It's still a simplistic view. If you increase salaries the pay has to come from somewhere. Does that mean making flights more expensive? Or raising taxes? Either way it's not as simple as "just increase salaries, dummy".

Making flights more expensive would also address the ATC shortage, by reducing workload. Good idea.

(Econ 101 again: increased price -> reduced demand, i. e. fewer flights.)

Except that the people making these decisions are politicians. So while Econ 101 applies, so does Politics 101: don't anger voters. It's not uncommon for those two to be in conflict.

In most fields of study, you eventually learn that the information from 101 classes are broad oversimplifications at best. I would be surprised if economics was an exception

microeconomics holds up amazingly well.

things get complicated of course as the situation under analysis gets further and further from the ideal setup, as data gets more scarce, and so on.

but the job market is pretty darn close to the simple model, and this question is also close to the ideal (how much more price need to rise for supply to meet demand, we draw the graph based on data from other professions, and boom, there's our answer, if we want to get very fancy we can do various models to try to estimate the curves.)

Fact: If the job paid 10X what it does, we would have more than enough of applicants.

Fact: Somewhere between 1X and 10X is a salary where we would have enough applicants.

It's objectively true.

Whatever prior assumptions prompt you to second guess this obvious, objective truth are ripe for reanalysis.

Unfortunately you've completely misunderstood. This is where they addressed it:

> at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools

Nothing to do with raising pay causing/not causing more supply.

Total non-issue. They hired ~1800 air traffic controllers in '24, which would be 0.06% of undergrads in a given year and a much smaller number of the total workforce.

I appreciate your "attack at all costs" comment style, but I was just pointing out how irrelevant your condescending "econ 101" comment was. There's no point debating me now about someone else's point; I was just saying they addressed it already.