Crisis of the Common Good by Chris Murphy

Author:Chris Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

SKYBOXIFICATION

In October 2025, I took my older son, Owen, a high school junior, to Connecticut for his first college visits. As we were standing at the end of a long security line waiting to board our flight back to Washington, my mind alternated between thoughts of proud wonder as I looked at this independent, inquisitive, mature-beyond-his-years prospective college student standing next to me, who couldn’t have been a toddler more than six minutes ago, and worries that the snaking line was going to cause us to miss our flight.

Suddenly, I heard a voice in my ear, coming from just the other side of the rope line: “Do you want to wait in this long line? You don’t have to. If you follow me, you can just skip the line!” A family next to us, clearly just as worried as we were about the tight timing, jumped at the chance and started following the young woman as she lifted the canvas rope to allow them to sneak out.

As the family joined her, it dawned on them that the offer was probably too good to be true. “There’s nothing to it? You can just put us at the head of the line?” they asked.

“Well, it’s free today,” said the woman.

The mother gave the young lady a we-weren’t-born-yesterday look, forcing the woman to give up the scheme. “Free today, and then you’ll get billed $209 after that for the year.”

The family, annoyed and dispirited, rejoined their place in the long line.

The young woman was pitching Clear, the service that, for an annual fee and a quick background check, lets you skip airport lines. Airports partner with the company and get a small share of the revenue. I already have TSA PreCheck, the government’s slightly less efficient expedited screening program, yet I’ve resisted Clear. It’s intentionally faster than PreCheck to spur subscriptions, and maybe I’ll sign up eventually—but the whole model still feels off to me.

Clear is owned by two former hedge fund managers, and the company’s value has climbed from $528 million to $4.37 billion in four short years. It’s a valuable company not only because its subscribership is growing but also because it holds loads of data (including retina scans) on members and their travel. I don’t love giving away my private information, but my discomfort is more about Clear’s business model: letting wealthier people skip the line ahead of lower-income travelers.

We see this phenomenon throughout modern American society. Wealthy people don’t send their children to the same schools as poor people: over half the children of families making $1 million or more a year attend private school. The rich don’t sit in the bleachers anymore: modern stadiums reserve nearly one-quarter of the seating space for skyboxes and exclusive seating with better views and luxury amenities. At America’s most popular theme parks, the affluent can purchase tiered products that allow them to skip the lines for rides (including a $2,300-per-person service at Universal Orlando that gets you a VIP guide to rush you through the park and onto each ride without any interaction with the lower-income crowds).

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