Thank you, shareholders and capitalism.

Air travel stinks, but it used to be great. Planes were less crowded, security wasn’t such a hassle, onboard service was better, and air traffic control just worked. The greedy capitalists have ruined the majesty of flight, and travel is worse than it was in the more regulated past.

This is a common story of air travel, especially in the United States. You can find anecdotal evidence to support it. What’s much harder to find is any kind of broad evidence in data or consumer preferences. A post by Tony Morley for the Up Wing newsletter compiles the evidence that has accrued over the decades.

Part of the reason for crowding is that, since airline deregulation in 1978 (Jimmy Carter’s and Stephen Breyer’s greatest contribution to humanity), way, way more people have been able to afford flying. It’s one of the markets in which prices have been going down over time, and not only when adjusted for inflation.

Morley quotes an article by Gale Pooley that found that the price of a round-trip flight from New York to London in 1970 was $550. Today, you can get a ticket for slightly less than that in nominal dollars. So adjusting for inflation, it’s far, far cheaper.

The difference really shows in the time price, or the number of hours an average person would have to work to be able to afford a ticket. In 1970, a flight from New York to London cost the average worker 140 hours of work; today, it costs about 13 hours. “The time price has fallen by 90.8 percent: for the time required to earn the money to buy one flight in 1970, you can get 10.8 flights today,” Pooley writes.

That’s a massive improvement! If you want a high-end flying experience, you can pay for business class or first class, but for most people who just want to get from one city to another, it’s great that it’s a lot cheaper. This took place in large part because government got out of the business of assigning routes and fixing prices, which allowed greater competition to bid down prices.

So, yes, it’s more crowded, but that’s because you can afford it. It’s nice to look at old pictures of people flying in the 1960s in less crowded planes, but those are pictures you probably would not have been in because it was so expensive to fly.

And because those are just pictures, you can’t see or hear or smell all the displeasures of flying on old airplanes. Morley writes:

Flying through much of the 20th century, presuming you could afford the privilege, was a loud, turbulent, rattling, poorly pressurised, smoke-filled, boring saga with only a magazine or book for entertainment. . . . Modern aircraft fly higher, smoother, and have improved cabin pressure, air conditioning and noise insulation, dramatically reducing fatigue and pressure-related discomfort, have improved radar and navigation systems to better avoid turbulence, and are frequently equipped with entertainment systems, high-speed satellite Wi-Fi and flight tracking, unimaginable to those flying in the primitive days of the eighties, nineties and early 2000s.

One of the few areas that has not improved in the past few decades is the speed at which planes fly. A few companies are in the process of getting regulations overturned to allow for more supersonic flight, but until then, airlines have been able to greatly improve turnaround times for aircraft, which has the effect of increasing capacity by allowing more frequent flights. Morley also lists more direct flights, faster refueling, and automated scheduling systems as improvements that have reduced frictions in the overall air travel experience.

Maybe you’re still not convinced. You think you would have been rich enough back in the day and don’t like dealing with all the riffraff. There is no shortage of ways to pay extra to avoid the riffraff, if you want to (e.g., lounges, priority boarding, PreCheck/Clear, terminal parking, etc.). But the real clincher is that today, you’re simply much less likely to die in an airplane than you were in the past.

The numbers Morley reports are astonishing. Charles C. W. Cooke has once before marveled over the safety of air travel — an industry in which human beings are put into metal tubes attached to jet engines and flown 30,000 feet off the ground for hundreds of miles at blistering speed. But it’s worth going over it again. Morley notes the following:

For all of these improvements in safety, affordability, and quality, Morley credits those hidden and reviled providers of prosperity: shareholders. “The forces of capitalism have worked to drive equality in air travel, as what the shareholders of Delta or Ryanair care about most is moving people safely for a profit, irrespective of who they are, where they’re from, or their socio-economic status,” he writes. Thank you, shareholders, and thank you, capitalism, for making flying better than ever.