Why is airline food so bad? ! Everyone complains about airline food. Indeed, if any serious restaurant dared to serve such food, it would go bankrupt in an instant. Our complaints seem to take for granted that airline meals should be just as good as the ones we eat in restaurants. But why should they? The cost-benefit perspective makes clear that airlines should increase the quality of their meals if and only if the benefits would outweigh the costs of doing so. The benefits of better food are probably well measured by what passengers would be willing to pay for it, in the form of higher ticket prices. If a restaurant-quality meal could be had for a mere $5 increase in costs, most people would probably be delighted to pay it. The difficulty, however, is that it would be much more costly than that to prepare significantly better meals at 39,000 feet in a tiny galley with virtually no time. It could be done, of course. An airline could remove 20 seats from the plane, install a modern, well-equipped kitchen, hire extra staff, spend more on ingredients, and so on. But these extra costs would be more like $50 per passenger than $5. For all our complaints about the low quality of airline food, few of us would be willing to bear this extra burden. The sad result is that airline food is destined to remain unpalatable because the costs of making it better outweigh the benefits. Many of us respond warmly to the maxim, "Anything worth doing is worth doing well." After all, it encourages a certain pride of workmanship that is often sadly lacking. As the airline food example makes clear, however, when the maxim is interpreted literally, it makes no sense. It is completely unmindful of the need to weigh costs against benefits. To do something well means to devote time, effort, and expense to it. But time, effort, and expense are scarce. To devote them to one activity makes them unavailable for another. Increasing the quality of one of the things we do thus necessarily means to reduce the quality of others-- yet another application of the concept of opportunity cost. Every intelligent decision must be mindful of this tradeoff. Everything we see in life is the result of some such compromise. For Serena Williams to play tennis as well as she does means that she cannot become a concert pianist. And yet this obviously does not mean that she shouldn't spend any time playing the piano. It just means that she should hold herself to a lower standard there than in the tennis arena.
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