Grim reality
THE “Save Our Airlines” online petition calls on the CNMI government, Marianas Southern Airways and Star Marianas Air to “achieve harmony.” That is, lower airfare. Airlines, to be sure, could lower their rates right away, but only if the government would provide subsidies. The government, however, says it no longer has funding for subsidies. And that’s the sticking point.
The online petition also wants the CNMI to “fight to keep Asiana” on Saipan, and to “keep United fares affordable” while “bringing more airlines” to the Commonwealth.
Actually, no fighting is needed to do those things. But again, the government must provide subsidies to the airlines so they could fly to the CNMI and charge affordable airfare.
What about government-imposed “price controls” you ask? Sure. Many politicians and voters (everywhere, and throughout recorded human history) are blissfully unaware of the abysmal results of price controls. The government can impose them. But the airlines can respond by staying away from the CNMI. Unlike government, which spends other people’s money, airlines can’t afford to lose their money. Their prices must reflect their cost of doing business, and the interplay of supply and demand in a specific market; in this case, the CNMI.
Prices, to quote economist Thomas Sowell, convey information about an underlying reality. The airfares charged by airlines (still) doing business in the CNMI mirror the islands’ grim economic condition: their remoteness, their small (and shrinking) population, and the (current) low demand for the destination itself.
Not so fast
HOLD onto your wallets whenever you hear a politician declare that s/he will make decisions “driven by data.” Public officials who say so are, more or less, telling us we can’t or we shouldn’t argue with them because they’re “backed by data.”
Nonsense. As data experts have pointed out, you can “prove” anything with data. Show us the data first so we can follow the advice of economist Tim Harford, author of “The Data Detective.” He recommends that in assessing data, we should “look for comparisons and context,” and put “any claim into perspective.” Then, he said, “we should look behind the statistics at where they came from — and what other data might have vanished into obscurity…. We should ask who is missing from the data we’re being shown, and whether our conclusions might differ if they were included…. [W]e should [also] ask tough questions about algorithms and the big datasets that drive them, recognizing that without intelligent openness they cannot be trusted.” In addition, “we should look under the surface of any beautiful graph or chart. And…we should keep an open mind, asking how we might be mistaken, and whether the facts have changed.”
“Data” should not signal the end of debate, but the start of it.
To paraphrase Charles Krauthammer, “There is nothing more anti-data than the very idea that data is settled, static, impervious to challenge.”
