If you live in Pierre, South Dakota, your airline options just got cut in half. Same with a bunch of other small cities around the country, as United Airlines cut its service indefinitely to 11 cities, citing “changes in the long-term sustainability” of the routes.

Airlines weren’t always free to unilaterally cancel service like this. In fact, it used to be illegal. From the 1930s until the 1980s, a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board controlled what routes airlines could fly. If it were still around today, United would have had to apply to the CAB for permission to cancel these 11 routes.

What changed all of this was the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, which allowed airlines to lower costs by cutting out the bureaucratic middleman and prioritizing more profitable routes.

The deregulation law came amid the stagflation of the late ’70s, when both unemployment and inflation were running extremely high. According to historian Rick Perlstein’s “Reaganland,” President Jimmy Carter tied this deregulation to the inflation crisis, telling reporters that he “asked Congress to pass his airline deregulation bill to lower the cost of plane tickets.”

The 40-odd years since have seen the rise of the “superstar city,” as New York and San Francisco pulled away from cities like Pierre and Kalamazoo, Michigan, another route that United just abandoned.

The (slight) revival of industrial policy

Some experts and economists are starting to connect the dots between deregulation and regional inequality and calling for a return to “industrial policy,” where the government regulates some services like utilities and airlines. These include the urbanist Richard Florida, who argued that airline deregulation was linked to regional inequality for Bloomberg CityLab in 2019, and author Matt Stoller, who wrote an influential essay in The Atlantic about industrial policy in 2016.