Why US passengers loathe airport productivity gains
Surveys may show them to be productive but the American system is still way behind Asia's best
Flying from Hong Kong to the United States recently, I occupied myself reading economist Tyler Cowen's book Average Is Over.
This is one of many recent works warning of rising inequality, but Cowen makes it clear the problem is not with the rich but with those who do not have the skills or smarts to compete in today's hi-tech economies.
He argues, for example, that the Americans who lost their jobs in the recession of 2009 were the least productive workers - and they may never be rehired, even in a full-blown recovery, because employers have learned to get by with fewer but better workers.
Many regulars to the US have at least one tale of a nasty run-in with some cranky flight attendant
But then, I landed in Chicago, where it would seem that a number of incompetent workers have escaped the 2009 purge, at least at O'Hare International.
Either that, or the "fewer but better workers" paradigm is going to be increasingly tough on the customer.
I felt particularly sorry for an utterly confused, stranded family of Indian passengers trying to locate an airline staffer to help them; perhaps they were hoping to take a vacation from their own country's famous chaos, only to arrive at an airport system that even US Vice-President Joseph Biden has described as "third world".
Two decades ago, when I moved to Hong Kong, the flights home to America were usually without incident. These days, there is always something.
With my arrival in Chicago last week, that something was an overheated, smoking bathroom fan in a flight tower, causing the evacuation of the tower's air traffic controllers - that is, it was incompetence.