We’ve had the usual burst of airline stock market results recently, they come around every few months. And the results are that, roughly enough, flight numbers are back to what they were pre-pandemic. That’s for short haul flights that is, the ones that take people off for an experience. Business travel is still below those pre-lockdown days. We had that little shock that showed Zoom calls working and so behaviour has changed. As it probably should do, having done it there’s not that much exciting about business travel. I’ve a comfy chair at home and I can mix my own gin - well, the first three or four at least.
But that the population is back to flying again is one of those interesting things. Obviously, interesting in that it enrages all those who think that us proles shouldn’t be allowed to fly. But rather more importantly, in that it’s so obviously against what all the usual polls and surveys tell us.
Everyone’s really, really, against boiling Gaia they tell us, every time they’re asked. And yet the very same people happily get on a ‘plane to the beach. That thing we keep being told is the very act that is boiling Gaia. There’s a disconnect here but what is it?
The answer is as economists have been pointing out for a long time. It’s revealed preferences that matter, not expressed. Or, more colloquially, look at what people do not what they say - and most certainly don’t pay any attention at all to what they say everyone else should be doing. To be slightly more formal again, we really only grasp human motivations, trade offs and decision making by observations of what is done within the constraints the universe throws at us.
Which is all very interesting and describes why people do indeed claim to be very worried about boiling Flipper and then fly off to the beach for sun and sangria. But there’s a larger lesson to be learned here too.
Politicians making decisions for us is near by definition acting upon expressed preferences. The results of the opinion poll, the focus group, even an election is still an expression of opinion. The information flow to those making those decisions is therefore hopelessly flawed. Because we know that what people say isn’t what they really mean. So it isn’t just that politicians are incompetent, or that reality’s too complex to be managed, or that they’re blinded by ideology (although all three are certainly true). It’s that the information flow to them, that they’re basing their decision making upon, is known to simply be wrong.
The implication of this is that political decision making has to be about revealed, not expressed, preferences. As revealed such can only be, umm, revealed by observation of those with the freedom to do those things the correct political stance is that classical liberal world. Consenting adults get to adult consentingly, over economic as well as all other parts of life. Adjustments for significant third party harm and prices for externalities are fine additions to such a system. But we’ve got to have the freedom to do as we wish so that it’s possible to divine what it is that everyone wants to do.
We simply don’t have any other effective information source. As is shown by the way in which everybody says they’re right there with Greta then go fly off to foreign for a long weekend.