Peasant Stories

News flash: A state-sponsored company in China has announced that has developed an electric typewriter that is faster than an IBM Selectric. HCN (whose motto is “we’re one step beyond IBM”) plans to sell an electric typewriter that allows typists to type more words per minute than any previous electric typewriter.

This demonstrates that the United States is falling behind in the critical electric typewriter race, just one more field in which other countries are demonstrating their technological superiority. IBM hasn’t even made a Selectric typewriter in the United States since the 1980s, which must be another example of manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas. Members of Congress have reacted by proposing to tax word processing software so that the federal government can raise the billions of dollars needed to restore American technological superiority in this vital field.

Sounds ridiculous? Of course. Yet how is this different from saying that, because China, Japan, France, and Spain are losing money on new high-speed rail lines, we need to lose money building high-speed rail lines as well? Perhaps we should tax airlines to subsidize high-speed rail in the same way that some cities and states are taxing ride hailing to subsidize public transit.

This is an example of what I call a “peasant story.” Something is happening in a developing country and immediately we’re supposed to do the same thing. The United States has more than 900 motor vehicles per thousand people; China has just 154. Yet transportation policies that are successful in China (not that high-speed rail is successful in China since they all lose money) are supposed to work here too? I doubt it.

Most peasant stories are apocryphal. For example, there’s the story of someone whose blanket was too short to cover themselves when they slept, so they cut a foot off the bottom and sewed it to the top. No one would really do that, would they?

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Then there’s the story of the peasant who acquired an automobile and tried to hitch a horse to it. No peasant would do that: farmers were some of the first to realize the value of motor transport.

But transit agencies effectively do the same thing when they propose hitching transit to ride hailing by asking ride-hailing services to provide the first- and last-mile of transit trips. But in short ride-hailing trips, most of the cost is in the fixed service fee and initial fees. For example, an Uber X costs $1.83 just to get in the car. A one-mile trip at 30 miles per hour $3.23, so going the first and last mile by Uber is 6.46. Add that to the fare for the transit trip, which is at least $1.50, and the total cost is around $8.

The average transit trip is about five miles long. Taking Uber the entire seven miles would cost around $11. Given a choice between a one-seat ride for $11 or a three-seat ride for $8, and a lot of people would skip the transit part of the journey. This doesn’t even bring up the fact that subsidies to transit average nearly $5 per trip, so the total cost of an Uber ride is less than the subsidized cost of transit plus Uber for the first and last mile. People are going to figure this out pretty fast, so transit agencies that hitch their futures to a ride-hailing company to provide first- and last-mile service are going to see their future prospects rapidly dwindle.

Despite our feelings of superiority, peasants are pretty smart. It’s government that is dumb.