceptives is taking a big honkin' nose dive under the ACA. Or at least it is for folks with coverage. Which is pretty much the part of the population that's already underserved by the insurance industry already, right? Young poor people are signing up in droves on the exchanges, right?
Step 1: make it more expensive to get married
Step 2: make it cheaper to have kids out of wedlock
Step 3: imprison fathers like it's going out of style
Step 4: ???
Step 5: forward the empire
Consequences aren't everything, people. But they are a thing and they need to be taken seriously.
ICY didn't RTWT, Colorado is mulling a state-mandated pre-wedding education course. Regret, I imagine is the EE condition engaged here. Divorce rates seem to be evidence of ex post regret, res ipsa loquitor. How can marriage be euvoluntary if people get a few years in and then huck it all?
The economics are pretty straightforward: ceteris paribus, adding a fixed cost to something raises the relative price of the low-quality good. Alchian and Allen made the case for apples and lobsters, saying that orchards and Maine lobstermen would be more prone to shipping the good stuff out given shipping costs. Of course, if you've had a pint of cider fresh from the press or a bowl of l-bisque fresh from the bay, you might recognize the empirical flaw (that A&A themselves readily admitted in their textbook) in the theory. Still, the incentives here are pretty plain: raise the relative price of marriage, and you can expect to see some substitution on one or more margins: more cohabitation, more out-of-state ceremonies (inter alia, naturally). More single parenthood?
Of course, with single parenthood, ceteris is not parebus since the relative private cost of oral contraceptives is taking a big honkin' nose dive under the ACA. Or at least it is for folks with coverage. Which is pretty much the part of the population that's already underserved by the insurance industry already, right? Young poor people are signing up in droves on the exchanges, right?
Step 1: make it more expensive to get married
Step 2: make it cheaper to have kids out of wedlock
Step 3: imprison fathers like it's going out of style
Step 4: ???
Step 5: forward the empire
Consequences aren't everything, people. But they are a thing and they need to be taken seriously.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
The Law of Intended Consequences
Hunting is not euvoluntary (for the animals, anyway).
And polices have consequences. Add a non-native, farmed species to the endangered species act, watch as the incentive to keep herds around dwindles. If this effect is strong enough, the critter might well actually go true-blue extinct.
It should be enough to give conservationists pause, right?
"Feral does not mince her words. She would rather see the three species become extinct in Texas than see a single animal hunted in what she says are "canned hunts." She calls the ranchers "pimps." She says they are more interested in putting a head on the wall than in conserving the species."
ATSRTWT
Yikes! With friends like these, amirite?
h/t Cracked.com
And polices have consequences. Add a non-native, farmed species to the endangered species act, watch as the incentive to keep herds around dwindles. If this effect is strong enough, the critter might well actually go true-blue extinct.
It should be enough to give conservationists pause, right?
"Feral does not mince her words. She would rather see the three species become extinct in Texas than see a single animal hunted in what she says are "canned hunts." She calls the ranchers "pimps." She says they are more interested in putting a head on the wall than in conserving the species."
ATSRTWT
Yikes! With friends like these, amirite?
h/t Cracked.com
Friday, August 2, 2013
Labor is not Euvoluntary: Labor Edition
I don't know what your experience is, but I can't recall Cesarean section births being all that common when I was a youngster. I still recall my surprise upon hearing that there was such a thing as a convenience C-section, usually scheduled well in advance. At first, I dismissed this as a fringe trend, disconnected from the actual experience of women, confined mostly to elite upper-middle class mothers.
I was wrong. From the CDC:
Source.
There are a lot of series on that graph, but the interesting one is the dashed line, for all births. In 1996, 19.7% of births were by C-Section, compared with 31.3% in 2011. It's a pity the time series doesn't go back farther, as I'd like to see what the rates were when we here at EE were born (the 50s and the 70s for Mike and me, and I think JR was born in the 80s), but the opportunity costs of fetching the data are too damn high. At any rate, this sort of thing doesn't happen just by accident: whoops, I tripped, fell on your scalpel and a baby popped out. No, there must be a tale of incentives, institutions, and relative prices in there.
And it wasn't until a chat with Mrs Spivonomist yesterday that I found the missing puzzle piece. Short-term disability.
At least here in the Commonwealth, short-term disability covers 6 weeks for vaginal birth and 8 weeks for C-section. Moreover, [employer redacted] grants extra paid time off for C-section recovery and no such benefit whatsoever for vaginal birth. I don't know if that's industry standard or not, but if it is, there's your story right there. Even more over, according to what I've been able to glean, this [employer redacted] policy is relatively new, a response to legitimate concerns that women who had medically necessary C-sections were being unfairly penalized by employment requirements. And that's true; recovery from invasive surgery takes time.
Knowing all that, it's kind of surprising that the slope on the graph above isn't steeper. Though, it is possible that the stale labor market has changed the relative prices. No sense shipping your good apples if nobody's buying. At any rate, it's kind of a relief to have a bit more insight into this odd outcome. I think it's at least a little bit easier to reject alternative hypotheses like all of a sudden placentas all across America have shifted out of place.
The last empirical question has to do with long-term outcomes. Will there be any interesting repercussions 20 years down the road? My priors say no, as I chiefly suspect that the big social ills come not from delivery method but from bad policy. Still, some economist two decades from now could do worse than to include a term for C-section birth rates in her regressions.
What are your moral intuitions about childbirth? How do you feel about midwifery? About scheduled C-sections? Should politicians and bureaucrats attempt to tinker with incentives that influence mothers' decisions? Why or why not? What's the appropriate moral calculus? Fairness? Justice? Care? What's the correct policy scale? National? State? Local? Personal? Please explain.
And if you do elect to have this conversation in class or with friends or family, please feel free to share your experiences in the comments or by e-mail. I'd love to follow up on the topic. I have one daughter and she was born at home, despite systematic pressures to deliver in a hospital under the supervision of a physician.
I was wrong. From the CDC:
Source.
There are a lot of series on that graph, but the interesting one is the dashed line, for all births. In 1996, 19.7% of births were by C-Section, compared with 31.3% in 2011. It's a pity the time series doesn't go back farther, as I'd like to see what the rates were when we here at EE were born (the 50s and the 70s for Mike and me, and I think JR was born in the 80s), but the opportunity costs of fetching the data are too damn high. At any rate, this sort of thing doesn't happen just by accident: whoops, I tripped, fell on your scalpel and a baby popped out. No, there must be a tale of incentives, institutions, and relative prices in there.
And it wasn't until a chat with Mrs Spivonomist yesterday that I found the missing puzzle piece. Short-term disability.
At least here in the Commonwealth, short-term disability covers 6 weeks for vaginal birth and 8 weeks for C-section. Moreover, [employer redacted] grants extra paid time off for C-section recovery and no such benefit whatsoever for vaginal birth. I don't know if that's industry standard or not, but if it is, there's your story right there. Even more over, according to what I've been able to glean, this [employer redacted] policy is relatively new, a response to legitimate concerns that women who had medically necessary C-sections were being unfairly penalized by employment requirements. And that's true; recovery from invasive surgery takes time.
Knowing all that, it's kind of surprising that the slope on the graph above isn't steeper. Though, it is possible that the stale labor market has changed the relative prices. No sense shipping your good apples if nobody's buying. At any rate, it's kind of a relief to have a bit more insight into this odd outcome. I think it's at least a little bit easier to reject alternative hypotheses like all of a sudden placentas all across America have shifted out of place.
The last empirical question has to do with long-term outcomes. Will there be any interesting repercussions 20 years down the road? My priors say no, as I chiefly suspect that the big social ills come not from delivery method but from bad policy. Still, some economist two decades from now could do worse than to include a term for C-section birth rates in her regressions.
What are your moral intuitions about childbirth? How do you feel about midwifery? About scheduled C-sections? Should politicians and bureaucrats attempt to tinker with incentives that influence mothers' decisions? Why or why not? What's the appropriate moral calculus? Fairness? Justice? Care? What's the correct policy scale? National? State? Local? Personal? Please explain.
And if you do elect to have this conversation in class or with friends or family, please feel free to share your experiences in the comments or by e-mail. I'd love to follow up on the topic. I have one daughter and she was born at home, despite systematic pressures to deliver in a hospital under the supervision of a physician.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Okay, So Knowing This, Is NOT Paying Manipulative?
If you know this result, it seems like you could manipulate another person by NOT offering an incentive. In fact, the not offering of the incentive IS the incentive, if this is correct. Is it euvoluntary?
To pay or not to pay? Do extrinsic incentives alter the Köhler group motivation gain?
Norbert Kerr, Deborah Feltz & Brandon Irwin
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, March 2013, Pages 257-268
Abstract: The Köhler effect is an increase in task motivation that occurs in performance groups when one is (a) less capable than one’s fellow group members, and (b) one’s efforts are particularly indispensible for group success. Recently, it has been shown that the Köhler effect can dramatically increase one’s motivation to exercise. The present study examines the potential moderating effect of the provision of extrinsic incentives on such Köhler motivation gains. When participants were offered such an extrinsic incentive for persisting at an exercise task, a robust Köhler effect was observed — participants who thought they were the less capable member of a dyad working at a conjunctive-group exercise task persisted 26% longer than comparable individual exercisers. But an even stronger effect (a 43% improvement) was observed when no such incentive was on offer. Possible explanations and boundary conditions for this moderating effect are discussed.
Nod to Kevin Lewis
To pay or not to pay? Do extrinsic incentives alter the Köhler group motivation gain?
Norbert Kerr, Deborah Feltz & Brandon Irwin
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, March 2013, Pages 257-268
Abstract: The Köhler effect is an increase in task motivation that occurs in performance groups when one is (a) less capable than one’s fellow group members, and (b) one’s efforts are particularly indispensible for group success. Recently, it has been shown that the Köhler effect can dramatically increase one’s motivation to exercise. The present study examines the potential moderating effect of the provision of extrinsic incentives on such Köhler motivation gains. When participants were offered such an extrinsic incentive for persisting at an exercise task, a robust Köhler effect was observed — participants who thought they were the less capable member of a dyad working at a conjunctive-group exercise task persisted 26% longer than comparable individual exercisers. But an even stronger effect (a 43% improvement) was observed when no such incentive was on offer. Possible explanations and boundary conditions for this moderating effect are discussed.
Nod to Kevin Lewis
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Nadie Queiran Volar con la Gorda
I'm no shrinking violet. Yet at 5'11" and tipping the scales somewhere in the neighborhood of 225#, I'm the runt of the EE litter. Our spouses? That's another matter. Mrs. Spivonomist claims doughty Lithuanian yeoman heritage, but even with that pedigree, she wouldn't even qualify for a super featherweight fight. Emma resembles nobody so much as a lithe Audrey Hepburn, and the LMM would struggle to balance the scales against a drinking straw. We're a trio of lumberjacks with dainty little wives, though we do manage to ever so slightly buck the trope of dumb fat guy-with-smart skinny wife by dint of some academic competence.
We've posted before on the topic of Large Folk on Airplanes. Today's big news is Air Samoa, who is raising hackles by a proposal to have a variable airfare schedule based on passenger-plus-luggage weight. Now, depending on the sort of price discrimination algorithm used, the average per-person price for the Euvoluntary Exchange blog crowd might very well be the same before and after. My chubby thunder-tuchus might have to pay a bit more, but my diminutive bride could make up for the difference. Is this euvoluntary? What about if it's not mean-neutral? What's the appropriate cluster? Is it important when you partition median body weight by real income category?
A few days ago, I spilled some pixels defending the notion of equal treatment in the eyes of the law. Do these same arguments extend to equal treatment in the eyes of an industry with high fixed costs or other barriers to entry? Is my BATNA of being unable to fly (to Samoa, for now) sufficiently unattractive that agents of the state should step in and restore... well, "fairness" isn't the right word, since airlines already deploy quite a bit of price discrimination based on whether or not you're a business or a pleasure flyer... "justice", perhaps? Is price discrimination unjust? Is it morally just to hold a passenger accountable for his girth? Most folks seem fine with some price discrimination based on income, on gender (oh yes it's Ladies' Night and I'm feeling right), on age. Not so much on race, on sexual orientation, on political party affiliation (and please note that attitudes, strangely, seem to vary widely based on whether or not the price discrimination is forwarded as either a premium or a discount), so what's the rule? When is it okay to price-discriminate?
More interestingly, why didn't Samoa Air announce a policy where they give discounts to svelte passengers while stealthily hiking base rates under the radar? Airline marketing departments can't still be that obtuse, can they?
Curious stuff.
We've posted before on the topic of Large Folk on Airplanes. Today's big news is Air Samoa, who is raising hackles by a proposal to have a variable airfare schedule based on passenger-plus-luggage weight. Now, depending on the sort of price discrimination algorithm used, the average per-person price for the Euvoluntary Exchange blog crowd might very well be the same before and after. My chubby thunder-tuchus might have to pay a bit more, but my diminutive bride could make up for the difference. Is this euvoluntary? What about if it's not mean-neutral? What's the appropriate cluster? Is it important when you partition median body weight by real income category?
A few days ago, I spilled some pixels defending the notion of equal treatment in the eyes of the law. Do these same arguments extend to equal treatment in the eyes of an industry with high fixed costs or other barriers to entry? Is my BATNA of being unable to fly (to Samoa, for now) sufficiently unattractive that agents of the state should step in and restore... well, "fairness" isn't the right word, since airlines already deploy quite a bit of price discrimination based on whether or not you're a business or a pleasure flyer... "justice", perhaps? Is price discrimination unjust? Is it morally just to hold a passenger accountable for his girth? Most folks seem fine with some price discrimination based on income, on gender (oh yes it's Ladies' Night and I'm feeling right), on age. Not so much on race, on sexual orientation, on political party affiliation (and please note that attitudes, strangely, seem to vary widely based on whether or not the price discrimination is forwarded as either a premium or a discount), so what's the rule? When is it okay to price-discriminate?
More interestingly, why didn't Samoa Air announce a policy where they give discounts to svelte passengers while stealthily hiking base rates under the radar? Airline marketing departments can't still be that obtuse, can they?
Curious stuff.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Do Writers Write Better if They Get Paid?
Why do writers write?
Is "better" writing (whatever that means) the result of the application of the artistic temperament, unsullied by monetary incentives?
Or do the best writers write to make money? Interesting piece from NYR-blog, with some speculations.
Reminds me of this famous encomium, to David Hume:
There is no instance of a man of genius who has wasted less in idleness or in unavailing pursuits. Money was not his object, nor was temporary fame; though, of the means of independent livelihood, and a good repute among men, he never lost sight: but his ruling ambition, pursued in poverty and riches, in health and sickness, in laborious obscurity and amidst the blaze of fame, was to establish a permanent name, resting on the foundation of literary achievements, likely to live as long as human thought endured, and mental philosophy was studied.-- J.H. Burton, Life and Correspondence of David HUME, Vol. 1, p 18.
Maybe. But Hume was famously disappointed when his Concerning the Principles of Morals "fell dead-born from the press."
So, do writers write for money? Are the best books written for money, or something else? And does offering money spoil that artistic enterprise? In effect, do incentives distort art, and is the distortion worst when the artist is very poor and has a terrible BATNA?
Is "better" writing (whatever that means) the result of the application of the artistic temperament, unsullied by monetary incentives?
Or do the best writers write to make money? Interesting piece from NYR-blog, with some speculations.
Reminds me of this famous encomium, to David Hume:
There is no instance of a man of genius who has wasted less in idleness or in unavailing pursuits. Money was not his object, nor was temporary fame; though, of the means of independent livelihood, and a good repute among men, he never lost sight: but his ruling ambition, pursued in poverty and riches, in health and sickness, in laborious obscurity and amidst the blaze of fame, was to establish a permanent name, resting on the foundation of literary achievements, likely to live as long as human thought endured, and mental philosophy was studied.-- J.H. Burton, Life and Correspondence of David HUME, Vol. 1, p 18.
Maybe. But Hume was famously disappointed when his Concerning the Principles of Morals "fell dead-born from the press."
So, do writers write for money? Are the best books written for money, or something else? And does offering money spoil that artistic enterprise? In effect, do incentives distort art, and is the distortion worst when the artist is very poor and has a terrible BATNA?
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Todos Quieran Bailar con la Gorda
I adore student publications. Journalism students are guileless, honest, earnest, and unfiltered. Editorial staff of university newspapers maintain relaxed standards, allowing writers to pepper stories with hyperbole and opinion. Neophyte authors, often wrestling with course work and the social life of an undergraduate have little time or patience to write thoroughly researched pieces, so each story in any given student publication has the potential to be a nice little snapshot of off-the-cuff reasoning we might expect from the ordinary pedestrian thinker. Those of us on the Isle of Euvoluntaria can benefit greatly from avidly reading student newspapers, as almost nowhere else can you find such a dense matrix of naive moral reasoning, insufficient cost/benefit accounting and quick interventionist assumptions.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Deutchland unter keine
Al Roth brings to our attention an interesting example of the doctrine of unintended consequences. The pith of the story is that two government policies have intersected to produce unseemly results.
1) Germany has recently legalized trade in prostitution.
2) Unemployment benefits are forfeit if a job-seeker declines a position.
When offered a perfectly legal job at a brothel, "A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing 'sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year."
I may be wrong, but this looks like an example of coercion by human agency. The threat of withholding an expected benefit is intended to reduce or prevent free-riding (though see the motion picture Trainspotting and Spud's magnificent performance at a job interview for an example of how to game this particular regulation), but this is predicated on the assumption that any job is both privately and socially preferred to no job at all. Clearly, this is not the case with this story.
In a counterfactual world without publicly-supplied unemployment insurance and without Germany's extensive labor market interventions, there would be no EE violation here. The young lady would simply tell the madam where to gently place her offer of employment and continue onward in the search for work.
Also, I beg you pardon my off-color pun. I assure you it was completely unintentional.
Also also, I speak next to no German, so if I botched the title, please let me know so I can edit it.
1) Germany has recently legalized trade in prostitution.
2) Unemployment benefits are forfeit if a job-seeker declines a position.
When offered a perfectly legal job at a brothel, "A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing 'sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year."
I may be wrong, but this looks like an example of coercion by human agency. The threat of withholding an expected benefit is intended to reduce or prevent free-riding (though see the motion picture Trainspotting and Spud's magnificent performance at a job interview for an example of how to game this particular regulation), but this is predicated on the assumption that any job is both privately and socially preferred to no job at all. Clearly, this is not the case with this story.
In a counterfactual world without publicly-supplied unemployment insurance and without Germany's extensive labor market interventions, there would be no EE violation here. The young lady would simply tell the madam where to gently place her offer of employment and continue onward in the search for work.
Also, I beg you pardon my off-color pun. I assure you it was completely unintentional.
Also also, I speak next to no German, so if I botched the title, please let me know so I can edit it.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
NYTimes on R. Grant's "Strings Attached"
I have expressed admiration before for Ruth Grant's Strings Attached. You should read it, if you have not.
This week brings a review in the New York Times. Hardly a rave review, but very solidly appreciative of the book's contribution. Again, congrats to Ruth. Well done, ma'am.
This week brings a review in the New York Times. Hardly a rave review, but very solidly appreciative of the book's contribution. Again, congrats to Ruth. Well done, ma'am.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Conventional Ownership and File Sharing
House Resolution 3261, aka SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act presents us with a fine opportunity to don our Smithian spectacles. Consider what Smith had to say in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about the exercise of sympathy:
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception. (Context)
Disputes over what does and does not constitute the first condition of euvoluntary exchange (conventional ownership) benefit from conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Towards this end, I offer the following as my inaugural contribution to Euvoluntary Exchange (below the fold).
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Stimulus "Recovery Act" and Kidney Transplants
Not making this up. Actual problem of rationing kidneys by region (article here), causing large differences in access across the nation.
Excerpt:
During his most recent hospital stay, Reginald Baker received bad news from his doctor. Over many years, his kidneys had gradually lost their ability to function, and now he would need a transplant. Reginald’s doctor said he would be added to a transplant list, but the waiting period for a kidney could be years. Reginald would be joining the approximately 80,000 people who are awaiting a kidney, while the annual number of transplants peaks at only about 17,000.
Reginald was especially surprised to learn that one of the factors adding the most time to his wait for a new kidney wasn’t his blood type or the severity of his disease but, rather, his geographical location. The closest transplant center to where Reginald lived served the large metropolitan region of the San Francisco Bay Area. His doctor explained that the area faced a particularly severe organ shortage due to the number of residents in need of transplants. Smaller towns in the Midwest, for example, have less competition for organs and are better supplied with kidneys for transplantation.
Reginald didn’t have the resources or the health to relocate himself and his family or to travel far from his home and his hospital to try to improve his chances of getting a kidney. He would just have to wait and hope.
ARRA May Help Improve Organ Allocation
Dr. Krista Lentine, associate professor of medicine at Saint Louis University, is addressing the plight of the thousands of Americans awaiting life-saving organs, particularly kidney and liver transplantations. With support from NIH and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Lentine and her team are highlighting geographical disparities and working to develop improved systems to ensure fairness in organ allocation.
Lentine’s motivation stems from her observation that patients with similar illness severity experience different waiting times due to imbalances in geographical supply and demand. For example, the average waiting time for a blood group O kidney varies from 2.8 years in a well-supplied Midwest region to more than 6 years in a West Coast region.
The United States currently is divided into 11 geographic organ-sharing regions that direct organ distribution. Operating within this geographical system are nationally agreed-upon rules that define priority among transplant candidates. For liver transplants, priority is determined based on illness severity using a scoring system that predicts the patient’s risk of death without a transplant. For those awaiting kidney transplants, however, priority is mostly determined by how long the patients have been waiting.
“These regions were not developed by any scientific method, but the intent was to divide the country in a way that would place organs quickly and encourage local donation,” said Lentine. “However, the current regions are heterogeneous in size and population, leading to mismatching in available organs with waiting candidates.”
(Nod to Michael Hartwell)
Excerpt:
During his most recent hospital stay, Reginald Baker received bad news from his doctor. Over many years, his kidneys had gradually lost their ability to function, and now he would need a transplant. Reginald’s doctor said he would be added to a transplant list, but the waiting period for a kidney could be years. Reginald would be joining the approximately 80,000 people who are awaiting a kidney, while the annual number of transplants peaks at only about 17,000.
Reginald was especially surprised to learn that one of the factors adding the most time to his wait for a new kidney wasn’t his blood type or the severity of his disease but, rather, his geographical location. The closest transplant center to where Reginald lived served the large metropolitan region of the San Francisco Bay Area. His doctor explained that the area faced a particularly severe organ shortage due to the number of residents in need of transplants. Smaller towns in the Midwest, for example, have less competition for organs and are better supplied with kidneys for transplantation.
Reginald didn’t have the resources or the health to relocate himself and his family or to travel far from his home and his hospital to try to improve his chances of getting a kidney. He would just have to wait and hope.
ARRA May Help Improve Organ Allocation
Dr. Krista Lentine, associate professor of medicine at Saint Louis University, is addressing the plight of the thousands of Americans awaiting life-saving organs, particularly kidney and liver transplantations. With support from NIH and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Lentine and her team are highlighting geographical disparities and working to develop improved systems to ensure fairness in organ allocation.
Lentine’s motivation stems from her observation that patients with similar illness severity experience different waiting times due to imbalances in geographical supply and demand. For example, the average waiting time for a blood group O kidney varies from 2.8 years in a well-supplied Midwest region to more than 6 years in a West Coast region.
The United States currently is divided into 11 geographic organ-sharing regions that direct organ distribution. Operating within this geographical system are nationally agreed-upon rules that define priority among transplant candidates. For liver transplants, priority is determined based on illness severity using a scoring system that predicts the patient’s risk of death without a transplant. For those awaiting kidney transplants, however, priority is mostly determined by how long the patients have been waiting.
“These regions were not developed by any scientific method, but the intent was to divide the country in a way that would place organs quickly and encourage local donation,” said Lentine. “However, the current regions are heterogeneous in size and population, leading to mismatching in available organs with waiting candidates.”
(Nod to Michael Hartwell)
Sunday, December 11, 2011
"Altruistic" Donations: In Fact, Payments are Allowed for Kidneys
Perhaps the most controversial kind of organ donation is the live donation, where the organ is harvested from a healthy human and given to someone whose organ has failed, or is about to. Obviously, live donations of a heart is impossible (I did once get back a referee report on a paper where the anonymous reviewer suggested I must have been the first successful live brain donor...). But other kinds of live donation, either a kidney or a portion of a liver, lung, or pancreas, are possible and relatively safe.
The problem is that the person who wants to donate is very unlikely to be a match for the person who needs it. You need a kidney, I want to donate mine, but you can't accept mine. And so we need to build a chain. But the chain is composed of people who, after the first altruistic donor, are all compensated in the sense that they are giving a resource to a family member. As this news story notes, it's actually a "swap," not a voluntary donation. Some background....
This video is quite good. It illustrates the importance of the payments implicit in the chain system, and also the naive insistence that there are no payments.
This letter from the Durham Herald Sun (Dec 10) is quite insightful:
***********
In your editorial "Gift of Life, no death required" (December 6) you appropriately celebrate the rare willingness to be an altruistic kidney donor. You then say that more like the first recipient's daughter "help because someone they love was helped."
A very substantive issue is overlooked in both the editorial and the news stories covering this remarkable event, an event I, as a practicing nephrologist, also celebrate. The Duke transplant of two kidneys is often called "chain donation" and has been as many as 14 donor / recipient transplants of kidneys in other centers. This has become a popular but difficult method of improving the important opportunity to transfer patients away from dialysis to a better life.
But note that both the government and most ethicists have expressed deep concerns about payment to donors, a concern that I think needs reexamination. In these "chains," only the first donor is "altruistic." The others are "bridge donors." These are people who have made a contract to benefit a friend or family member...Clearly this is also a form of payment...I hope that experts will [analyze] the very thin line between this form of payment [and monetary compensation] and perhaps open the possibility of early transplantation for the tens of thousands of dialysis patients currently waiting years.
I am aware of the concern that poor people will be made "vulnerable" by the promise of money, but I also believe that safety and protection could be built into such a system.
Robert Gutman, Durham
***********
A perfect illustation of the problem of euvoluntary exchange. Poor people are made "vulnerable," in point of fact, by being POOR. Selling a kidney would be a way to be less poor. But the medical establishment considers all incentives to be coercive. Poor people must be forced to remain poor, in a kind of human museum of poverty and misery. So they die with healthy kidneys. And wealthy people who would gladly pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a healthy kidney and a better life must be doomed to live miserably and die young
All so doctors can feel good about themselves as being "ethical?" I just don't get it. Literally no one is benefitted by this system except the consciences of doctors who themselves make huge salaries, but dictate that no one else can get paid because incentives and medicine don't mix.
My good friend Virginia Postrel pretty much nails it here.
The problem is that the person who wants to donate is very unlikely to be a match for the person who needs it. You need a kidney, I want to donate mine, but you can't accept mine. And so we need to build a chain. But the chain is composed of people who, after the first altruistic donor, are all compensated in the sense that they are giving a resource to a family member. As this news story notes, it's actually a "swap," not a voluntary donation. Some background....
This video is quite good. It illustrates the importance of the payments implicit in the chain system, and also the naive insistence that there are no payments.
This letter from the Durham Herald Sun (Dec 10) is quite insightful:
***********
In your editorial "Gift of Life, no death required" (December 6) you appropriately celebrate the rare willingness to be an altruistic kidney donor. You then say that more like the first recipient's daughter "help because someone they love was helped."
A very substantive issue is overlooked in both the editorial and the news stories covering this remarkable event, an event I, as a practicing nephrologist, also celebrate. The Duke transplant of two kidneys is often called "chain donation" and has been as many as 14 donor / recipient transplants of kidneys in other centers. This has become a popular but difficult method of improving the important opportunity to transfer patients away from dialysis to a better life.
But note that both the government and most ethicists have expressed deep concerns about payment to donors, a concern that I think needs reexamination. In these "chains," only the first donor is "altruistic." The others are "bridge donors." These are people who have made a contract to benefit a friend or family member...Clearly this is also a form of payment...I hope that experts will [analyze] the very thin line between this form of payment [and monetary compensation] and perhaps open the possibility of early transplantation for the tens of thousands of dialysis patients currently waiting years.
I am aware of the concern that poor people will be made "vulnerable" by the promise of money, but I also believe that safety and protection could be built into such a system.
Robert Gutman, Durham
***********
A perfect illustation of the problem of euvoluntary exchange. Poor people are made "vulnerable," in point of fact, by being POOR. Selling a kidney would be a way to be less poor. But the medical establishment considers all incentives to be coercive. Poor people must be forced to remain poor, in a kind of human museum of poverty and misery. So they die with healthy kidneys. And wealthy people who would gladly pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a healthy kidney and a better life must be doomed to live miserably and die young
All so doctors can feel good about themselves as being "ethical?" I just don't get it. Literally no one is benefitted by this system except the consciences of doctors who themselves make huge salaries, but dictate that no one else can get paid because incentives and medicine don't mix.
My good friend Virginia Postrel pretty much nails it here.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
New Conditions on Organ Donations
what is the ethical trade-off in ensuring the safety of donated organs? What probability is "acceptable," since zero risk is unachievable? Well, there are new rules: you can't have had more than two sexual partners in the past year. Excerpt:
“With the new guidelines, every college student in America will be high risk,” said Dr. Harry Dorn-Arias, a transplant surgeon at the University of Virginia. “Right now, it's probably a prostitute or a guy with a needle in his arm. Next time, it will be just a young guy."
Under the new policy proposed this fall by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deceased and living donors who were not monogamous in the previous 12 months would be considered at increased risk of transmitting HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C -- even if they had no other risk factors
CDC officials say the proposed guidelines are aimed at making the organ supply safer and preventing accidental transmission of life-threatening infections. The policies wouldn’t absolutely ban anyone from donating, especially in an exceptional or life-saving situation, but they would call for more scrutiny and testing.
“With the new guidelines, every college student in America will be high risk,” said Dr. Harry Dorn-Arias, a transplant surgeon at the University of Virginia. “Right now, it's probably a prostitute or a guy with a needle in his arm. Next time, it will be just a young guy."
Under the new policy proposed this fall by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deceased and living donors who were not monogamous in the previous 12 months would be considered at increased risk of transmitting HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C -- even if they had no other risk factors
CDC officials say the proposed guidelines are aimed at making the organ supply safer and preventing accidental transmission of life-threatening infections. The policies wouldn’t absolutely ban anyone from donating, especially in an exceptional or life-saving situation, but they would call for more scrutiny and testing.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
FT Caldwell Article on Colleague Ruth Grant's Book
Prof. Ruth Grant has a terrific new book, "Strings Attached."
Christopher Caldwell of FT writes a nice extended review and commentary. Here is an excerpt:
In Ruth Grant’s latest book, Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives, the professor of political philosophy at Duke University gives one the sense that day-to-day rules of American life are being set in a crooked fashion. Police officers hand out traffic tickets according to a daily quota. A South Carolina legislator proposes reducing prison sentences for inmates who donate their organs. The federal government collects billions in taxes for state road building projects, but will release the money only if states surrender their constitutional right to set the legal drinking age.
These stories all involve government incentives. The policy bestseller Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein has lately brought a similar approach into vogue. Nudge suggests displaying vegetables more prominently than desserts in school cafeterias and automatically enrolling company employees in retirement plans unless they protest. Prof Grant identifies the Thaler-Sunstein approach as “choice architecture”, a slightly different programme than the “incentivisation” she assails. But both offer politicians a way to herd citizens like cattle, while purporting to set them free.
There are two basic ways to get people to do something: coercion and persuasion. Both have their problems. Coercion is cruel. Persuasion doesn’t always convince. That is where incentives come in – you can offer someone something to do something he would not do otherwise. It is a trade. But it is also an exercise of power. These incentives are employed to counteract people’s natural motivations.
That is the way people understood the word “incentive” when it entered public-policy discussions a century ago. It was part of the American world view of the Progressive Era, a strange combination of utopianism and two-dimensional, “let’s get down to brass tacks”, “every man has his price” cynicism. This was the world of Taylorism and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and social engineering proposed without embarrassment.
Incentivising is not only the market’s alternative to coercion. It is also powerful people’s alternative to persuasion. It can render governing classes unaccountable. Rulers get the outcome they desire, while the masses on whom it was imposed get the responsibility for having chosen it. An incentive is not a reward, something that can be fair or unfair. It is just a hedonic incitement. Prof Grant notes that the controversial bonuses paid to AIG employees after the insurer’s $180bn bail-out were revolting to those who think of bonuses as wages but acceptable to those who think of bonuses as incentives.
Dubious incentivisation is the hallmark of much of the US public sector.
ATSRTWT! And congrats to Ruth, a really good job on the book. It is an important achievement.
Christopher Caldwell of FT writes a nice extended review and commentary. Here is an excerpt:
In Ruth Grant’s latest book, Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives, the professor of political philosophy at Duke University gives one the sense that day-to-day rules of American life are being set in a crooked fashion. Police officers hand out traffic tickets according to a daily quota. A South Carolina legislator proposes reducing prison sentences for inmates who donate their organs. The federal government collects billions in taxes for state road building projects, but will release the money only if states surrender their constitutional right to set the legal drinking age.
These stories all involve government incentives. The policy bestseller Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein has lately brought a similar approach into vogue. Nudge suggests displaying vegetables more prominently than desserts in school cafeterias and automatically enrolling company employees in retirement plans unless they protest. Prof Grant identifies the Thaler-Sunstein approach as “choice architecture”, a slightly different programme than the “incentivisation” she assails. But both offer politicians a way to herd citizens like cattle, while purporting to set them free.
There are two basic ways to get people to do something: coercion and persuasion. Both have their problems. Coercion is cruel. Persuasion doesn’t always convince. That is where incentives come in – you can offer someone something to do something he would not do otherwise. It is a trade. But it is also an exercise of power. These incentives are employed to counteract people’s natural motivations.
That is the way people understood the word “incentive” when it entered public-policy discussions a century ago. It was part of the American world view of the Progressive Era, a strange combination of utopianism and two-dimensional, “let’s get down to brass tacks”, “every man has his price” cynicism. This was the world of Taylorism and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and social engineering proposed without embarrassment.
Incentivising is not only the market’s alternative to coercion. It is also powerful people’s alternative to persuasion. It can render governing classes unaccountable. Rulers get the outcome they desire, while the masses on whom it was imposed get the responsibility for having chosen it. An incentive is not a reward, something that can be fair or unfair. It is just a hedonic incitement. Prof Grant notes that the controversial bonuses paid to AIG employees after the insurer’s $180bn bail-out were revolting to those who think of bonuses as wages but acceptable to those who think of bonuses as incentives.
Dubious incentivisation is the hallmark of much of the US public sector.
ATSRTWT! And congrats to Ruth, a really good job on the book. It is an important achievement.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Airline Travel: Putting Seat Back
Putting the seat back can be pretty bad for the person behind you. Is there a negotiated solution?
Coase might say, "Yes."
But would side payments be okay? Could I offer to give you $20 not to put your seat back? Could you refuse, but then when I get made offer ME $20 to be allowed to put your seat back?
Who "owns" the rights? I think most people say if you sit in a seat, you can put the seat back. Here is a poll: In a recent USA TODAY/TripAdvisor survey that drew more than 6,500 responses, travelers were conflicted: Asked "what's your position on reclining plane seats?" 27% answered, "I have the right to recline," while another 27% said "all seats should be non-reclining." Bringing up the rear: "It's rude to recline" (17%), "I only recline when sleeping" (15%), and "It depends who's behind me" (13%).
But what about mealtime? Should you ask? Should you go slowly?
Three short videos on etiquette. The LMM really hates seat back grabbers.
Thanks to the LMM!
But would side payments be okay? Could I offer to give you $20 not to put your seat back? Could you refuse, but then when I get made offer ME $20 to be allowed to put your seat back?
Who "owns" the rights? I think most people say if you sit in a seat, you can put the seat back. Here is a poll: In a recent USA TODAY/TripAdvisor survey that drew more than 6,500 responses, travelers were conflicted: Asked "what's your position on reclining plane seats?" 27% answered, "I have the right to recline," while another 27% said "all seats should be non-reclining." Bringing up the rear: "It's rude to recline" (17%), "I only recline when sleeping" (15%), and "It depends who's behind me" (13%).
But what about mealtime? Should you ask? Should you go slowly?
Three short videos on etiquette. The LMM really hates seat back grabbers.
Thanks to the LMM!
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Airline Travel: If the person beside you is "A Passenger of Size," you have to stand?
Should a truly obese person be REQUIRED to buy two seats?
Should the fat person have to sit like the picture above? That's not safe, or comfortable.
This story raises a lot of questions. (I had a similar experience, but since I am a wide-bottom myself the situation spilled over onto the person on my left, also).
Some excerpts from the US Air story:
Liz Landau, a spokesperson for US Airways, confirmed that Berkowitz was inconvenienced by a passenger of size and told msnbc.com “it was his choice to stand.”
“His seatmate had the same right to his seat as Mr. Berkowitz did to his. So here’s where the diplomacy and cooperation of all passengers comes into play,” the airline said in a statement.
Berkowitz was unhappy with the $200 voucher the airline offered him for his experience, at which point he contacted (consumer advocate) Elliott. (NOTE: TICKET WAS $800)
"We have attempted to address this customer’s service concerns,” the airline statement said, “but offering increasing amounts of compensation based on a threat of a safety violation isn’t really fair — especially when the passenger himself said he didn’t follow crew members’ instructions and fasten his seatbelt.
“The way to ensure you have space available next to you — whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight — is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance.”
This is remarkable, even for the putzes who run US Airways. Each passenger has the same rights to his/her seat.... unless the person is fat, and then they get 1.5 seats or more. If you can't buckle your seatbelt, because El Gordo is flowing over onto your seat, then you are refusing to "follow crew members' instructions."
Finally, and most remarkably, the displaced man was at fault. US Airways suggests that HE should have purchased two seats, if he wanted "more personal space to relax."
Three parties here. Who is obliged to make accomodations? The jumbo? The displaced passenger? Or the airline?
And then what about tall people? If the guy behind me is very tall, does that mean that I can't put my seat back? Comments here, on same story and also tall issue, are interesting.
Can reputation solve this problem? For me it does. I would prefer either to drive, or just not go, if the only option is the pirates at US Airways. But US Airways is not bankrupt, so clearly this aggressive indifference to customer safety and comfort is not a threat. The airline can get away with imposing all the costs on the customers, because the customers are too sheeplike to fight back.
But clearly this was not a euvoluntary exchange, where the passenger agreed to give up his seat. His only choices were to stand up, or forfeit his $800 ticket completely.
The solution: one of those box things they use to check carry ons (only they don't, really).
But you could have a seat, with the armrests bolted down. If you don't fit in that seat, you have to buy two.
(nod to Mark Steckbeck)
This story raises a lot of questions. (I had a similar experience, but since I am a wide-bottom myself the situation spilled over onto the person on my left, also).
Some excerpts from the US Air story:
Liz Landau, a spokesperson for US Airways, confirmed that Berkowitz was inconvenienced by a passenger of size and told msnbc.com “it was his choice to stand.”
“His seatmate had the same right to his seat as Mr. Berkowitz did to his. So here’s where the diplomacy and cooperation of all passengers comes into play,” the airline said in a statement.
Berkowitz was unhappy with the $200 voucher the airline offered him for his experience, at which point he contacted (consumer advocate) Elliott. (NOTE: TICKET WAS $800)
"We have attempted to address this customer’s service concerns,” the airline statement said, “but offering increasing amounts of compensation based on a threat of a safety violation isn’t really fair — especially when the passenger himself said he didn’t follow crew members’ instructions and fasten his seatbelt.
“The way to ensure you have space available next to you — whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight — is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance.”
This is remarkable, even for the putzes who run US Airways. Each passenger has the same rights to his/her seat.... unless the person is fat, and then they get 1.5 seats or more. If you can't buckle your seatbelt, because El Gordo is flowing over onto your seat, then you are refusing to "follow crew members' instructions."
Finally, and most remarkably, the displaced man was at fault. US Airways suggests that HE should have purchased two seats, if he wanted "more personal space to relax."
Three parties here. Who is obliged to make accomodations? The jumbo? The displaced passenger? Or the airline?
And then what about tall people? If the guy behind me is very tall, does that mean that I can't put my seat back? Comments here, on same story and also tall issue, are interesting.
Can reputation solve this problem? For me it does. I would prefer either to drive, or just not go, if the only option is the pirates at US Airways. But US Airways is not bankrupt, so clearly this aggressive indifference to customer safety and comfort is not a threat. The airline can get away with imposing all the costs on the customers, because the customers are too sheeplike to fight back.
But clearly this was not a euvoluntary exchange, where the passenger agreed to give up his seat. His only choices were to stand up, or forfeit his $800 ticket completely.
The solution: one of those box things they use to check carry ons (only they don't, really).
But you could have a seat, with the armrests bolted down. If you don't fit in that seat, you have to buy two.
(nod to Mark Steckbeck)
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