The hotel industry has moved away from their traditional pricing practices, where rooms were more expensive during busier times of the year and busier days of the week, but rates were predictable and could be negotiated by corporate clients on an annual basis. Instead, Bloomberg reported last week, the industry has shifted to dynamic, algorithmic pricing more like what airlines or Uber do. The idea is that prices can quickly adjust higher or lower depending on the demand, but the reality for consumers is that these kinds of algorithms only ever seem to drive prices upwards.

Data from CoStar Group provides the details for the Bloomberg piece, showing that average prices are up 19% over the pre-pandemic rates of 2019. And that’s particularly striking because this source of data — CoStar — sells software to the hotel industry that helps them set dynamic prices. Not only that: CoStar is currently being sued for using their dynamic pricing software to effectively allow hotels to form price-fixing cartels. In other words: data on the upward march of prices is being provided by a company that also happens to be  significantly responsible for this upward march of prices… whose practices may even be illegal. But somehow Bloomberg fails to mention price-fixing at all, even though they’re sourcing data from the company behind it.

Make it make sense.

Based on the amount of words written about people working remotely, it wouldn’t be bananas for you to think that something like half of the population does jobs that don’t require a physical presence in a particular location. You might also think there have been massive ups and downs in the frequency of telecommuting, and that fights about it are a routine feature of contemporary office life. 

But this chart from Adam Tooze shows the more mundane reality. While remote work is, in fact, dramatically more common than it was before the pandemic, the amount of remote work has been largely stable for three years now: about 25% - 30% of work days are now performed at home. That’s certainly a boon to caregivers, people with long commutes, and many people with disabilities. But it’s hardly a complete transformation of American working life, and it hasn’t really touched the millions of people who work in retail, food service, construction, warehousing, transportation, delivery, and other jobs that necessarily require an employee’s physical presence to do their jobs. 

Senator Chris Murphy doesn’t have a reputation as a radical, so strong words from him about the future of Democratic Party hit especially hard. In a sharp interview with New York Magazine, Murphy offers his own diagnosis of why Trump won the election: fundamentally, he argues, it’s the neoliberalism. Forty years of neoliberal domination of both parties, Murphy contends, have “let society and culture and our economy slide away from a focus on the common good.” And that’s led to a crisis of meaning and an “epidemic of unhappiness” which has upended our political climate.

While the Biden/Harris administration made a sharp policy break from neoliberal orthodoxy, Murphy argues their public messages didn’t line up with this break. And few Democratic politicians take enough to time to really understand and sympathize with the actual problems their constituents are facing, pivoting far too quickly to policy prescriptions. “We are so in love with our solutions,” Murphy argues, “that we spend 80 percent of our time talking about the policy solution and only 20 percent of the time identifying with the way that people are getting screwed.”

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