Is the person behind you not entitled to comfort?
Your car is sold with a horn. Are you entitled to sit on it for 10 minutes at 3am in a residential area for no reason? Possibly. Should you? That’s the more important question when we live in a society.
Also if your father in law absolutely needs to use his laptop perhaps he should fly business class (I can’t speak to domestic services but internationally you’re guaranteed to be unaffected by others’ seats)
At the end of the day, the person paid for a seat and that seat comes with comfort features that they can use.
To reiterate, it's a poor analogy as no one is honking at you or keeping you from sleeping or waking you up or whatever else a random car horn would do to you at 3 am (at which point you should be calling the authorities because if you live in a civilized place, that ought to be illegal)
Are you entitled to deny another person their comfort and use of a service they have paid for? I don't understand this argument because it goes both ways. The airline is the only entity to blame.
Precisely. As the article/book author is correct to point out too. And this applies to so many products and services these days. We're conditioned to accept what's made available, because there's usually little we can do about it directly. So companies are free to engage in "value engineering", successively making every product asymptotically approach the border between "fit for purpose" and "fraudulent marketing".
When has there been any alluding to or promise of being able to work in economy? It always seemed best effort. Eg if your laptop was small enough, if you’re at a seat with power, if the person wasn’t reclining.
IMO you should not book economy with the expectation to work for any decent portion of it uninterrupted.
(Again this an EU/international view. I’ve not flown US domestic)
If the seat came with a button that would deliver an electric shock to the person sitting behind, would you feel entitled to push it?
I do always feel a little guilty by reclining. Especially with some of those seats that by reclining, the seatback media player is tilted just so that it's harder to watch. And on Amtrak one time, my wife reclined her seat too quickly and the woman behind us spilled her water on herself -- that was embarrassing for us all, honestly.
But the point stands. I can recline my seat, and you can recline yours, and that's the way it is.
For those of you that want to take a passive aggressive route, by the way, my father in law says if he really needs to use his laptop en route he will point his air con at the recliner in front of him until they sit up straight. Maybe try that.