re: Uber/ Lyft leaving Minneapolis due to new law. City officials now fear transport shortages

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A lesson in critical thinking I got in undergrad:

Econ 1 prof hands us an article about airlines overbooking & offering money at the gate to bump passengers. Article argues we should ban this. Reasoning is that it’s exploitative: poorer people overwhelmingly more likely to get bumped because they’ll take the cash and a business traveler won’t.

Class is mostly split on whether it’s reasonable. Prof asks one question: when we ban this, will the poor people who were taking the bump fee thank us for taking away the option? Will the price they pay to fly go up or down?

Clearly people took the bump fee because the money mattered to them. Also, airlines will just raise ticket prices if they can’t overbook, which hurts poorer people more. Taking away options is almost never good.

It’s really incredible how often this pattern plays out: people like this guy below with his UCLA & law degree tell poor people: “you don’t understand, you’re being exploited. Here, let me take away this opportunity you’ve been seeking out so you don’t get exploited anymore.”

There are genuinely tons of people on Twitter right now who implicitly think drivers are going to thank Minneapolis for destroying their option to earn. They won’t.

Disclosure: I worked at Uber and helped launch UberX. My aim was not to depress wages for gig workers. My aim was to allow gig work to be an option for people in the first place.

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