New York Diary

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?

posted by Skay @ 6:56 PM