Value Watch: Wow, $15 (instead of $30) for three empty bottles!

What a deal! Just to be clear: "Bottles are sold empty ready to be filled with your favorite sauce!" Hey, you'd pay $30 for a deal like this, wouldn't you? Well, you can get it for only $15 -- that's right, for three (empty) 1.25-oz bottles! And note the "stainless steel carabiner for easy clipping."

by Ken

Okay, I'm going to have to call a timeout on this, if not actually whistle a foul. I'm going to go with the more restrained course of action in recognition of the fact that I'm cheap. I could fall back on the more polite-sounding "frugal," but "cheap" is probably more descriptive. So I have to allow for the possibility that some inner cheap-compulsion is driving me in pursuit of this story -- the very same cheap-compulsion that drove me to click through on this offer to verify that my eyes were seeing what they were claiming to see. (Especially now that I've finally gotten new glasses. Don't even ask what the experience of buying new glasses is like for a cheap person.)

Just to be clear, I need to know: They weren't really selling a set of three empty bottles, were they?

Bulletin: They were.

And at the price, you'll probably want to stock up both for your own use and to give as gifts. To, you know, the people you would want to gift with the gift of empty bottles. (Draw up your list carefully, though. The "fine print" of the deal specifies: "Limit 25 per customer." This is definitely going to involve you in some empty-bottle triage.) So here's the deal:

3-Pack of Empty Sriracha2Go Bottles

Sriracha lovers, your life just got a whole lot spicier... Sriracha2Go is a must-have for every sriracha lover. With S2G, you'll never worry about a sriracha-less meal again. No matter where you go, no matter what time of day, sriracha will be by your side. Simply fill your empty S2G bottle with your favorite sriracha and clip it to your keychain, slide it in your pocket, or toss it in your purse - you're now set to add sriracha to your breakfast, lunch, dinner, and everything in between. Worried about depleting your S2G stash? Don't be! Just refill your bottle and continue eating your sriracha-loving heart out.

Get 3-pack for just $15, shipping included.

• Bottles are sold empty ready to be filled with your favorite sauce!
• BPA Free and TSA Approved!
• Flip top, leak proof cap
• Easily refillable and reusable
• Stainless steel carabiner for easy clipping
• Container holds 1.25 ounces

Of course the possibilities become endless when you consider that you don't have to put sriracha in your Sriracha2Go bottles -- especially not all three of them! (Or all 75 if you max out on the deal limit.) These empty 1.25-oz vessels are awaiting "your favorite sauce!" (The exclamation point is important here, I think. You wouldn't want to go filling your precious bottles with any old non-exclamatory slop. Of course if you did put something other than sriracha in one or two (or all three, or all 75) of the bottles, I think it would be fairly important to label them, so you'd have to supply your own, say, adhesive tape to scribble on, and this might detract from the aesthetic pleasure of the design.

Just remember where you heard about it.


P.S.: Oh, you want a link?

I thought about it. I don't think so. Unless you really want it.

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Robert Reich And Stanley Chang Want To Solve One Of The Big Problems Endemic To Growing Inequality

The debate above on the topic: The Rich Are Taxed Enough-- Robert Reich and Mark Zandi vs Glenn Hubbard and Arthur Laffer-- took place in 2012. At its core, the question came down to whether or not the richest are paying their fair share in taxes. (Spoiler: the audience vote showed a gargantuan win for Reich and Zandi over the two clueless corporate stooges Hubbard and Laffer.)

Over the weekend, Reich did an interesting post, Work and Worth that almost anyone who finds himself in a high-paid job contemplates at one time or another. His assertion-- that "what someone is paid has little or no relationship to what their work is worth to society"-- doesn't delve into an even more basic question: is what gigantically rewarded executives are paid relationed to what their work is worth to the company paying them? Yesterday we looked at billionaire sociopath Bruce Rauner, a sleazy conservative crook running for governor of Illinois. Rauner and his wife pull in slightly over $50 million a year and-- using various loopholes and schemes-- pay virtually no taxes. Reich, though focuses on another financial manipulator to kick off his piece, crooked hedge-fund operator Steven Cohen, who made $2.3 Billion last year alone, "despite," Reich reminds us, "being slapped with a $1.8 billion fine after his firm pleaded guilty to insider trading?"

Reich compares a money-grubbing sociopath like Cohen to "social workers who put in long and difficult hours dealing with patients suffering from mental illness or substance abuse" who make around $38,000 a year, to "personal-care aides who assist the elderly, convalescents, and persons with disabilities" who make around half what the social workers make, to "hospital orderlies who feed, bathe, dress, and move patients, and empty their ben pans" ($24, 190/year), to kindergarten teachers, who make an average of $53,590 a year, rather than $2.3 billion.

Yet what would the rest of us do without these dedicated people?

…One study found that children with outstanding kindergarten teachers are more likely to go to college and less likely to become single parents than a random set of children similar to them in every way other than being assigned a superb teacher.

And what of writers, actors, painters, and poets? Only a tiny fraction ever become rich and famous. Most barely make enough to live on (many don’t, and are forced to take paying jobs to pursue their art). But society is surely all the richer for their efforts.

At the other extreme are hedge-fund and private-equity managers, investment bankers, corporate lawyers, management consultants, high-frequency traders, and top Washington lobbyists.

They’re getting paid vast sums for their labors. Yet it seems doubtful that society is really that much better off because of what they do.

I don’t mean to sound unduly harsh, but I’ve never heard of a hedge-fund manager whose jobs entails attending to basic human needs (unless you consider having more money as basic human need) or enriching our culture (except through the myriad novels, exposes, and movies made about greedy hedge-fund managers and investment bankers).

They don’t even build the economy.

Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another.

They’re paid gigantic amounts because winning these games can generate far bigger sums, while losing them can be extremely costly.

It’s said that by moving money to where it can make more money, these games make the economy more efficient.

In fact, the games amount to a mammoth waste of societal resources.

They demand ever more cunning innovations but they create no social value. High-frequency traders who win by a thousandth of a second can reap a fortune, but society as a whole is no better off.

Meanwhile, the games consume the energies of loads of talented people who might otherwise be making real contributions to society-- if not by tending to human needs or enriching our culture then by curing diseases or devising new technological breakthroughs, or helping solve some of our most intractable social problems.

In 2010 (the most recent date for which we have data) close to 36 percent of Princeton graduates went into finance (down from the pre-financial crisis high of 46 percent in 2006). Add in management consulting, and it was close to 60 percent.

Graduates of Harvard and other Ivy League universities are also more likely to enter finance and consulting than any other career.

The hefty endowments of such elite institutions are swollen with tax-subsidized donations from wealthy alumni, many of whom are seeking to guarantee their own kids’ admissions so they too can become enormously rich financiers and management consultants.

But I can think of a better way for taxpayers to subsidize occupations with more social merit: Forgive the student debts of graduates who choose social work, child care, elder care, nursing, and teaching.

Next Saturday, August 9, Honolulu voters will pick between a gaggle of Democrats running to replace Colleen Hanabusa. There is only one progressive in contention, City Councilman Stanley Chang. Like Reich, he is very focused on the societal value of education. In his Agenda For Change he calls for "a year of college tuition for every year of public service a young person invests in military service, the Peace Corps, VISTA, Teach For America, or other qualified programs. The years following World War II showed how robust investment in public universities along with support from programs such as the GI Bill combined to create an educated and productive workforce. Education represents a fantastic return on investment. Educated workers create wealth for themselves, their families, their communities, and the companies that employ them. A program to guarantee free college tuition for students who devote themselves to service would both produce a workforce for the 21st century and instill a spirit of giving back to the community in the next generation."

And like Reich, Chang recognizes that "debt is crushing our young generation before they even start their careers." He would like to go to Washington to work on a solution. "Profiteering in student loan programs needs to be stopped. Our parents may have been able to work their way through college, but with high tuition and our rising cost of living, this is increasingly out of reach for today’s students. Today, too many college students are forced to take out expensive loans in order to finance their education, and can’t get off on the right foot once they graduate and start working. If subject to predatory interest rates, the paychecks for their first few years on the job will be siphoned away. They will not be able to save to buy a home and support a family. If the prospect of paying for college is too daunting for today’s working families, our economy and productivity will suffer in the long run. Let’s make sure that the student loan industry is appropriately regulated so that funding is made available to our young people at reasonable rates."

This map showing the richest person in each state circulated widely online over the weekend. The only states blessed enough to not have any blood-sucking billionaires are Delaware, Alaska (the socialist states that gives everyone in the state a share of their oil), North Dakota and Maine. Just for the heck of it, I decided to see if there was any pattern of political giving among the fifty richest people of each state.

• WA- Bill Gates ($80B)- huge donor to both parties
• NE- Warren Buffett ($63.1B)- huge donor to both parties
• CA- Larry Ellison ($49.4B)- moderate donor to both parties
• NY- David Koch ($41.4B)- huge donor to Republicans
• KS- Charles Koch ($41.4B)- huge donor to Republicans
• WY- Christy Walton ($37.9B)- huge donor to Republicans
• NV- Sheldon Adelson ($35.7B)- huge donor to Republicans
• AR- Jim Walton ($35.7B)- huge donor to Republicans
• TX- Alice Walton ($35.3B)- huge donor to Republicans
• VA- Jacqueline Mars ($20B)- modest donor to Republicans
• OK- Harold Hamm ($19.7B)- huge donor to Republicans
• OR- Phil Knight ($19B)- big donor, mostly to Republicans
• MA- Abigail Johnson ($18.2B)- moderate donor, mostly to Republicans
• CO- Charles Ergen ($16.6B)- big donor to Democrats
• GA- Ann Cox Chambers ($16.1B)- huge donor, both parties
• CT- Ray Dalio ($14.4B)- big donor to Republicans
• MO- Jack Taylor ($13.5B)- big donor, mostly for Republicans
• NH- Rick Cohen ($11.2B)- modest donor to Republicans
• NJ- David Tepper ($10B)-big donor to Republicans
• FL- Charles Johnson ($8.1B)- big donor for Republicans
• NC- James Goodnight ($8.1B)- big donor, both parties
• HI- Pierre Omidyar ($7.9B)- big donor for Democrats
• MI- Hank & Doug Mijer ($7.9B)- big donors to Republicans
• WI- John Menard ($7.7B)- big donor to Republicans
• TN- Tom Frist ($6.9B)- modest donor for Republicans
• MT- Dennis Washington ($6.1N)- big donor for both parties
• IN- Gayle Cook ($6B)- small donor for Republicans
• OH- Leslie Wexner ($5.7B)- big donor for Republicans
• IL- Ken Griffin ($5.5B)- huge donor to Republicans
• MN- Whitney MacMillan ($5.3B)- big donor for Republicans
• AZ- Bruce Halle ($4.8B)- big donor for Republicans
• MD- Ted Lerner ($4.6)- small donor, both parties
• VT- John Abele ($3.3B)- small donor, both parties
• IA- Harry Stine ($3.1B)- modest donor to Republicans
• PA- Mary Alice Dorrance Malone ($3B)- small donor to Republicans
• SC- Anita Zucker ($2.7B)- modest donor to both parties
• MS- Leslie Lampton ($2.4B)- modest donor to Republicans
• KY- Bradley Hughes ($2.3B)- huge donor to Republicans
• RI- Jonathan Nelson ($1.8B)- modest donor, both parties
• WV- Jim Justice ($1.6B)- modest donor to both parties
• LA- Tom Benson ($1.5B)- big donor to Republicans
• SD- T. Denny Sanford ($1.3B)- modest donor to Republicans
• UT- Jon Huntsman, Sr ($1.2B)- huge donor to Republicans
• ID- Frank Vandersloot ($1.2B)- huge donor to Republicans
• AL- Margerite Harbert ($1B)- small donor to Republicans
• NM- Maloof Bros ($1B)- modest donor mostly to Democrats
• ND- Gary Tharaldson ($900M)- modest donor to both parties
• ME- Leon Gorman ($860M)- modest donor mostly to Democrats
• DE- Robert Gore ($830M)- modest donor to both parties
• AK- Robert Gillam ($700M)- modest donor to both parties

If we want an economy that works, says Ian Welsh, we have to "break or regulate" Google and the other "oligopolists" -- even as Mike Doonesbury wonders if he's ever sunk so low

What's driving Mike Doonesbury to all this soul-searching?

Dooonesbury, by Garry Trudeau, today [click to enlarge]

by Ken

"You want a good economy again?" Ian Welsh asked in a recent post.

You want an internet economy that lives up to the early hype and which provides even more jobs than the old economy?  Break or regulate Google, Apple, Facebook and all the other gatekeepers, scrapers and information brokers.

Ian was writing from his perspective as a longtime blogger, including his stints as managing editor of "The Agonist" and FDL. He's been in good position, he says, to observe the collapse of the blogospheric advertising market, going back to the big collapse of 2007-08 and worsening to this day. The reason the advertising market collapsed, he says,

is that in the old days you sold your ads direct, or through brokers who offered good deals.  As time went by, however, the percentage offered dropped and dropped and dropped. The brokers consolidated, and one broker took the lion’s share of the market: Google.

The reasons are simple enough: Google can offer the widest portfolio of websites to advertise on, and for all but the best branded websites, it determines more traffic than any single other factor.  For people with no brand, it determines almost all the traffic.

Google takes the value because Google takes the value of websites: content creators don’t matter for squat because without Google they don’t get read, or watched.  Oh, there are some exceptions, websites with a large enough community to provide their own traffic and push (Facebook, YouTube, etc…), but for the long tail and even the lower part of the fat end, Google is it.

"Google is remarkably similar in important ways to Walmart," Ian says.

If it doesn’t carry your goods, or sticks them in a lousy place on the shelves, you aren’t going to sell much.  The information problem in economics has absolutely not been solved, people cannot find what they would actually want to read or buy, but only what a few key companies show them (see Apple’s App Store for another example, or Steam, both of which take 30% in exchange for giving people a lottery ticket to make some money).

What this is, Ian says, is "pure skimming off of other people’s work,"

and while it makes a few companies obscenely profitable (Apple doesn’t even know what to do with all the money it’s sitting on), it destroys businesses. If you have to pay 30% to someone simply as the price of getting your product before consumers in theory (often not in practice), a lot of businesses simply become unviable, and the jobs at Apple or Facebook or Google do  not make up for all the jobs they kill.  If Google doesn’t serve your website in the first few pages, it’s not going to be read.  You will make a deal with Google (if you’re big enough for them to care) and you will create your content to pander to Google’s preferences as embodied by their algorithims, or you won’t get traffic, and even if you do get traffic, well your ads don’t pay squat, because Google takes almost all the profit.

Is there anything to be done?

Companies like Google, the key App stores, Walmart and so on must be heavily regulated, and the amount of commission they can take must be fixed by law.  If it isn’t, well, you get to read all sorts of articles wondering where the tech jobs are, asking why Instagram has so few employees, while Kodak had tons.  The reason is that tons of people are providing value to Instagram, or Google, or Apple, or Facebook, and they either aren’t getting paid, or are getting peanuts: they create content, that content has value, but because someone stands between them and the people who pay, they aren’t rewarded for the value they create.

And so, if we "want a good economy again," if we "want an internet economy that lives up to the early hype and which provides even more jobs than the old economy":

Break or regulate Google, Apple, Facebook and all the other gatekeepers, scrapers and information brokers.

(Oh, and reduce patents to only a few years, and enforce mandatory licensing, and a million (ok hundreds) of cell phone companies will blossom, driving smartphone prices down to a tenth of what they are today, or more.  It’s called a competitive market, and it doesn’t work in a strict protected works world.)

You can have an economy that works, or you can have a few oligopolist companies which make obscene profits and create oligarchs: your choice.

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Verizon may have pulled back on that $2 fee for paying bills online, but this is a battle that's only begun

Companies like Verizon and Time Warner Cable don't need masks and guns to rob us, as long as they have pricing power over us.

"It’s not just about the money (though if you’re like me, you don’t have extra cash to be sending to a giant phone company in order to pay your own bills). It’s that Verizon thinks it can do anything to its customers, and that we’re powerless to stop it."

-- Molly Katchpole, in a change.com e-mail (see below)

"At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers. Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time."

-- Verizon CEO Dan Mead, in a statement

"Pricing power is the ability to raise your prices beyond the inflation rate and expect that most people will pay. It occurs in monopolies and oligopolies and in necessities during crises (how much is a loaf of bread worth if you'll die without it?)"

-- Ian Welsh, in his post "You don't get the payroll tax 'cut' "

by Ken

By now I'm sure you've heard about Verizon's latest plane -- already rescinded (we'll come back to this in a moment) -- for sticking its hand in our pockets. The plan was to slap on a $2 fee, as of January 15, every time a customer makes a one-time payment by credit card or debit card, either online or by phone. I had a feeling this wasn't going to happen, that the uproar would be too great, and indeed before I could even write about it, Verizon has pulled back ("Verizon scraps $2 fee to Pay Bills Online").

But you can be sure they'll be back -- Verizon and everyone else who's in a position to stick their hands in our pockets. Which is why the e-mail from Molly Katchpole of change.org seems to me every bit as pertinent now as when she sent it out.

Remember when together we beat Bank of America -- and the whole banking industry backed away from charging us just for using our debit cards?

Well, it’s time to get the band back together. Verizon just announced a new fee for paying your bills online. Really. Even though paying via internet is fully automated.

It’s not just about the money (though if you’re like me, you don’t have extra cash to be sending to a giant phone company in order to pay your own bills). It’s that Verizon thinks it can do anything to its customers, and that we’re powerless to stop it. (Spoiler alert: We’re not.)

By the way, I found out that a recent report says Verizon paid zero federal income tax from 2008-2010, and actually got almost a billion dollars in rebates from taxpayers. So they definitely shouldn't be nickel and diming us.

As a Verizon customer, I've started a new Change.org petition demanding that the phone company drop the fee for paying bills online. I'd be grateful if you signed it. You can click here to add your name. [Bear in mind, again, that Verizon has already rescinded the payment fee. -- Ed.]

We can win this. And, if we do, we’ll save a lot of money for millions of people, many of whom are like me - not exactly swimming in a billion dollars of rebates.

But we’ll also prove again that times are changing. People like us have real power when we organize together! Lots of people will see this petition, and maybe some of them will start their own, realizing that they can change something in their own community.

First things first, though. Let’s stop Verizon from charging us a fee to send them money. Click here to sign my petition.

Thanks! And happy new year!

- Molly Katchpole

As it happens, I'm not a Verizon customer, even though Verizon is my local phone company. I'm not a Verizon wireless customer either, simply because when I finally had to get a cell phone to maintain contact with my declining mother a thousand miles away, I picked a provider more or less blindly, and it was someone else. However, in the years when I was taking care of my mother's bills as well as my own, I came to depend heavily on online bill-paying, which was actually a godsend. Nowadays I probably pay 98 percent of my bills that way.

Which of course, multiplied by all those millions of other online billpayers, has contributed so much to the financial crisis of the Postal Service. I mean, with two sets of bills to pay by mail I used to feel as if I were buying first-class stamps by the truckload. Now that the USPS is out of the billpaying picture for so many of us, the people who collect our money are now in a position to soak us.

They don't even bother trying to pretend that they're just making up for costs incurred in processing these newfangled payments. As we all know, there aren't any such costs -- they're saving money, and I'm guessing tons of it. We're now plugging our payments directly into their computer systems. Why do we think they encouraged the transition to begin with? But as I say, they don't even pretend to have a rationale, at least not seriously. (I wouldn't be surprised if there was some lame-ass assertion to that effect buried somewhere in the original Verizon announcement. I didn't bother to dig into the innnards of it.)

No, as Molly says quite rightly in her e-mail, Verizon unveiled the plan because they thought they could get away with it. And while this time there was plenty of pushback, I wouldn't be surprised if they anticipated that, and already have Plans B through J ready to roll out when the times are ripe. Just the way the banks have been adding new sets of fees every month, based not on costs incurred or even necessarily their financial needs -- it's all based on what we can get away with.

As it happens, there's a standard economics term for this: pricing power. It's not something most of us think about, but for some time now as I've eavesdropped on my economically more literate friends and colleagues, it's a term I've heard come up a lot. And by chance Ian Welsh just wrote about it again. And as it happens, the example he uses, the case in point that set off this post, concerning the incessant price increase of Time Warner Cable, does strike me personally, because I am a TWC customer -- for cable TV, online service, and phone service. And for years now I've been watching my TWC bill soar, despite everything I've tried to do to control it, short of canceling the services, which I'm afraid I'm pretty well addicted to. The result is a love-hate relationship with the company -- they actually provide some pretty good services, which I rely on heavily, and yet I always feel that their only interest in me is how much more money they can squeeze out of me each month.

Because what am I going to do, cancel my cable (remember, in Manhattan we basically don't get TV reception without cable), online access, and phone service?

Anyway, here's Ian's take.

You don't get the payroll tax "cut"

2011 December 27

by Ian Welsh

There has been much ballyhoo about how there is a payroll tax cut and that an extra $40 per paycheck (every two week) will make a big difference.
Sure, if you get to keep it (via Americablog):

Some rates will be significantly higher, such as a 27.4% increase to $17 from $13.34 just to receive local broadcast channels. Others will be modestly higher, such as a 9.5% increase to $69 from $63 for broadcast plus basic cable channels, or a 7.3% increase to $58.99 from $54.99 for the digital video package. Compare that with a 3.5% annual inflation rate as of October. "The cable industry maintains a near-monopoly over television services," said Doug Heller, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica advocacy group. "Their prices are completely disconnected from the real lives of their customers."

Pricing power is the ability to raise your prices beyond the inflation rate and expect that most people will pay. It occurs in monopolies and oligopolies and in necessities during crises (how much is a loaf of bread worth if you'll die without it?)

American consumers and workers, as a group, do not have pricing power and they do not have alternatives. They cannot charge more for their labor, because there is a huge surplus of workers. Because almost every major industry is an oligopoly or a local monopoly, as consumers, they cannot move from one company to another, as the companies are almost all in collusion and raising prices more or less in lockstep. There is no real competition on price in most industries (certainly not in telecom).

Until Americans have the ability to opt out, things will not get better. And tax cuts will do NOTHING. If you give money to ordinary people corporations with pricing power will take it away. If you give money to corporations or rich people, they will use it for leveraged financial plays (job destruction), offshoring or outsourcing (job destruction) or on luxury consumption like $50,000/night hotel rooms and private jets (some job creation, but destroying the quality of services you get.)

What the US needs right now is a massive tax increase on the rich and corporations. They are not spending their money usefully, and in the case of corporations are sitting on billions. In fact, every extra dollar of profit makes things worse, not better. If corps and the rich can't use money to create growth, and in fact are using it in destructive ways, you take it away and use it to create growth (assuming the Obama administration knew how to do that, which it doesn't. But theoretically, assuming competent individuals of good will in power. Yes, you can laugh hysterically now.)

If you're not accustomed to thinking in terms of pricing power, the way I'm not, now is a good time to start. It really is essential to trying to understand the world around us. Not that, in the grand scheme of things, there's much you or I can do about it. At the least, though, we can be vigilant for more schemes like this Verizon one, but I don't kid myself that we can do more than stick a finger in the dike. Still, maybe -- and I really mean maybe -- there's some value in knowing how our guts are being squeezed out of us.

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If you're in the NYC area, or will be on April 30, there's a unique tour opportunity you need to know about

I'll explain in a moment why I'm presenting this screen shot from Jack Eichenbaum's "Geography of New York City" website, geognyc.com, which I encourage anyone interested in getting to know NYC better to check out. (You can click on it to enlarge it for enhanced readability.)

by Ken

And when I say "a unique tour opportunity," I mean a unique tour opportunity. If you can't wait to find out about it, you can scroll down straightaway to "THE EXCITING OPPORTUNITY."

In writing sketpically last night about the "miraculous" transformation of Times Square, which NEA Chariman Rocco Landesman (who as head of the Jujamcyn Broadway theater chain played an active role in that transformation) explained in his keynote speech at the Municipal Art Society's annual meeting this week he is promoting as a model for cities all over the country seeking major new development, I mentioned that I had joined the MAS for its walking tours. Tonight I want to talk about that a little more, and in the process clue you in to this exciting upcoming opportunity, which may not be quite once-in-a-lifetime but is so exciting, at least to me, that I want to try to spread the word to people who would jump at it if only they knew about it.

(Again, if you want to skip the blather and get straight to "the exciting opportunity," feel free to scroll down to "THE EXCITING OPPORTUNITY." I won't take it personally. Well, that's not quite true. I suppose I take everything personally, but that amounts to the same thing.)

I also mentioned last night that I had two MAS tours booked for this weekend, and by coincidence, for those who believe in coincidence more than I do, today's happened to offer which are surprisingly inexpensive, especially for members (typically the two-hour tours are $10 for members, $15 for nonmembers; longer ones -- including several of the new ones I signed up for yesterday -- are naturally more expensive, but not much), and surprisingly (at least to me) helpful in enabling you to look at even parts of the city you may have thought you knew pretty well and begin to see them through the eyes of someone who has better, smarter ways of looking at them.

I suppose major cities have always had walking tours of a sort, but the kind of historical-mindedness that has made them flourish seems to me a phenomenon of recent decades. And for me the whole thing is brand-new. I don't know why I waited this long to avail myself of the opportunities; on any given weekend day there seem to be dozens of them around the five boroughs, and for that matter stretching into the whole metropolitan area. I guess I've done so much tramping around at least portions of the city over the decades I've lived here that I mistakenly imagined I didn't need that kind of "prompting." In fact, even with all that tramping, there are large swaths of the city that are pretty much terra incognata to me, and as I just said, I've learned as much touring parts of the city I thought I knew pretty well.

Times Square, to pick a random example. Last night I described the sense of aloneness feeling that I was the only one at the annual meeting of the MAS who wasn't so absolutely certain that the miraculous rebirth of Times Square over the last couple of decades is miraculous but harbored the whisper of a doubt that it's even a good thing for the vitality of the city. I'm sure I was exaggerating. It felt that way, especially when that audience member challenged the two-person panel on the Times Square rebirth for failing to give enough credit to Disney. For some of us the mind-numbing blandness and mush of Disney is an all too apt symbol for, well, the mind-numbing blanndess and mush of the "revitalized" Times Square, which seems to exist to shake fistfuls of moolah out of folks who, in fairness, seem only too eager to spend it, on crappy blockbuster musical entertainments, wildly overpriced schlock merchandise, and wildly overpriced schlock food.

It might be stressed that what Chairman Rocco, an honorable man who seems to genuinely believe in his vision of using the arts as the basis for economic redevelopment, understands by "arts" does seem to place a premium on crappy blockbuster musical entertainments. There actually are other visions of urban life, cultural life, and urban cultural life. The problem is that while there are a lot of people out there who might support their efforts, they're scattered and hard to find, whereas the audience for what Chairman Rocco understands by "arts" seems to be out there in abundance just waiting to be told what to do to be officially "entertained."

My MAS tour today put me squarely in contact with the other end of the arts spectrum. It was a "tour" of the East Village block of East Fourth Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue which has become the city's second-only designated "cultural district" (and the only one in Manhattan; the other is in Brooklyn, around the Brooklyn Academy of Music, of which our guide for this tour, Lawrence Frommer, will be leading an MAS tour on June 4), a block on which numerous shoestring arts organizations had taken root, and by coincidence (again?) the block on which one of the city's most storied theater enterprises, the late Ellen Stewart's LaMama E.T.C., found its enduring home.

It was a thrill to encounter the passion and energy of Tamara Greenfield, the executive director of FAB (Fourth Arts Block), the nonprofit organization founded in 2001 to give these for the East 4th Street Cultural District, who joined us on the tour, and also introduced us to some of the people working on that block. "Cultural districts," we learned, are popping up all over the country, and in fact New York State has been lagging well behind many others. We also learned that for the two such districts so far so designated in the city, there really isn't any official definition. A NYC "cultural district" is what its supporters can make of it.

So Tamara and her associates, including the organizations that are part of the cultural district, play all the angles, working with government and funding organizations as well as community businesses and anyone else they can rope in to help sustain and promote the life and activities of the district arts organizations, and indeed organizations outside the immediate district with which FAB networks. The kind of art they promote clearly isn't for the mass audience to which shows like Spider-Man: Get Off My Lawn are aimed, but they're essential to the vitality of city life, and indeed make the city a vastly more livable place.


THE EXCITING OPPORTUNITY: AN ALL-DAY PILGRIMAGE
ON THE NO. 7 TRAIN, NYC'S INTERNATIONAL LIFELINE

What got me started on this whole walking-tour thing was a bunch of the New York Transit Museum's tours, including an especially illuminating one about the engine for economic development created by transit "nodes," places where multiple subway lines intersect, starting with Times Square, which is unlike anyplace else in the city, sitting as it does atop the Sixth Avenue IND, Broadway BMT, Seventh Avenue IRT, Eighth Avenue IND, IRT Flushing, and crosstown shuttle lines. The guide for that tour, Queens's borough historian, "urban geographer" Jack Eichenbaum, had an uncanny eye for pointing out the buildings and street life of the area reflect the history of the area's transit development, and then he did the same for Queens Plaza and Jackson Heights in Queens.

The subway lines crossing those Queens nodes in both cases include the IRT Flushing line, the No. 7 train, which is one of the city's most fascinating lifelines, a veritable international lifeline. (Wikipedia has a nice article on the almost bewildering diversity you encounter along the length of the Flushing line.) And on April 30 Jack is offering what he describes as his "signature tour."

THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN
10am-5:30pm, SATURDAY, APRIL 30

This series of six walks and connecting rides along North Queens’ transportation corridor is my signature tour. We focus on what the #7 train has done to and for surrounding neighborhoods since it began service in 1914. Walks take place in Long Island City, Sunnyside, Flushing, Corona, Woodside and Jackson Heights and lunch is in Flushing’s Asiatown. Tour fee is $39 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address) The full day’s program and other info is available by email jaconet@aol.com The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

I got my check in the mail the day I saw the announcement. This promises to be a memorable occasion, and I know Jack still has openings. Frankly, I want to make sure he's got enough people registered to make it a "go." The simple fact is that there isn't going to be an opportunity like this until, well, the next time Jack offers this tour, and who knows when that will be? So I want to be sure as many as possible of the people who would want to know about it do know about it. Spread the word!

Jack's got a bunch of other tours coming up as well, including tours for the MAS (there's one next Sunday, April 10: "Conforming to the Grid: West Side," the sequel to an earlier "East Side" version, which I unfortunately couldn't get to; these tours are in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the street-grid plan that charted the future development of Manhattan) and with other organizations and on his own (among them weekend afternoons exploring rapidly evolving Long Island City and a fascinating-looking series of Wednesday-evening tours under the rubric "Changing Cultures of Queens: A Walking Anthology"). If you're in the area, do yourself a favor and check out the "Public Tour Schedule" on Jack's website.


UPDATE: Thanks to our friend Woid for calling attention to my idiotic brain-and-finger malfunction in referring a couple of times to the No. 7 train as the No. 1 (a train I take every day). This is what a ticking deadline clock, along with trying to pull too many discussion threads together, can do to an already faltering brain. Jack Eichenbaum of course got it right in his tour description. I think I've corrected them, but if I missed any, please let me know!

Woid also makes some splendid points about the No. 7 train that I sort of meant to, so I'd like to think of his comment as officially part of this post. Thanks, Woid!

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The "new" Times Square is the key to revitalizing cities all over the country. (It is, isn't it?)

What, ya think I don't go to no Broadway shows? Yeah, I saw Spider-Man: Shut Off the Lights, or whatever the thing is called. Ya wanna make somethin' of it? (It would be nice if somebody did. The performers sure didn't seem to be having much luck trying to. This could be why the producers are shutting it down "for a brief hiatus," April 19-May 11. Good luck with that.)

by Ken

These days by and large when I stagger to 6pm and the end of my workday, like as not I'd just as soon shuffle home. (And that's no express hop. If I take my least stressful homeward transit route, once I board the train I get off a mere 28 stops later. But who's counting?) The other night, though, after surprising myself by remembering to look at my calendar, I was reminded that I had a commitment: the annual meeting of New York's Municipal Art Society.

This is the first time I've ever been an MAS member at the time of the annual meeting, and therefore eligible to attend. (I joined for the excellent MAS walking tours, and in fact have two coming up this weekend -- I just hold my knees hold up. Why, today I got around to poring over the April-May calendar I brought away from the meeting and signed up for four more tours.)

I get lots of e-mail from the MAS, and once I've checked out the upcoming tour listings, I often actually read about of the society's real business, which is monitoring and advocating for a host of urban quality-of-life issues. Great stuff! It seemed only logical to RSVP my attendance at the annual meeting. Besides, there was the promise of some sort of reception afterward. Although I am widely known in my admittedly narrow circle for the motto "Free isn't necessarily a bargain," the offer of free food nevertheless gets my attention.

I arrived early, as I often do -- my only weapon against the familiar horror of wheezing in late. I found a nice seat in the spacious theater where the meeting was held -- in the Times Square area, the them of this year's meeting being the miraculous regeneration of the area over the last 20 years --and tried my best not to wish I'd been able to go home.

In fact, the meeting was fine, and I'm glad I went fear of arriving late, And then talk turned to the impending annual meeting, at which there would be speeches and a panel discussion and election of new board members (who'd actually already been chosen; they were just going to be ratified) and even a reception afterward. Somehow in this telling it sounds even less interesting than it turned out to be, but the thing is, since I was a member, I got to go, and I did. And I'm not sorry I went.

For one thing, among the on-the-stage people there were a number with names I sort of recognized for their history of civic involvement. It was nice to attach faces and bodies to the names, and to see these very grown-up people really making a difference in their (our) community. During the president's talk about the society's agenda for the coming year, I actually got out a pen and jotted down the 11 items he announced for "our" Livability Watch List for the year, and it all sounded pretty darned good. Assuming I can read my notes, I could listen them for you, and I think you'd agree that they sound pretty darned good. Oh wait, I can crib them from the MAS website, which is where you'll find brief descriptions of each, with links to fuller discussions.

The MAS 11 for 2011 Watch List

The MAS 2011 Livability Watch List is a compilation of the 11 initiatives that will have the most significant effect on livability in New York City this year. As the leading organization dedicated to creating a more livable New York through intelligent urban planning and design, MAS will call attention to these 11 through advocacy work, public programming and issues monitoring.

Stay tuned to MAS.org for updates and watch for announcements on MAS programs that will explore our 11 for 2011.

1. Moynihan Station & Hudson Yards
2. The Garment District
3. Disaster Planning
4. Public Housing
5. The Bronx
6. Lower Manhattan
7. NYU Expansion
8. Changing Streets
9. PlaNYC 2.0
10. Waterfront
11. Coney Island

Serious stuff, right? Okay, in most cases you'll have to check out the website link to find out, for example, "Well, what about the Garment District, or Changing Streets?" But I do believe that a lot of people with their hearts in the right place have put a lot of time and effort into this, and come up with serious initiatives.

So it was all inspiring in its way: all these serious grown-up people devoting all that time and effort to making the city a more vibrant, livable place. I truly admire what they do, even as I know that that probably sounds like the prelude to a "but" which will lead to some bashing of what they do.

I won't bore you with an extended recap of the speeches. The keynote was given by Rocco Landesman, whom most of us know as, until recently, the head of Jujamcyn Theaters, operator of five Broadway theaters and thus one of the largest players in the city's live theater industry. He stepped down when he was named by President Obama to head the National Endowment for the Arts. And I jotted down some keywords from his speech too, which was also inspiring. Rocco was a major player in the Times Square revival -- after all, the financial health of Jujamcyn's theaters depended on lots of people wanting to come into the area, which for many years they had been not so eager to do because it had become so run-down and dangerous.

The turnaround, all present agreed, was nothing short of miraculous. It is also, Rocco explained, a model he is encouraging at the NEA to cities around the country: using the arts as an engine for urban revival. And even I was feeling kind of warm and toasty. I jotted down some notes from his presentation too.

Until I realized that I seemed to be the only person on the premises who wasn't entirely persuaded that the "rebirth" of Times Square was such a miracle. Oh, lip service was paid to the specter that had haunted the planners in the process of rebirthing the area: gentrification. You got the feeling that they weren't so much afraid of gentrification as they were afraid of being accused of gentrifying. Now that the grand project is complete and such a universally acknowledged rip-roaring success, it was possible for a certain number of those present to giggle at the very idea of the threat of gentrification.

When the floor was opened to audience questions, one questioner accused the panel participants of failing to give proper credit to Disney for the renaissance. The panelist most involved explained that yes, Disney had been important, because it lent credibility to the idea that the area could be reborn, but in fact the plans were in place before Disney signed on.

Who couldn't love the new Times Square?

To an extent, the lip service paid to apprehension over gentrification extended to pretending it hadn't happened, or not entirely. There was much satisfaction over the fact of the new Times Square being built on the old, and it's indeed true that much of the Broadway theater business was preserved -- surprisingly few of the commodious old theaters have been lost. Of course the serious part the Broadway theater business today is only serious about business, and has switched to the big monster houses, suitable only for high-noise "musicals" whose sound is delivered entirely as an electronic assault -- it's hard to know why audience members even need to be in their seats. Probably they have better-sounding sound systems at home on which they could listen to the proceedings in better sound as well as greater comfort.

The sad reality is that the Broadway theater as any sort of cultural medium has been dead for decades. It would go too far to say that the rebirth of the area killed it off. It was mostly moribund already, although the neighborhood in its rundown "depressed" condition probably made it possible for a certain number of shows of some actual artistic consequence to find temporary lodging.

So no, it's not really the death of artistic seriousness in the Broadway theater that I'm mourning now that Times Square is all improved. No, it's more that there's hardly anything to do in the improved Times Square. It's like a giant theme park, only without any rides. Just wildly overpriced restaurantlike businesses serving swill that barely qualifies as food and enormous clutches of selling even more wildly overpriced, well, stuff. What I see is one giant tourist trap, to use the old-fashioned term.

It's obviously a minority opinion that there's nothing to do in the new Times Square, because it's now routinely packed. At peak hours both the sidewalks and the streets are almost impassable. But I'll be damned if I can figure out what they're all doing, unless it's just to spend down a dangerous oversupply of time and money which seems to afflict these folks.

I used to have a dozen or more frequent destinations in the area, and probably another couple of dozen occasional ones. They're now all gone. Awhile back, when my friend Richard invited me to join him at a preview performance of Spider-Man: It's Dark in Here! -- it wasn't supposed to be a preview performance when he bought the tickets, but as of now, and for the foreseeable future, there haven't been anything but preview performances -- and we tried to find someplace to eat afterward, we were stumped.

Now you must understand that Richard is practically psychic when it comes to divining decent places to eat. None of his finely tuned sensors yielded anything. Oh, there were lots of restaurantlike establishments, but you could easily see which gimmick each was peddling, and none of it held much promise of edible food. So we settled for the outlet of a famous national chain, and after I gagged at the prices, I gagged at the turkey burger I was served. I'm not a food sender-back normally, but inedible is inedible. I swapped it for a cheeseburger that for my 28 bucks was at least edible.

Oh man, The Filthy 5 and The Promiscuous Sex Whatever (does it really matter? what could be bad that starts with "The Promiscuous Sex . . ."?) -- plus Sex with Stran[gers] (I'm guessing) too??? Were those the days or what?

Now I understand that the dark and dangerous old Times Square wasn't good for business, and what's bad for business isn't good for a city that has always depended on commerce. Still --

Again, it's undoubtedly just me, but I never found the old Times Square especially dangerous or depressing. To me it was filled with life, just as through most of its history New York City has enjoyed such a rich mix in that commerce it depends on that diversity of experience, including cultural experience, was built into the mix. Oh, sometimes it was messy, but it was vibrant, and alive. And once upon a time, somehow, a lot of people made a living there as well.

Most of the people I know feel pretty much the same way, but then, in the grand economic scheme of things, even though each of us actually spends a decent amount of money, we don't spend it in the safely predictable mass-group way that the people who mob the new Times Square do. And in the end, it's their money that drives this particular economic machine, even if it's being driven to noplace special.

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Ever wonder why companies tend to give their existing customers such crappy service? Let's ask James Surowiecki

"Companies end up thinking that their efforts are adding up to a much better job than they really do. In a recent survey of more than three hundred big companies a few years ago, eighty per cent described themselves as delivering “superior” service, but consumers put that figure at just eight per cent."

-- James Surowiecki, on his New Yorker "Financial Page"

this week (Sept. 6), "Are You Being Served?"

by Ken

It's fascinating how widespread the acclaim was for flight attendant Steven Slater -- you know, the fellow who had it up to here with those damned passengers and made that dramatic exit from his plane via the exit chute. As New Yorker "Financial Page" columnist James Surowiecki notes this week, "Everyone knows that the contemporary customer is mad as hell, too—fed up with inept service, indifferent employees, and customer-service departments that are harder to negotiate than Kafka’s Castle."

And why are we all so damned mad? As Surowiecki points out, "C.E.O.s routinely describe service as essential to success, and they are well aware that, thanks to the Internet, bad service can now inflict far more damage than before; the old maxim was that someone who had a bad experience in your store would tell ten people, but these days it’s more like thousands" -- or even millions, he notes, as in the case of Dave Carroll, who had his guitar broken by United Airlines baggage handlers and had the song he wrote in response, "United Breaks Guitars," "has garnered more than nine million views on YouTube." However,

customer service is a classic example of what businessmen call a “cost center”—a division that piles up expenses without bringing in revenue—and most companies see it as tangential to their core business, something they have to do rather than something they want to do. Although some unhappy customers complain, most don’t—one study suggests that only six per cent of dissatisfied customers file a complaint—and it’s tricky to quantify the impact of good service. So when companies are looking for places to cut costs it’s easy to justify trimming service staff, or outsourcing. The recession has aggravated the problem, as companies have tried to cut whatever they could—the airlines, for instance, have trimmed payrolls by sixteen per cent since 2007—but even in more prosperous times there was a relentless emphasis on doing more with less. That’s how you end up with overworked flight attendants, neglected passengers, and collective misery.

Unfortunately, customer service doesn't lend itself to any of the productivity enhancers that have transformed the workplace in recent decades.

Modern businesses do best at improving their performance when they can use scalable technologies that increase efficiency and drive down cost. But customer service isn’t scalable in the same way; it tends to require lots of time and one-on-one attention. Even when businesses try to improve service, they often fail. They carefully monitor call centers to see how long calls last, how long workers are sitting at their desks, and so on. But none of this has much to do with actually helping customers" --

[with the result quoted at the top of this post]

Is it all our fault as consumers, for having become so demanding of lower prices? "Low prices usually mean small payrolls and cheap wages." Still,

there are companies that have managed to use superior service to distinguish themselves from their competitors and still deliver reasonable prices: the employees of the online shoe retailer Zappos.com are famous for going to exceptional lengths to keep customers happy. Doing this, though, requires an investment in service that most companies aren’t willing to make.

As usual, Surowiecki is holding a theory in reserve.

The real problem may be that companies have a roving eye: they’re always more interested in the customers they don’t have. So they pour money into sales and marketing to lure new customers while giving their existing ones short shrift, in an effort to minimize costs and maximize revenue. . . . [A] company’s current customers are often the ones who experience its worst service.

This doesn't seem to make economic sense, since "it's more expensive to acquire a new customer than to hold on to an old one," and "these days, annoyed customers are quick to take their business elsewhere." There's a "but," though.

[B]ecause most companies are set up to focus on the first sale rather than on all the ones that might follow, they end up devoting all their energies to courting us, promising wonderful products and excellent service. Then, once they’ve got us, their attention wanders—and Dave Carroll’s guitar gets tossed across the tarmac.

David Carroll's "United Breaks Guitars": As of my visit tonight, it's at 9,079,065 views -- not counting the song's two sequels.

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How do we judge "value" for services rendered? Eventually we'll get to some imperishable thoughts from E. B. White

"It occurred to us, gliding by the thirteenth floor and seeing the numeral '14' painted on it, that our atom-splitting scientists had committed the error of impatience and had run on ahead of the rest of the human race. They had dared look into the core of the sun, and fiddled with it; but it might have been a good idea if they had waited to do that until the rest of us could look the number 13 square in the face."

-- E. B. White, in "Air Raid Drill," included in the

anthology The Second Tree from the Corner

by Ken

Earlier today we were talking about the tricky process of putting a dollar value on services rendered. At that time I promised some follow-up thoughts on the subject from one of my favorite writers, E. B. White.

I mentioned too that this will be finishing some DWT business.

Last February, contemplating the wildly overblown compensation of all those bankster and other corporate CEOs, I tried to propose a new system of payment based on a reasonable hourly wage for a strict 35-hour work week.

NOTE TO THOSE HERE FOR THE ECONOMIC
STUFF, NOT ENDLESS BLATHER ABOUT EBW . . .

. . . who is after all just some dead old writer, remembered now mostly as the author of the celebrated children's books Stuart Little, Charlottte's Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan. (As a matter of fact, despite my near adulation of EBW, I've never been able to read more than a few pages of any of the children's books.) Those readers may scroll all the way down -- scroll, scroll, scroll -- to the section with the boldface subhead that begins: [SKIP TO HERE].

In trying to establish what might be a reasonable rate of compensation, I acknowledged a difficulty:

Unfortunately, I have to make do without a quote I would have like to introduce from a New Yorker "Notes and Comment" piece by E. B. White, I guess from the early '50s. Somehow my cheesy old Perennial issue of The Second Tree from the Corner (and also One Man's Meat) has mysteriously gone AWOL. I'm not pointing any fingers, just suggesting that anyone who knows anything about the vanished paperbacks would do well to spill his/her guts now rather than later. (Okay, so I've been watching too much Law and Order.)

The piece was an account of what I recall was a New York City-wide bomb-alert drill, in which, eerily, the entire city came to a standstill. I recall the report of a visitor unaware of the proceedings happening onto a no-longer-bustling city street and commenting, "What this, something new?" And I remember in particular White's report of calculations of economic loss from that "lost" hour.

In The New Yorker's own offices, the business people were lamenting that by bad luck they had the company's lawyers present (and presumably billing). And they had a dollar figure to put on that loss.

But that calculation of loss, White suggested, depended on the quality of the advice the lawyers were giving. If by chance it was poor advice, he pointed out, then missing out on an hour's worth of it actually put the magazine ahead.

It took me awhile, but eventually it occurred to me that between Amazon.com and eBay pretty much any book should be findable. I was amazed by how much White I found available, much if it at shockingly low prices.

I was even more amazed to discover that, unbeknownst to me these several decades, there had been a wonderful flowering, even explosion of the White bibliography following the publication of two new collections: Letters of E. B. White, in 1976 (edited by White's goddaughter Dorothy Lobrano Guth, the daughter of perhaps his closest friend, Cornell crony and onetime New Yorker managing editor Gus Lobrano), and Essays of E. B. White, in 1977. (The Essays collection was in fact prepared first but was delayed, on the thinking, which turned out to be correct, that the letters volume would be the bigger attention-getter and commercial draw.)

The development I missed entirely, and remained unaware of these several decades, was that in the late '70s and early '80s (which by coincidence were also the author's late 70s and early 80s, since he was born in 1899) Harper's, encouraged by the sales of the Letters, green-lighted a fantasic project dear to White's heart: a uniform edition of his writings, including both new and republished books, for all of which the author provided beautiful new introductions. It was also during this period that the gifted photographer Jill Krementz visited the White farm and took a lot of remarkable pictures of a singularly camera-shy subject, surely the best photos we have of him.

THE REVISED LETTERS: A FAMILY AFFAIR

There's also revised edition of the Letters, published after White's death (in 1985), adding letters from the last ten years of his life. The new edition, with a new introduction by John Updike, was "revised and updated" by the Whites' granddaughter, Martha, herself a professional editor and writer, and I imagine that her participation would have been a source of boundless pleasure to both Andy White and Martha's grandmother, the legendary New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, who died in 1977 -- as I recall, shortly after the Essays volume was published.

(In addition to all the White I've been reading in recent months, I've also been reading about EBW, including Scott Elledge's excellent 1985 biography, written with cooperation and comments on the manuscript from the subject, and also a fascinating book, Katharine and E. B. White: An Affectionate Memoir by Isabel Russell, the Whites' part-time secretary in the '70s, including the time when the Essays and Letters volumes were being put together. I've learned an enormous amount of stuff, which I've been managing to quickly forget.)

All of which is by way of saying that I've had the great pleasure of replacing my lost copies with the lovely "new" One Man's Meat (the collection of the remarkable essays White wrote for Harper's magazine in 1938-43, when he lived year-round on his saltwater farm in Maine; it's now available in a 1997 edition) and Second Tree from the Corner (which seems to be out of print again, though there are zillions of copies available online; just be sure to get an edition based on the 1984 one, which includes not just White's original 1954 foreword but the new introduction he wrote in February of that year, which I think may have been the last thing he wrote for publication), not to mention a bunch of other books.

Not that I'm bragging or anything, but I'm relieved to find that my recollection of that piece, written originally for The New Yorker's unsigned "Notes and Comment" section, was pretty good. The piece, sure enough, is titled, "Air Raid Drill" (still, frustratingly, undated, so I'll stick with my earlier guess) and begins:

Five minutes after the all-clear sounded, everyone on our floor of The New Yorker offices was back at work. Nobody escaped, in the confusion, to another part of the city or to another planet; nobody tried to prolong the recess period in order to savor his freedom; none seemed desirous of meditating on the heavy implications of an A-bomb drill.

White himself rather regretted the orderliness of this extraordinary event, noting:

Only one fellow, of all we heard about, questioned the normality of eight million people creeping into the walls like mice. He stepped out on Broadway, gazed up and down, and asked, "What's this -- something new?"

In White's case, the drill involved evacuation -- from the 19th floor to the 10th.

Bubbling with good spirits and bright as birds, we assembled at the elevators and were piped aboard, in lots of a dozen, for the weird descent to the survival chamber, or tenth-floor corridor . . . the dodge that has been agreed upon as the means of eluding the atom -- a queer piece of magic but one that is probably as good as any other.

The descent from the 19th floor to the 10th, he notes, is --

a drop not of nine flights but of eight. This building has no floor called "13"; hence the "fourteenth" floor is a euphemism, and all the other floors above the twelfth are numbered not by a system of mathematics but by witchcraft. In our descent, then, in the cheeful lift, we not only had to evade an atomic explosion by taking a short journey but we had to subtract ten from nineteen and get eight.

[This leads directly into the passage I've quoted at the top of this post.]

[SKIP TO HERE] OKAY, WE'RE FINALLY AT
THE PART ABOUT THE ECONOMIC ISSUES

Are we all back together? Okay, let's proceed:

The papers reported that millions of dollars in manpower were lost by the quiescence of eight million persons. For fifteen minutes, wealth ran down the drain. This, like the missing thirteenth floor, was a mathematical enigma that stopped us cold. What happened exactly? Who lost what? How can anyone say for sure that millions of dollars were lost? Probably the dollars, like the people, were not lost -- just deeply troubled. Like the people, the dollars stood still for a brief while. . . . It was eerie, but it was not necessarily a loss. The Consolidated Edison Company noted a sharp drop in the curve of kilowattage, giving stockholders a nasty turn but relieving consumers of fifteen minutes of expensive electrical existence. . . .

And now the final paragraph in its entirety:

A fellow we stood next to in the corridor, and who survived, confided to us that the drill was costing The New Yorker a pretty penny, because at that very moment a couple of high-price lawyers were in the office and they were being paid by the hour. But what he failed to say was whether the advice they were peddling was god or bad. If it should turn out to be bad, then every minute they were rendered inarticulate was a gain. We regard the published estimates of community loss during the test as highly suspect. Who knows? Maybe if everybody in the world stood still for a quarter of an hour and looked into the eyes of the next man, the mischief would come to an end.

I doubt that EBW was paid anything like what this piece of writing is worth, but there's no doubt that he was paid -- presumably at his agreed-upon New Yorker rate. That deals is what made it possible (a) for White to write such a piece and (b) for The New Yorker to publish it. As deals go, this one strikes me as eminently civilized. And I don't think even my pirating of bits and pieces of this lovely text undermines the deal. I'm assuming that at least some readers may discover that not having a copy of The Second Tree from the Corner represents a serious but mercifully remediable gap in their mental well-being, and may be moved to do something about it.

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