Thought du Jour

I am writing this at an airport. A slight Asian woman has checked in with, I would guess, about 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of suitcases and boxes. She pays extra for exceeding the weight allowance. A man who must weigh at least 40 kilos more than she does, but whose baggage is under the limit, pays nothing. Yet, in terms of the airplane’s fuel consumption, it is all the same whether the extra weight is baggage or body fat. ….

[Why not] set a standard passenger weight, say, 75 kilos. If a passenger weighs 100 kilos, a surcharge would be charged to cover the extra fuel costs. For a passenger who is 25 kilos overweight, the surcharge on a Sydney-London return ticket would be $29. A passenger weighing just 50 kilos would get a discount of the same amount.

Another way to achieve the same objective would be to set a standard weight for passengers and luggage, and then ask people to get on the scales with their luggage. That would have the advantage of avoiding embarrassment for those who do not wish to reveal their weight.

Friends with whom I discuss this proposal often say that many obese people cannot help being overweight – they just have a different metabolism from the rest of us. But the point of a surcharge for extra weight is not to punish a sin, whether it is levied on baggage or on bodies. It is a way of recouping from you the true cost of flying you to your destination, rather than imposing it on your fellow passengers. Flying is different from, say, health care. It is not a human right.

Peter Singer, “Weigh More, Pay More“, Project Syndicate, 12 March 2012.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

Luigi Zingales, a noted economist at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, knows a thing or two about crony capitalism. The reason he emigrated to the US from his native Italy in 1988 was because he had had enough of living in a country where promotion was based on who you knew, not what you knew. ….

In the US he found a country that had built a system of capitalism that was the pre-eminent exemplar of the free-market ideal of economic liberty and open competition. He thrived on this meritocratic ethos. Yet now he is beginning to have his doubts, detecting hints in America of … crony capitalism ….

Zingales expresses an understandable nostalgia for the values of the American Revolution, which started as much as a protest against the corruption of the East India Company as a battle over taxation. And he produces a wonderful quote from Supreme Court justice Noah Swayne in 1875: “If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves in this way, to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption, and the employment as infamous.” Compare and contrast with the pygmies of today’s Supreme Court, who in 2010 made the landmark decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission that gave money unlimited power on the electoral process via super-Pacs. For some, this is fine because it is disclosed. Yet the fact of disclosure does not make the system of political finance any less corrupt.

Zingales’s fundamental diagnosis is right. Lobbying has run riot, capitalism has become pro-business instead of pro-market and cronyism is a real threat.

John Plender, “Nostalgia for the land of opportunity“, Financial Times, 16 April 2012.

FT columnist John Plender is reviewing A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity , by Luigi Zingales (Basic Books, 2012).