Great article by John Cochrane:
Uber’s surge pricing was an important lesson for me. I loved it. I could always get a car if I really needed it, and I could see how much extra I was paying and decide if I didn’t need it. I was grateful that Uber allowed me to pay other people to postpone their trips for a while, and to send out the word that more drivers were needed. But the drivers reported that everyone hated it and felt cheated.
This disapproval of culture and behavior came to me firmly about 25 years ago. We were driving from Chicago to Boston in our minivan, with 4 young children, a dog and my mother. We got to northern NY, and we had to stop for the night. This was before cell phones and the Internet, so the normal thing to do was pull up at the intersection of the highway, marked food, phone, gas, lodging, and see what was available. Nothing. We tried hotel after hotel. We asked them to call. Nothing. Turns out this was the weekend of Woodstock II. When it got dark, the children were turning into pumpkins. We finally found a seedy Super-8 motel that had 2 rooms left, for $400. This was back when Super-8 motel rooms were about $50 at least. I immediately said “Thank you, we’ll take them!” My mother was angry. “How dare you!” I tried hard to explain. “If he had charged $50, or $100, those rooms would have been gone and we would be sleeping in the car tonight. Thank him and thank you! He is a struggling, entrepreneurial immigrant. We don’t need handouts from people who run Super-8s in upstate New York.” But, although she was a wonderful, intelligent, intelligent, and well-traveled woman, she did not have it. Nothing I could do would convince him that the hotel owner was not a bad person for “taking advantage of us.”
It is really worth giving what you have to your neighbors in times of need, especially those who are poor. But we should not seek gifts. And redistribution by threat of force, extinguishing the best way we know to reduce the deficit, does not follow. Moral feelings are a bad guide for laws.
If we cannot ride mothers we will face difficulties. Still, I feel confident that the Cochranes are making sure that generational trauma ends with them.
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