Petanque. Piano. Reading Room. Wireless Access. Movies on Monday Nights.
Today the rain is gone! To celebrate, I lunched in Bryant Park, as I often do on nice days.
Bryant Park is an awesome place. It's a very New Yorker place, too: tourists go to Times Square, if they're in the area, or to Central Park, if they want a park. But Bryant is where it's at for free entertainment, lovely weather, an open lawn, and the rushed lunches of the New York native.
Today at lunch I played pétanque (say: PAY-tonk). This is a game in which one throws heavy metal balls at a light little wooden target on the ground, while at the same time trying to knock competitors' balls away from the target. In other words, it's curling for the south of France. I played with a student, with a fellow I-work-in-finance type, and with a couple old men who were just out to enjoy the unusual sight of the sun. Lessons are free in Bryant Park. Equipment is available. Spectators are inevitable.
On Monday nights, there are free movies at sunset, projected on a giant screen on the main lawn. From 12:00 to 2:00 in the afternoon, there is very often a piano right next to the pétanque space, with a pianist providing the background music for one's lunch. On less athletic days (if one can call the playing of pétanque athletic, which one really oughtn't), one can lounge about in the Bryant Park Reading Room--that lovely, open-air library, complete with reference section, newspapers, poetry, and murder mysteries.
The library is a particularly cool idea. Just cross the imaginary line between grassy lawn and betabled reading room, and there you are, sitting at a shaky metal table, eating lunch, and reading Kafka.
Or you could, of course, be working: the whole park is rigged for wireless, and suit-clad men let their jackets hang off their chairs, roll up their sleeves, and log in as they enjoy this little bit of the great outdoors. People bring reports outside with them, and rocks serve as paperweights. It makes me dream of a day in which we can all work, cell phones and computers in hand, in parks, or at poolsides, on mountaintops, in our bedrooms. This is a horrifying thought; we don't want work to invade our personal non-workspaces. We
want to be able to find places in the great outdoors where the burdens of civilization do not quite reach, where our cellphones don't work and where we can't do anything about looming deadlines. But this is at once an uplifting thought, too: if I could work 9 - 5 from a cabin in South Dakota, or a park in New York, it would sure beat working 9 - 5 in a cube farm.
I realize that very many somebodies get left out of this idealized vision of work and workspace, and those somebodies are (primarily) service workers. It's easy to see how I could write computer programs or do research or conduct netmeetings or even answer customer support hotline cellphones from Bryant Park, but it's much harder to see how one could serve Starbucks Coffee or McDonald's Hamburgers, make hotel room beds or bus tables from anywhere but a very particular non-park site. Online classes notwithstanding, it's hard to see how you could teach first grade. You can't play professional baseball from a South Dakotan cabin. You can't drive a cab or conduct a subway train while taking some sun outdoors.
So a lot of people don't get to participate in this vision. But there are other ideals: if a machine could make our beds, perhaps our bedmakers could run hotels--from Bryant Park. If nobody's congregating in big cube farm office buildings, maybe Starbucks will give way to outdoor coffee delivery service, which must be a better job in all but the worst of weathers. Maybe pro baseball players don't have that many quality of life issues to worry about anyway.
Still, it's a problem. We have lots of ways to make life more pleasant and convenient for "working professionals," but nothing very inspiring to say to professional workers. I'm all for making life better for even a small segment of a population, but the growing disparity between service workers and knowledge workers is not merely a product of bad social or economic policy. It is also a product of
good, but lopsided, policy. Wiring Bryant Park is a great idea; having increasingly healthy and happy accountants with lots of vitamin D in their bodies and fresh(-ish) air in their lungs is fantastic; having increasingly healthy and happy accountants while at the same time having an increasing number of relatively pale, perpetually-on-their-feet Starbucks baristas who serve the accountants on their way to work in the Park--well, that's nothing if not widened social inequity, and that's not so great after all.
Relative disparities matter more than we might find immediately obvious. Blanchflower and Oswald found that a rise in everybody else's income makes you feel less satisfied with your own income. Clark and (the same) Oswald discovered that a rise in the wages of other workers lowers your job satisfaction as much as an equally large raise in your own pay lifts it. Solnick and Hemenway conducted a particularly telling experiment, which found that most people (for the purposes of this survey, "most people" refers exclusively to Harvard grad students) would rather make $50,000 a year where others made only $25,000 than they would make $100,000 a year in a world where most folks are earning $250,000. Traditional economic models don't quite get this; the whole idea behind comparative advantage and the benefits of free trade is that we can both be better off by producing more stuff and earning more income. But if you're earning that extra income hand-over-fist, while I'm only earning, say, 2% more GDP, then there may be a problem after all.
It is not crazy, of course, that relative well-being should so occupy us humans. An evolutionary narrative that comes readily to mind suggests that we are programmed, first and foremost, to be competitive. From the standpoint of a species, what's the point if all the individuals have enough food to survive, if the
most well-fed aren't the ones who are best equipped to go out and propogate? As a result, perhaps, we feel keenly the desire to one-up our neighbors.
But you don't need evolution to explain the link between relative well-being and happiness; there are simple rational reasons for it, too. If I make twice as much as everybody else, I can buy twice as much as everybody else. If I make 40% of what everybody else makes, I can only get 40% of the goods that my neighbors are getting. It's not, of course, a perfect correlation. There are successful bargain-hunters out there who can stretch that 40% income to 60% of the stuff, and there are people who don't like caviar and wouldn't buy it no matter how much money they had--but it's still true that health, wealth, and goods can be largely swapped about. If not caviar, leg of lamb. Or a new car, or a better doctor, or a McMansion. Having absolutely more food, houses, or workaday happiness in the world may mean that there is more to go around to everybody, but it doesn't necessarily make us
happier on the whole, at least not if it's distributed in a radically inequitable way. Well, and what good is greater workaday happiness, anyway, if it doesn't make us happier?
Head Cold
I'm sick. Not exciting, stay-home-from-work, go-to-the-doctor sick, just runny-nosed and stuffy-headed. It's no fun.
I suppose being sick is never any fun, but I nonetheless do remember the days when being sick meant staying home and watching baseball and Matlock, reading, and drinking Kool-Aid. At some point, it just became a hassle to stay home if sick. At some point, it became an irresponsibiity.
And so, my friends, today was a work day like any other, except that I went through two boxes of Kleenex and several individually-wrapped packets of Advil. (Ah, luxury, to work at a place that provides such ridiculously cost-ineffective things as individually-wrapped Advil tablets.) For lunch I had soup. I worked more slowly than usual.
Why do we work like this? Sanity and germ control indicate that I should have taken this day off to rest and recover before becoming actually sick. Personal and professional responsibility dictates the opposite. There's a trade-off between duty overlap and absence coverage in the workplace, and it's not clear where the happy medium should be. The more that someone else can cover for me in my absence, the better. But the more that people can cover for me, the less I'm needed to do my job even in my presence.Too much overlap, and there's no point in paying me in the first place. Too little, and it's a crisis if I can't come in.
Of course, once it's reached a certain size, a company can just about always count on
somebody being out on any given day. In that case, one can predict redundancy. Sure, we might hire 100 people to do the work of only 99, but if any given person has a 1/100 chance of being out on any given day, this allows for reasonable coverage. And it's not like a single individual is the redundant one; they're all a bit redundant, in a wholly reasonable way.
Smaller companies, or smaller departments within large companies, or small groups within departments, have it much harder. If I'm one of only four people at the office who does anything related to Product X, it's makes a lot less sense to hire a fifth employee for the group just to help cover on the odd days when I or my three coworkers are out. Most of the time, there'll just be no work for employee # 5 to do.
This, of course, is the great argument of scale. It forgets something important, though. Sure, it might be rough on my three coworkers when I'm out sick, but the flip side is that I actually might know all three of them well. We aren't just cogs in a giant scaled-up corporate machine; we have drinks together, sympathize when others are sick, and cover for one another out of slightly more than just professional obligation. What we lose in cost efficiency and predictable sick day coverage, we make up for in actually liking our jobs and knowing our coworkers.
This is no small point. Wall Mart, are you listening?
Architecture
I've been in and out of the city over the last week or so, but the rain seems to be following me. I'm beginning to feel a bit like Noah at this point, what with the downpour at about 4:00 every day. Perhaps global warming has moved the tropics far enough north to explain the rainy season in New York and Michigan.
Anyway, you should see the water zip down and pour off of the sides of this building. The building itself always makes me think of racecars defying gravity and zooming up the sloped sides. No reason for that, I suppose; it's just the way things are. There's a nice parallel, then, in actually seeing the water zoom on down.
Diplomacy 101
It's the World Cup!!! Yippee!
And I'm not the only one who thinks that, either. Living in New York, it's hard to disaggregate soccer enthusiasm into its two constituent parts, namely, the growing sense of World Cup excitement among Americans, and the preexisting enthusiasm among the foreigners and recent immigrants who so enliven this city. I can't tell: are we
that much more aware of the WC than we were four years ago, or is it just that NYC is that much more cosmopolitan than Ithaca, New York? The latter is clearly true to some extent, but then again, a renowned college town is hardly lacking for successful students (and academics) from other countries.
Either way, people here are watching the World Cup. And this, despite the fact that America is currently poised to go down as soon as possible, perhaps without scoring even once (though we can always hope).
At work, I've seen people bring their company-issued laptops to the office, so that they can bring them into the break room and work while watching the game. On the streets, bars and restaurants have the games on; while buying lunch today, some 20 people were huddled outside the window just to watch the USA game on inside. A friend tells me that his trading floor had the game on instead of MSNBC. Another friend suggests that one could surely make a killing off the London markets if you made a point of calling just as England was scoring a goal. ("Their brains would be addled," to paraphrase his point.)
And, of course, there's nothing like the World Cup to bring out national rivalries. This doesn't yet really apply to most Americans, who would of course prefer their side to win, but who also feel that they have very little invested in the contest. Soccer is not a particularly American sport. None of us really know who the main competitors are, anyway.
But people are walking around the streets in team colors. They bring national flags to work, hang them in doorways, dress up their bars to favor one nation or another, and make a point of following their team's games. Certain matches take on added significance: an Angolan acquaintance was devastated when Portugal beat his team handily, even though this was to be expected. (Angola, I hasten to point out, was once a Portuguese colony.) Imagine the strong feelings surrounding a USA-Iran match, if such a thing could happen (and it could, theoretically, though it won't). Does anybody remember when upstart Senegal beat reigning champion France on the first day of 2002's World Cup? It was a popular victory in a way that the Yankees beating the Red Sox could never be.
I'm a big fan of national pride through sporting contests. Sports provide one of very, very few ways through which we can all come together as a single nation supporting a single cause, proud of our country, and leery of dissenters, without being frighteningly jingoistic. I do think moments of national unity are good: they are stabilizing, they make people feel like they are supported and part of something bigger than just themselves, and (obviously) they help sometimes very different community members to band together behind a shared cause. I broadly approve of these things--it's just that I just think that such moments should be orchestrated around things other than political causes. Thus: sports!
More than that, though, I think national
rivalry through sports is good. The Indians and the Pakistanis may not be the best of friends, but surely it is a step in the right direction that both sides are deeply invested in winning their regular cricket matches against one another. They can boo the other team, wear national flags, cheer their own side, crowd around TVs en masse, and loathe the good batsman on the opposing team, but they each need the other for the match ever to get off the ground. Sporting contests are strange beasts: they are contests, yes, but each requires a mutual respect and an agreement on everything from ground rules to location. We could bomb random country X any day, but we couldn't play them in soccer unless they agreed to a number of mutually-acceptable rules.
And it's not just the teams that have to enter into the joint project of a match before they try to humiliate one another on the field; in most cases, especially the ones where the feelings run the highest, governments have to do this, too. Pakistan opened its borders to thousands of Indian cricket fans during their last Test match, negotiated a new cross-country bus service with the Indian government, and had to figure out where Indians were going to stay in their country. In the Japan-Korea World Cup, those countries had to work together economically, structurally, and politically--and the Japanese had to welcome finalist China into their midst along with a multitude of Chinese fans. Despite huge fears that this would go off badly indeed, it didn't. To be sure, the Japanese fans booed the Chinese team (which went home in ignomy having played poorly indeed), but after the match they turned around and hawked their World Cup wares to every Chinese tourist that would buy them. And the Chinese? Well, they bought them.
The Cost of Things
Tim Harford wrote an interesting piece on inflation for Friday's Financial Times (which, oddly, you can't read on their site unless you have a subscription, but which you
can read on
slate for free). The basic claim (you should read it yourself) is that it's really hard to measure inflation, if not impossible. This is for two reasons: the same object in times past and today is not always equally desirable, and the same object 100 years ago and today is generally not actually the same when you get all nitpicky about it. So, even if you can say that a hat today costs 50% more in real dollars than it did 100 years ago (and this itself is hard enough to establish), this doesn't take into account the fact that a hat was far more important socially and culturally at the turn of the 20th century. It's true that a hat may be more expensive now, but we just don't care, because owning one is hardly a necessity for professional life. The cost of living is not more expensive today because hats are more expensive. The flip side of this is that objects themselves change and improve. We may be spending 10 times as much on the average warship today relative to 1776 dollars, but the average warship can do far more than 10 times as much damage. Cell phones may be more expensive in real dollars than the old rotary phones ever were, but cell phones can go anywhere. (Heck, normal, off-the-shelf, land-line phones may be more expensive, too--but they're also probably wireless, equipped for conference calling and multiple lines, come with hold buttons and caller ID, and have a volume control. Perhaps you're not paying more because the value of the dollar went down, but rather because the quality of the phone went
up)
All of this makes sense to me, and complicates the idea of measuring the changing value of the dollar. I think Harford opens the door to a further aspect of the inflation problem, though, without ever really considering it well.
We measure inflation by comparing the cost of a static basket of goods over the years. If the entire basket costs $2,000 in 2000 and $3000 in 2005, we've just seen a 50% inflation rate over the last 5 years. The basket is big; it contains everything from college tuition to men's shirts, uncooked long grain white rice to haircuts to instant coffee to sports equipment (and a million other things, which you can see
here). But just as not all of these things were equally important to daily life 5, 10, or 100 years ago, not all of these things are equally important to people of different social classes today, nor do they require an equal proportion of different people's incomes. Over the last century, the cost of technology has generally been decreasing. The cost of food and rent, however, has generally been increasing. If you're the kind of well-to-do person who owns (or even who has inherited) your home and who makes enough money to have to spend only a small percentage on food (freeing up a large amount for, say, flat-screen TVs and new computers and other high-tech toys), the inflation rate on the things that you buy has been very low. If, however, you are the kind of working-class person who spends the bulk of your income on rent and supper, then you're feeling inflation very much indeed. If you are a businessman, the increasing real price of suits is troublesome. If you're in construction, the decreasing real price of boots is encouraging. For the former, wardrobes are becoming more expensive every year; for the latter, they are becoming cheaper.
To try to account for all of this, the basket of goods that is used to determine inflation is meant to reflect some average of what Americans purchase (in rural and urban areas--there are two different baskets that divide along these lines). But few Americans actually purchase the "average" number of computers, for example. Rather, Bill Gates owns an awful lot of 'em (as do even the normal upper-class families--a laptop for dad and another for big sister, a PC for mom and little Jimmy to share, plus sis's old computer in the back room and that new laptop on order now that Jimmy is old enough to start typing his assignments for school), while people on the other end of the economic spectrum own one computer or none at all. Similarly, it's not the case that most Americans include one package of Ramen noodles--or 1 ounce of fresh cheese--in their shopping baskets each week. Rather, some people are eating a bunch of Ramen, and others are eating gourmet cheese. These people may indeed overlap--the same person might just LOVE both chicken-flavored noodles and fresh Parmesan--but it seems unlikely that anybody is regularly buying a single package of Ramen for 20 cents, or cheese in anything less than 5- or 6-ounce chunks. In other words, the inflation rate is being calculated on a basket of goods that reflects not the average American, but rather the nonexistent American.
Maybe we would do better to try to calculate inflation based not on the mean (= number of things / number of people, so that 100 computers / 50 people means each person has to have bought 2 computers even if in actuality one person has 35 computers, 60 others have 1, and the remaining 5 have none at all), but on the mode (= the greatest number of people in today's population have 1 computer, therefore we include only 1 computer in our basket of goods, even if that one guy had to have bought 35 of 'em for this to work out). Better yet, maybe we ought to look at different consumer price indexes for members of different tax brackets, much the way we already recognize that urban consumers have different needs and desires from their rural counterparts. After all, just as a Manhattanite can be presumed not to need a tractor and large quantities of fertilizer, and not to own vast swathes of land, while a rural Iowan can be assumed to have a lesser need for the Club (for the car) or a gym membership, America's richest families feel the effects of inflation when it hits investment returns, new car prices, technology, jewelry, wine, and other luxury items, while our poorest families most strongly feel the decreasing real value of the dollar when they discover that a greenback will buy less food, gasoline, or health care.
This is important, because tweaking the value of the dollar might have radically different effects, depending upon which sectors get tweaked. Moreover, it's worth pointing out that inflation actually benefits debters (since the amount they have to pay back is worth less in the world than it was when they borrowed it) while hurting lenders (since the interest they recoup today buys less than it would have 10 years ago, when they made the initial loan or bought the bond or whatever).
When we talk about inflation, then, it makes sense to ask "whose inflation?" But even then, it's hard to see how we could ever produce a personally-applicable picture of the value of our currency.
