[nateabele]

> The drop in price has a great deal to do with improving technology not simply competition driving down prices

And this improved technology was an inevitable, foregone conclusion?

People make arguments like this as if it was some passive thing, as opposed to thousands if not millions of conscious decisions to improve turbines, airframes, and myriad other technologies, then actually implement them in real aircraft, then acquire and deploy a commercial fleet.

People made these decisions because they were incentivized to trade time and money today for material improvements tomorrow. Why do you think that might have been?

Hint: think about industries where there isn't much competition. Do we see similar improvements there, usually?

[Retric]

There very much was global competition in the airline manufacturing market in the 1970’s. US airlines also weren’t the only people buying aircraft at the time so those regulations didn’t actually impact manufacturing very much.

As to improvements without competition, it’s surprisingly common. AT&T was a huge hotbed of technical innovation when they were a monopoly from ever improving switches and fiber optics etc but they even produced one of the first commercial Unix System V. They also played a surprisingly large role in early satellites literally owning the first commercial communications satellite used for the first live transatlantic television signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar

Monopolies often spend huge sums on R&D outside of their core business. Google’s self driving car is exactly the kind of investment you see when companies have more money than they know what to do with. Xerox for example developed the desktop UI mouse included when they held a huge monopoly, not that it helped them but it did push the industry forward quite a bit.

[WillPostForFood]

AT&T may have innovated in their labs, but they were glacially slow pushing innovation out to consumers. AT&T launch the push button phone in 1963, but it wasn't until the 80's (deregulation in 1984) that a majority of dial phones had been switched over to touch tone. One didn't their home phone, they rented from AT&T, so what was their incentive to innovate?

[fein]

I don't really buy this premise at all

> think about industries where there isn't much competition. Do we see similar improvements there, usually?

I can't think of an industry without competition where said industry doesn't try to improve their product or production for more profit. Maybe something in the medical space that I'm unaware of, but this definitely doesn't fly for aviation or transportation in general.

[quanto]

> but this definitely doesn't fly for aviation or transportation in general.

Precisely because those fields are in a high economic (and consequently technology) competition, you see innovation as you noted. The parent comment is that you cannot throw away the competition and still expect innovations to happen.

[turquoisevar]

I love how you start with critical thinking, essentially asking for evidence, only to then turn around, put on your cheerleading outfit and make heaps of implications and assumptions in favor of deregulation and capitalism without so much as a notion of evidence.

You didn’t even bother to argue against the points raised by the article itself, which goes as far as to say that the benefits you attribute to deregulation hasn’t occurred beyond the first few years after deregulation.