March 23, 2007
Stewardesses III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon suspects a connection between the eroticization of stewardesses and the regulatory environments in which airlines were born and came of age. On the face of it, this is not a foolish argument: When firms are forbidden to compete on the basis of price, they will generally compete by offering customers other incentives. In the case of the airlines, I remember a race to provide ever more luxurious food. Since airline food had previously been more or less disgusting, this was not necessarily a bad outcome, although much cheaper air travel seems preferable, since people were in effect paying vast sums for the modest pleasure of a bad steak on the way to Florida. But the eventual deregulation of air fares did drive down some prices on many routes, sometimes to an astonishing extent. I still regret my 1999 failure to fly from the United Kingdom to Stockholm for 37 pence, plus taxes and fees (which I think amounted to ten pounds or so). I also think there is something to the notion that some of the higher profit margins regulation produced were passed on to the work force; this was certainly true in broadcast television, and I think it was true with the airlines. But I do not think that regulation can account for the stewardesses being touted in the way they were. There were a lot of regulated industries before Alfred Kahn came along—telecommunications, for example, and trucking, but no eroticization of the labor force in those cases. Similarly, now that airlines can and do compete on the basis of price, there is no reason for them to have stopped competing on other fronts; when I fly Air India, I do it for the combination of the price and the food. I still think there was something peculiar about our culture’s transient stewardess fetish, and I think it has to be explained, at least in part, in non-economic terms.
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