One of my favourite cartoons shows a couple sitting in luxury at the front of a plane, the wife peeking through the curtains to the cabin behind. ‘I’m so glad we’re in business class, darling,’ she says to her husband. ‘There seems to be some sort of hijacking happening in economy.’
People who have learned to play a game by one set of rules are bitterly affronted when the rules change
Because we must consort with strangers for several hours, planes and airports amplify the normal human sensitivity to status. And so the media furore created by British Airways in revising the status thresholds for its loyalty programme is valuable fodder for students of psychology.
What British Airways has done is to change the criteria it uses to allocate tier status to its frequent fliers (Bronze, Silver, Gold and beyond). Henceforth, your status will be determined by what you have spent in a 12-month period, rather than by where you fly: it is your status which will determine the perks you enjoy when flying on any BA or affiliated airline, whether it’s using business-class check-in desks or the holy grail of lounge access. Many airlines, including the major American carriers, have already changed their programmes to this ‘revenue-based’ approach.
Looked at dispassionately, this is not wholly unreasonable. If I pay £500 to fly to Athens, I am perhaps ten times more profitable to BA than someone paying £200 for the same return flights. Yet previously, if we were both in the same cabin, the number of tier points awarded would usually be the same.
Granted, there is something nakedly transactional about the new system. It does make it blatantly obvious that richer people are going to be treated better than poorer people. On the other hand – and I hate to break this to you, comrades – that’s kind of how money works.
One problem with the old system was that it was vulnerable to arbitrage: people who, finding themselves falling short of Silver Status for the forthcoming year, would hastily book a weekend break in Chernobyl with a six-hour layover in Doha – agratuitous behaviour known as a ‘points run’.
Now I don’t want to let BA off the hook completely here. I don’t think the new programme is perfect by any means. When the threshold for Silver membership is 7,500 points, awarding someone 97 points for a return flight seems churlish. But it is also worth remembering that there is a limit to how generous you can be with some perks – an overcrowded lounge is worse than no lounge at all.
But the grievance felt by people here is genuine. And, in miniature, it helps explain why it is almost impossible for any government significantly to reform the tax system, even if the new system is ultimately fairer overall. Quite simply, the people who are worse off under any new system will make inordinately more noise complaining about the change than the beneficiaries will make to support it. And because the media are much more interested in reporting unhappy stories, this negativity bias is further amplified, so that something that is probably a neutral to mildly negative change overall is made to seem like a grievous injustice by the minority who are adversely affected.
People who have learned to play a game by one set of rules are bitterly affronted when the rules change. And people who lose out under a new system feel a far greater sense of outrage – and garner far more media attention – than those who gain. This explains why ideas like Georgism have made no headway in more than a century, and why we are stuck with a tax system that allows some people shamelessly to game it, while the working young pay over the odds to subsidise the old. Yet in the modern media environment, it has become more or less impossible to do anything at all.
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