Perks of city life

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.

Posted by Felix at 6:03 EST