travel

Why are borders so strict?

pnrj personal, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Aug 15 JDN 2459442

Most of us don’t cross borders all that often, and when we do it’s generally only for brief visits; so we don’t often experience just how absurdly difficult it is to move to another country. I have received a crash course in the subject for the past couple of months, in trying to arrange my move to Edinburgh.

Certain portions of the move would be inherently difficult: Moving a literal ton of stuff across an entire ocean is no mean feat, and really the impressive thing is that our civilization has reached the point where we can do it so quickly and reliably. (I do mean a literal ton: We estimated we have about 350 cubic feet and 2300 pounds of items, or 10 cubic meters and 1040 kilograms.)

But most of the real headaches have been the results of institutional policies.

First of all, there’s the fact that the university gave me so little notice. This is not entirely their fault; my understanding is that the position opened up during the spring, and they scrambled to fill it as fast as they could for the fall. Still, this has made everything that much more difficult.

More importantly, there is the matter of moving across borders.

In order to get visas to live in the UK, my fiance and I had to complete an application documenting basically our whole lives (I had to track down three parking tickets and a speeding ticket from as far back as 2011), maintain bank balances of a sufficient amount for at least 30 days (evidently poor people need not apply), and pay exorbitant fees (over $5000 in all for the two of us, which, gratefully, the university is supposed to reimburse me for). We had to upload not only our passports, but also financial documents as well as housing records to prove our relationship (in lieu of a marriage license, since we had to delay the wedding to this year due to the pandemic). But this was not enough; we had to pay even more fees to get expedited processing, and then travel to a US government office in the LA area to get our fingerprints done, and then mail our passports to another office in New York for further processing. We started this process the first week of August; we still haven’t heard back on our final approval.

Then there is the matter of moving our cat, Tootsie. UK regulations for importing a cat require an ISO-compliant microchip and certain vaccinations; this is perfectly reasonable. But they also require that you bring the cat with you when you move (within at most 5 days of your arrival), or else the cat will be legally considered livestock and subject to a tariff of over $1000.

This would be inconvenient enough, but then there is the fact that current regulations do not allow cats to be transported into the UK in the cabin of an aircraft. If they are to be flown in, they must be brought in the cargo hold. Since we did not want to subject our cat to several hours alone in a cargo hold on a transatlantic flight, we will instead be flying to Amsterdam, because the Netherlands has more lenient regulations. But then of course we still need to get her to Edinburgh; our current plan involves taking a ferry from Amsterdam to Newcastle and then a train from there to Edinburgh. In all the whole process will take at least a day longer (and cost a few hundred dollars more) than it would have without the utterly pointless rule forbidding cats from flying into the UK in the cabin.

All of this for, and I really cannot emphasize this enough, a routine move between two NATO allied First World countries.

The alliance between the US and the UK is one of the most tightly-knit in the world, and dates back generations. Our trade networks are thoroughly interconnected, and we even share most of our media and culture back and forth. There’s honestly no particular reason we couldn’t simply be the same country. (Indeed the one thing we did fight with them about in the last 250 years was over precisely that.)

There is probably less difference culturally and economically between New York and London than there is between New York and rural Texas or between London and rural Scotland. Yet a move within each country requires basically none of this extra hassle and paperwork—you basically just physically move yourself, register your car, maybe a few other minor things. You certainly don’t need to get a passport, apply for a visa, or pay exorbitant fees.

What purpose does all of this extra regulation serve? Are we safer, or richer, or healthier, because we make it so difficult to move across borders?

I can understand the need to hve some sort of security at border crossings: We want to make sure people aren’t smuggling contraband or planning acts of terrorism. (There is, by the way, a series of questions on the UK visa application asking things like this:”Have you ever committed terrorism?” “Have you ever been implicated in genocide?” One wonders if anyone has ever answered “yes”.) It even makes sense to have some kind of registration process and background check for people who plan to move permanently. But what we actually do goes far, far beyond these sensible requirements; the goal seems to be to ensure that only the finest upstanding citizens may be allowed to move to a country, while anyone who is born on the opposite side of that line need not meet any standard whatsoever in order to remain.

In my view, the most sensible standard would be this: You should only exclude someone from entering your country for actions that you’d be willing to imprison them for if they were already there. Clearly, smuggling and terrorism qualify. Indeed, any felony would do. But would you lock someone in prison for not having enough money in their bank account? Or for failing to disclose a parking ticket from ten years ago? Or for filling out paperwork incorrectly? Yet visas are denied for this sort of reason all the time.

I think most economists would agree with me: The free movement of people across borders is one of the most vital principles of free trade—and the one that the world has least lived up to so far.

Yet it seems we are in the minority. Most people seem to think it’s perfectly sensible to have completely different rules for moving from Detroit to Toledo than from Detroit to Windsor.

The reason for this is apparent enough: Once again, the tribal paradigm looms large. Human beings divide themselves into groups, and form their identities around those groups. Those inside the group are good, while those outside are bad. Actions which benefit our own group are right, while actions which benefit other groups are wrong. The group you belong to is an inherent part of who you are, and can never be changed.

We have defined these groups in many different ways throughout human history, and our scale of group identification has gradually expanded over time. First, it was families and tribes. For centuries, it was feudal kingdoms. Now, it is nation-states. Perhaps, someday, it will enlarge to encompass all of humanity.

But until that day comes, people are going to make it as hard as possible to cross from one group to another.

How I’d run an airline

pnrj personal , , , , ,

Mar 1 JDN 2458910

I’m traveling this week, so I have less time for blogging than usual and airlines are very much on my mind. So I thought I’d write a short post about things I would change if I were to run my own airline.

1. Instead of overpriced first-class seats, offer the option of seats with more space for a proportional amount. First class prices are almost never worth it, and people seem to be figuring that out: Use of first class is in decline. But sitting in that middle seat is so miserable, why not simply eliminate it? I think a lot of people would be willing to pay 50% more for 50% more space.

2. Offer every passenger two free checked bags, but charge for the carry-on. Carry-on bags are far more awkward and disruptive, and slow down boarding and deboarding much more, than checked bags. The airline should be trying to incentivize passengers to use checked baggage as much as possible. I’d still give each passenger a free personal item (like a purse, backpack or laptop bag), and some people would still want a carry-on bag (e.g. for cameras that can be damaged by radiation); but most people really don’t need to have a roller bag as a carry-on.

3. Power outlets in every seat. This is a trivial amount of cost in terms of manufacturing and electricity, compared to what an airplane already requires; but it makes flying much more convenient for your passengers, and thereby allows you to demand higher prices. This is a no-brainer. (Some airlines, like Delta, already do this.)

4. Assign seats and load the plane based on the seating positions. The first boarding group should be the people who sit furthest in the back, so that no one needs to pass seated passengers in order to find their own seat. Ideally window seats would be filled before aisle seats, but since people like to board and sit together, that might not be feasible. But at the very least we can make boarding faster by seating the back rows first.

5. Give pilots and flight attendants reasonable hours and plenty of vacation time. Airline pilots around the world are dangerously overworked and sleep-deprived. This is dangerous for customers, and if it leads to crashes or lawsuits it can be very expensive for the airlines too. Having an aircraft idle overnight really isn’t that great a cost, especially since red-eye flights command lower prices and are thus less profitable for the airline. Working fewer hours makes people more productive per hour—often to the point of making them more productive overall.

6. Explain why you need to put on your own oxygen mask first. Standard airplane safety instructions always include the line “Put on your mask before assisting others.” But since they almost never explain why, I strongly suspect that in a real emergency a lot of parents try to put on their children’s masks first and thereby needlessly endanger themselves. Wording these instructions might be tricky, because any talk of such things is bound to scare people, but the core idea is this: Hypoxia will cause delirium or unconsciousness long before it will cause permanent brain damage or death. You want to first make sure you aren’t incapacitated, and then you can help save others. If you put on your mask first, your kid may get confused or pass out, but you’ll be able to help them and they’ll be fine. If you put on your kid’s mask first, you may get confused or pass out, and your kid won’t be able to help you. Then unless someone else saves you, you may die pointlessly because you didn’t follow instructions. Depending on altitude and how severe the hull breach is, you have about 30 seconds before you lose consciousness. But your kid has at least three minutes before you need to worry about permanent brain damage, and probably as many as fifteen before they’d die.

7. Include carbon offsets in the ticket price, and advertise this aggressively. Despite the fact that airplanes are a major source of carbon emissions, carbon offsets are actually remarkably cheap compared to the cost of airline tickets. Adding offsets would typically raise the price of a ticket by about $30, which on a $300 ticket is unlikely to shock people. And by advertising the carbon-neutrality of your airline, you can probably get a lot of customers who are willing to pay more, potentially even more than the additional cost of the carbon offsets themselves. This could be a win-win for the airline and the environment.

8. Invest heavily in research on more efficient jet engines. The second-biggest cost for an airline is fuel expenditure. (First is the wages of the crew.) If you can install more efficient engines on your aircraft, you can both reduce your environmental impact and dramatically lower your cost. Current state-of-the-art engines can reduce fuel consumption by as much as 20%; future research could improve this even further.

9. Include snacks at every seat before passengers even board. Putting a bag of pretzels and a water bottle at every seat would be trivially easy, and would allow passengers the opportunity to be eating while the plane takes off—and chewing reduces the discomfort of changing air pressure. If the worry is that people will try to put their tray tables down (which is genuinely unsafe during takeoff), install electronic locks that prevent tray tables from being lowered except when authorized.

10. Install seats that don’t recline. The additional comfort for the passenger reclining is far smaller than the reduced comfort for the passenger behind them. Combine that with the additional cost of maintaining the seats and the additional risk of injury during rough landings, and the answer is obvious: Seats shouldn’t recline.

11. Offer better food. Charging less for airplane food honestly isn’t feasible: Because space and weight are at such a premium, it really is that expensive to store and transport food on an aircraft. But the cost comes mostly from the bulk and weight of the food; it really doesn’t much matter what kind of food it is. To that end, airlines should offer high-quality food that people feel more comfortable paying such high prices for. A steak weighs about the same as a hamburger, and champagne has about the same density as Sprite.

12. Reduce, or even eliminate, fees to change flights. Yes, it’s expensive to have empty seats on a moving airplane. But most flights can be filled by standby passengers, and those that can’t often weren’t full anyway. It’s actually fairly rare for a cancellation to result in an empty seat that would otherwise have been full. And the additional goodwill you get from making life easier for your passengers will make up the difference. (Southwest figured this out; other airlines don’t yet seem to have caught on.)

Would these changes revolutionize air travel? No. But I do think they’d make it a bit more pleasant, without greatly reducing the profits of the airline.