A Stitch in Haste

Once I return from my undisclosed location, I will for the first time ever have earned "elite status" with an airline (Continental). Indeed, my choice of destination was based in small part on the mileage accrual (i.e., the shortest possible flight to make it to 25,000 miles).

Elite status on Continental comes with many perks: priority check-in, priority baggage handling, priority seat selection, priority boarding ...

... and, much to my delight, priority security screening at Newark Airport.

As I've noted before, the notion that there is an "express lane" at security for First Class and elite status fliers stirs indignation among some malcontents.

A New York Times Magazine contributor, for example:

There have always been special queues for first-class check-in and boarding. Those are part of a private transaction between an airline and a customer. But two-tiered security checks are a different story. Airport security, after all, is not a business transaction. It is justified as national defense, mandated by federal law, overseen by the Transportation Security Administration and carried out by either the T.S.A. or a private security service under its ultimate authority. It exists in its present form because of the national emergency of Sept. 11, 2001. It is financed by a "Sept. 11 security fee" that all fliers pay.

The T.S.A., whenever it is called on the carpet (which is often) about the two-tiered system it countenances, responds with the same piece of casuistry. The rich are scanned the same way as everyone else, the T.S.A. insists, but the formation of the queues themselves is not our department. "That real estate in front of the checkpoint is owned by the airlines," one spokeswoman told USA Today in 2006. (The law is not crystal clear. It gives supervisory responsibility for the entire airport to a T.S.A. "federal security director.")

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Just as it was preposterous for Hillary Clinton to dismiss economists (and, therefore, economics itself) as "elitist," so too is it preposterous for this malcontent to dismiss a priority queue at airport security as "casuistry." It ignores the pesky fact that, so long as the TSA staff are kept busy (i.e., not standing around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a first class passenger to show up), then what difference does it make, from an objective "just keep 'em moving" perspective, how the passengers are sorted? If the screeners are all working continually, then what exactly is the problem from the perspective of "security"? (For an isolated but far better example of the point the author is trying to make, one that help keeps the current debate in perspective, see this old post — but note the differences in the analysis too; they are all-important.)

(And, talking about "casuistry," the notion that an airport's "federal security director" does or ought have authority to impose egalitarianism for its own sake — rather than focusing exclusively on legitimate "security" concerns — is the worst kind of specious, bureaucrat-inspired, Kip's Law sophistry.)

Indeed, the malcontent reluctantly concedes barely a column-inch later that, even if the airlines needed a justification for establishing priority lines at security (they do not), they actually have one:

Although there is no principled argument for segregated airport security, maybe there is a pragmatic one. Elite travelers tend to be repeat travelers. As likely as not, they have had their luggage rummaged through three times in the past week, and the airlines — or their databases — know who they are. If there were some security-based system for speeding their transit, that would be great. Since there is no such system, maybe the rough-and-ready class system is (without meaning to be, of course) fair.

Economic science (in the form of "operations research" generally and "queueing theory" specifically) is, we are told, not "principled" but merely "pragmatic." If it is "fair," then it is so only by accident. The libel of "economists as elitists" strikes again.

One last hasty stitch:

James May, C.E.O. of the Air Transport Association, which represents the big airlines, told a Senate committee in 2006 that money spent on Registered Traveler had been "wasted." The airlines' views are not surprising — after all, Registered Traveler makes available for $100 a perquisite that they have been using to sell $4,700 tickets.

That is a flat-out lie. The airlines opposed "Registered Traveler" (now run by "Clear" and "FLO") because it was poorly designed, not because it would steal their business class revenues. (Indeed, opposition was based in large part because $100 was deemed too expensive, not too cheap.) It is simply absurd to think that huge swaths of the business traveler population will suddenly trade down to coach merely because they can save a few minutes at the security line via paid pre-screening programs.

It is easy for some to couch antipathy for the better off as a quest for "egalitarian fairness." But to sacrifice one harmless scrap of efficiency at what is already one of the least efficient processes in all modernity strips the facade from the malcontents' argument and exposes their underlying sociopathy.