Hacker News Reader

Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

> The alternative isn't "hold everyone's hand through all cost decisions"; the alternative is don't make things worse/more confusing unless you absolutely must.

If you're confident and in fact the entire industry is moving in the wrong direction, then you should probably invest as much as you can afford in an airline that is offering simpler plans. For me, I'll trust that the airlines' leaders are the experts in their own market.

> saying that this is a desirable property of an economic system seems like an inhumane and, if taken to extremes, systemically dysfunctional position to take.

"Choice" (i.e., "freedom") _is_ a desirable property. Sometimes it means people make inefficient choices (per their values); in general, the proper response to this observation is to teach people how to choose efficiently.

View on HN

>If you're confident and in fact the entire industry is moving in the wrong direction, then you should probably invest as much as you can afford in an airline that is offering simpler plans.

I think people should be heavily criticized for making arguments like this -- it's entirely done in bad faith. You're presenting a fairy tale, a piece of advice that is completely un-actionable for a huge majority of people. What is this person supposed to do, when

(a) No such airline exists

(b) What sort of marginal impact can <$1000 (presumably the most that can be afforded for this by the majority of people) even have in achieving actual change?

If anything, complaining about it to others (online or elsewhere) probably has more efficacy than doing the above.

Not bad faith; you just missed the joke.

(a.1) Of course there are differences in the complexity of airlines' pricing structures. To claim that all airlines' menus are equally complex is an extraordinary claim.

(a.2) The extent to which it is hard to find an airline with a very simple pricing structure testifies to the economic infeasibility of these structures unless the OP found a market inefficiency (which was overlooked by the entire industry), in which case he should exploit it to the tune of millions of dollars.

(b) Assuming the OP is in fact an airline industry visionary, when other airlines see him making money hand over fist, they'll change their ways.

> The extent to which it is hard to find an airline with a very simple pricing structure testifies to the economic infeasibility of these structures

Perhaps. As I've said elsewhere, another explanation is that it's easier to collude than compete, especially in markets with entry-barrier-induced low participant counts.

The "it came to be this way therefore the market has revealed the optimum" claim misses frequent realities of limited market control/visibility, greed/laziness (i.e. collusion), and intermediate or catch-up evolutionary behavior (i.e. it's quite hard, absent lots of historical evidence often lacking in recent markets, to tell whether something represents a stabilizing optimum or a state of flux as emergent behaviors pursue changing realities, and there are many reasons to presume the latter).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com