Globalism at 35,000 feet

HOW MUCH WOULD you pay to enjoy six hours away from your fellow humans, in a chair that reclines? $1,500 an hour -- or even more? And if someone invited you to spend $9,000 to pass a long afternoon in a fairly cramped lounge, munching peanuts and reading airline magazines, would you accept? How desperate are you to have access to 15 movies you'd never pay to see in a theater, instead of 11?

I often think that the airline executive who came up with the idea of business class should get his name on an endowed chair at the Harvard Business School -- and his face on a most-wanted poster.

These seats somewhere toward the middle of planes are where airlines make most of their revenue. But for passengers, they are the place where the laws of reason, much like the laws of gravity, no longer seem to apply. To fly business class from New York to London can cost $9,600 on British Airways, and to fly first class costs more than $14,000. A coach seat will set you back roughly $500.

Look at those figures again. Who in her right mind would pay $9,000 for six hours -- or eight, if you include time in the airport -- of slightly elevated comfort? Someone who is not paying for her own travel, perhaps, and longs to be a little closer to those billionaires and movie stars who dropped the full $14,000 to be a few extra feet away from the riff-raff.

On the ground, a traveler might expect to pay $100 to get 24 hours of extra comfort in a hotel's upgraded suite or an executive floor room. But as soon as we take to the skies -- and become a kind of captive audience -- we will pay $9,000 for a little more of the food that we'd gladly have much less of.

The age of airline deregulation has brought a carnival of "luxury discount" carriers, genuine discount carriers, frat-boy parties in the heavens and fly-by-night operations that change their names or colors before you've got a boarding pass. But what it's really brought us is the worst side of globalism, in compact form.

It begins with the inequity of prices. Those paying thousands for the upper deck of the jet effectively set up a gated community in the air, in which people from other classes are not even allowed to visit their restrooms. It continues with the startling inequality of services -- and the unsurprising fact that the countries that often score highest for quality of life (Singapore, Australia, New Zealand) also are the ones that offer the most comfortable coach habitations in the sky.