Skip to main content

Taxi cartels, ctd

Image
By
My thinking on the taxi issue here in South Africa has been shaped a lot by Yglesias' posts on taxi medallions and barber licensing.  I know he catches a lot of flak for being a sellout on those issues, but I think it might be illustrative to consider the different situations here and back home, because (and I suspect Yglesias would agree) the solutions are exactly the opposite.

Via Wikipedia
The standard "neoliberal" story about taxi medallions goes like this: taxi drivers try to get the government to erect barriers to entry, to restrict competition and drive up prices.  The solution is to not grant medallions and instead allow as many taxis as the market will bear, subject to some more basic regulation about vehicle safety, driver's licenses, and so forth.  However, so far as I can tell, in South Africa there are no legal grants of association status for taxi organizations.  Instead there is market failure driven by insufficient government regulation (most obviously in law enforcement), leading to endogenous monopolies that then restrict competition and fix prices.  Now, obviously the details would vary a lot between each ideal situation, especially since the most obvious problems with South African taxis have to do with crime and basic safety.  More particularly, since South African taxis (really share taxis) are performing a much more complicated task than US-style one-passenger taxis, government might have to help coordinate between cities and ranks. 

But the underlying story here is clear: the government should be on the side of the weaker party, in both cases here the taxi passengers, and lean against the natural tendency of businessmen best encapsulated by that great Adam Smith quote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousJuly 26, 2011 at 2:01 PM

    I've heard some terrible things about those taxis. Do you feel unsafe riding in them?

    ReplyDelete
  2. RyanJuly 26, 2011 at 2:05 PM

    Sometimes. The rural taxis in particular can be pretty decrepit—I remember one time going to visit another volunteer where we had to stop about every 50k and air up one of the tires with a bike pump. In the cities, though, they tend to be in relatively good shape, sometimes even late-model Volkswagen vans in excellent shape.

    I'd say the biggest safety issue with taxis (and with driving in SA generally) is that no one wears seatbelts. Most taxis don't even have them.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

By
This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s
6 comments
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more