Come Fly With Me
👩🏾✈️But Not On Spirit Airlines 🧑🏽✈️
“In my house, anyone who uses one word when they could have used ten just isn't trying hard.” -President Josiah Bartlet, The West Wing
I’ve flown a lot during my career…but I never fly Spirit Airlines.
One time was enough for me.
Spirit Airlines’ claim to fame is that it offers the lowest prices on airline tickets, mainly by charging the customer for countless items that most people get included in ticket purchases, including carry-on bags, snacks, and seat selection.
Spirit Airlines is a godsend for people who fly frequently and exceptionally light. For people who fly infrequently and don’t read the fine print, Spirit Airlines is the most hated airline in a widely disliked industry.1
One of the tensions raised by Spirit Airlines and described in this exceptional podcast episode from Planet Money is why an airline hated by so many people continues to stay in business (although merger talks have been afoot for quite some time.) Of course, many businesses thrive despite being held in low esteem by consumers, including the companies that provide us with cable, insurance, loans, etc. However, these companies are different because they sell things most of us feel required to purchase. Airlines are mostly a discretionary expense, so why purchase a ticket if we know we will loathe the provider?
The reason can be found in this week’s heuristic.
Stated and Revealed Preferences
By now, the disconnect between people buying tickets from Spirit Airlines versus flyers saying they hate Spirit Airlines should be familiar to you. Personal preferences and economic choices misalign all the time, and this divergence has a name: “revealed preference theory” (RPT) (sometimes called stated and revealed preferences.)
Paul Samuelson, one of the giants of twentieth-century economics, developed RPT in the late 1930s and early 1940s, arguing that assuming income and price are constant, “the individual…by his market behavior, reveals his preference pattern.”2 A person claims that they want to make an economic choice (the “stated” preference), but what matters is how they spend their money (the “revealed” preference.)3
Returning to Spirit Airlines, while it is true that travelers say that they hate how Spirit nickles and dimes them, consumer choices consistently show that travelers will choose the lower price when purchasing airline tickets. While consumers say they want one thing, their purchases reveal another.
I love RPT because it shows how much we can learn just by following the financial choices of organizations. Consider organizational budgets. If your synagogue claims that teen engagement is the congregation’s “crown jewel,” but the board just cut the position of youth director and now only has a college student working with teens five hours a week, the synagogue’s economic choice makes clear that the board doesn’t value teen engagement, no matter what someone says.4
And those examples do not stop at individual organizations but extend to entire segments of Jewish organizational life. Consider the role of Hebrew Schools:5
The conventional wisdom in Jewish education is that Hebrew Schools are not only ineffective vessels of serious Jewish learning but that they may cause more harm than good
Worse, we have fewer bureaus of Jewish education than ever before and no major philanthropist who wants to devote their billions to supplementary education in the manner invested by others towards camps, Israel trips, etc.
However, on the eve of 2024, Hebrew Schools remain by far the institution that teaches the greatest number of Jewish children (despite the precipitous decline in enrollment)
The economic choices of most Jews still reveal that people want an education that fits into their schedule for an affordable price. Should we be happy about that choice? I have no idea, but it’s irrelevant. Consumer choices don’t care about my feelings. The longer the Jewish organizational world resists investing in the consumer choices made by the greatest number of Jews, the more we throw good money after bad…
Smart Brevity
Smart Brevity Count6
Words: 288
Time to Read: 1.21 minutes7
Big Idea: In a world of information overload, the person who masters substantive brevity will thrive.
Quote: “Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.”
This slogan can be found at Axios' headquarters and in the opening chapter of Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz (VAS).8 As someone who suffers from an inability to be brief,9 I always enjoy another reminder. VAS argues that:
People have too many things to read and not enough time to read them; this means that the person who masters brevity develops an underappreciated superpower
The sooner we accept the fact that most people scan or skip most of what we communicate, the sooner we can master holding someone’s attention for the limited time they are engaged10
Smart Brevity combines simple tools to show how “strong words, shorter sentences, arresting teases, simple visuals, and smartly organized ideas transform writing from unnoticed to vital—and remembered.”11
My Takeaway: One of my mantras that I do not always role model is, “The less I say, the better I lead.” I may think I’m brilliant, but the people I’m trying to convince aren’t going to hang on my every word, so make every word count.
I won’t pretend to always succeed in being brief, but I know Smart Brevity is a powerful approach in a world where people speak too much and say too little.
Returning to stated and revealed preferences,
Most people will tell you that they want depth (stated preference), but,
All the data on human attention spans suggest they want to skim and skip (revealed preference). Therefore, if you master writing in a way that reflects how people read, you will be far ahead of those who don’t (or can’t)
Want to learn how to master brevity? Start by reading this book.12
Short, Not Shallow
3,000
Scientists estimate that a 3,000-mile slab of land broke off Australia 155 million years ago and is now floating “unseen” as a part of another landmass or on the ocean floor.
What I Read This Week
Nature and Solitude: When I’m in a bad mood, few things help me more than being outdoors and/or being alone. Apparently, this is not an accident.
The Great Gloom Continues: Employee morale continues to stay low across industries. Keep staying curious. As a bonus, the article includes the NPS.
Why Career Transitions Take Longer Than Expected: Perhaps the previous article does not surprise you, and you’re contemplating a career transition. Buckle up, and good luck.
The Power of Telling Your Children “I Don’t Know”: My children ask me many questions; the only honest answer to many of them is “I don’t know.” This is a better strategy than I thought.
How Many People Attend Church Every Week?: Synagogues are fairly difficult to count heads due to Shabbat observance, but this is not an issue for churches. Read some findings from Ryan Burge and identify the parallels.
For the record, I love JetBlue, and not just because of this amazing advertisement they published right before Passover (although it helps):
A little detour…
Personally, I think that revealed preference theory is a much better way to measure affiliation and identification in the Jewish Community. Instead of asking people how they identify as Jews, ask them how they spend their money.
For many years, I worked with a wonderful lay leader who used to say, “Your budget is your policy document, not your financial document.”
Even the name we use shows a disconnect. For decades, we have tried to use any name but “Hebrew School” to describe supplementary Jewish education: congregational education, part-time Jewish education, lifelong learning, learning labs, kids groups, etc.
But what do the parents who send their children to these schools call them?
Hebrew School.
This section is written in the structure used in Smart Brevity.
This is based on an estimate of a human being able to read 238 words per minute.
Although Strunk & White is always helpful:
“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
-William Strunk Jr.
Smart Brevity, 16.
Ibid., 13.
I’m debating employing the structural information at the top of this section in future issues, feel free to share feedback if you like the idea.