Remember what I was saying
about the economic perks of white-collar city life?
Look at all the boozy expense-account lunches, the "free" tickets
to the opera, hell, even the packets of post-its brought home from the office.
No one’s going to take you out for a £250 dinner if you’re living in
the countryside.
Well, here’s
a prime example. Jeff Jarvis is a reasonably successful media executive,
but not the kind of person who’d ever dream of spending $10,000 on a plane ticket.
And he’d certainly never be able to afford to charter a private jet. Yet here
he is, comparing his experience on Eos, the new business-class airline, to his
previous experiences flying (a) first-class on British Airways; (b) first-class
on Lufthansa; and (c) in private jets.
Yes, I know that JJ lives in a New Jersey suburb and not in the city. But Tim
Harford was comparing
the costs and benefits of life in the city to the costs and benefits of life
in the countryside. My point was that if you’re city-based (and JJ works in
NYC), you end up becoming a consumer of things like luxury air travel despite
never paying for them out of your own pocket. JJ might complain that "the
few times I ever took corporate jets I had to work the whole time and be nice
to bosses." But I suspect that’s the kind of complaint which is likely
to garner him relatively little sympathy.