What Millennials want

Why are regulators so out of touch? At a Chicago City Council committee hearing on ride-sharing services last week, taxi-industry lobbyist Matthew Daus, president of the International Association of Transportation Regulators, reportedly said that “millennials” were responsible for the rise of companies such as Lyft and Uber because they care more about “cost” than about...

Why are regulators so out of touch? At a Chicago City Council committee hearing on ride-sharing services last week, taxi-industry lobbyist Matthew Daus, president of the International Association of Transportation Regulators, reportedly said that “millennials” were responsible for the rise of companies such as Lyft and Uber because they care more about “cost” than about the public interest.

But what’s wrong with caring about costs? Everyone prefers to pay less money for better service if they can. Millennials in particular can hardly be blamed for being cost-conscious in an economy where they face a high unemployment rate and relatively poor job prospects.

And what is the “public interest”? Low prices, reliability, innovation and the freedom to choose the services one likes best all serve the public interest. What doesn’t serve the public interest is lobbying to protect taxi medallion owners, or any entrenched industry, from competition. If traditional taxi companies were really interested in what serves the public interest, they would focus on improving their services rather than lobbying and filing lawsuits attacking their innovative competitors.

But it’s not just on this issue that regulators and many politicians seem to have a tenuous (or self-serving) grasp on what drives millennials. Wherever there is innovation, our local and state governments rush to prohibit and harass under the guise of protecting the “public interest”: from the Chicago’s harassment of Logan Square Kitchen that forced it to end its kitchen-sharing project, to nanny-state regulations that ban e-cigarettes from public places, to a proposed ban on using Google glass when driving, to name just a few recent examples. Instead of treating young people – or even older people – like adults capable of making their own choices, city and state officials infantilize them at every turn.

Young consumers, just like older consumers, care about convenience and value, and so we’re naturally attracted to businesses that promote this – whether the business models fit with regulators’ views of what an industry should look like or not. The choices we make in the marketplace, not dictates from city hall or the General Assembly, reflect our preferences and priorities. If government wants to look out for our interests, the best thing it can do is to get out of the way.