Tavern on the Green

I am as down with Schumpeterian creative destruction as the next person -- in fact, probably more so. Nevertheless, even us committed Schumpeterians sometimes feel a tinge of mourning for businesses that fall victim to creative destruction.

Thus my surprisingly reaction to reading about the shuttering of New York's iconic Tavern on the Green. I only went there once -- see the whole being in school until recently thing, and also, the whole being a public interest and then government lawyer thing. It was under odd circumstances, which I'm perhaps too happy to relate here.

It was Christmas break after 1L, between Christmas and New Year's. I'd made plans to take the bus from Allentown to NYC for a weekend to see some friends from college. I was supposed to stay with my friend James Joyce* and his parents in one of the NYC suburbs, and another friend of ours, Elizabeth Blackwell.* Elizabeth is from upstate New York. She was home from med school for break, and she and her parents were staying in a nice hotel in downtown NYC, visiting some relatives and doing some shopping and sightseeing.

James and Elizabeth had a brief relationship in college. They remained friends afterwards, though at various points, it appeared that at least one party harbored hopes of re-establishing the relationship. (Note that I am kind of sacrificing clarity here for discretion, and it is also kind of not going well. But please bear with me.)

On Christmas Eve, James called my cell when I was out shopping for presents. "Isabel, Isabel, I'm really sorry --" and here he sounded half-hysterical -- "but I can't come meet you when your bus gets in. This is really peculiar, but you shouldn't be surprised that things are peculiar, given the group of people that are involved... " He went on to explain that he'd double-booked himself, since he was getting dinner in Manhattan with his parents and the Blackwells at Tavern on the Green the evening that my bus was supposed to get into New York. I told him not to worry, that maybe I could do something with some of my other undergrad friends in the city.

After I hung up, my mom inquired, "So what's up with James?"

I told her and added, "It's not that I'm really upset or mad or anything, but is it me, or is it kinda odd that James wouldn't tell me I could join the Joyce/Blackwell crew for dinner? I mean, maybe I'd be messing with the family-to-family dynamic, but, like, I know both families really well from when they visited in college, and it's kinda... I don't know..."

She replied, "Maybe Elizabeth and James getting engaged."

This remark caused me to nearly have a heart attack.

She goes on to explain, "Well, you said once that James really liked Elizabeth for a long time, right?"

"That's true, but they're not dating or anything... and... Elizabeth's at med school in Chicago, James is a journalist in New York...:"

"But... if you think about it... both sets of parents, getting together, in Manhattan, at a festive time of year... at a nice restaurant... and you're getting the feeling they don't want you there... it just sounds like they could be planning an engagement. And maybe Elizabeth might have changed her mind about him."

I realized I hadn't talked to Elizabeth for about a week or so, but... still... If she were planning on getting engaged to James Joyce, I feel like she might have let me know pretty quickly...

We went back and forth in this vein for about ten minutes. I can't remember everything I said, but I do remember "Elizabeth is going to be a doctor, and I'm sure that would make her very attractive to James Joyce's Jewish parents" coming up.

James Joyce called again, not twenty minutes later.

"Hey, Isabel, so I was thinking... if you haven't firmed up your plans to do something else yet, I was thinking, you're definitely welcome to come to dinner with us at Tavern on the Green. "

Head, meet desk. So there would be no talk of match-making after all.

The actual dinner itself did not disappoint in terms of ridiculousness. First, my bus was about an hour late getting there, as there was a huge accident on I-78, and traffic was massively backed up. Second, I cracked the porcelain veneer on one tooth eating a piece of bread. Third, the Joyces were embracing the Atkins diet at that point (they may be still), and were indignant when Elizabeth offered James a bit of one of the more interesting rolls in the bread basket. I sampled a pineapple martini, which cost the ungodly sum of $12. But really, I needed that much alcohol to get over the ambient absurdity. Especially because Elizabeth Blackwell and I kept looking at each other and thinking of the engagement dinner that this wasn't, and cracking up laughing. Fourth, another of our friends frantically called Elizabeth's cell phone to inform us that she was having a panic attack. Fifth, James inadvertently convinced me that two of our undergrad friends were having a secret affair with each other, even though they were in fact were not, while we were standing around the gift shop. Grand times.

Normal people no doubt have more sane memories of Tavern of the Green. The atmosphere is decidedly elegant, old New York, and perhaps unsuited to the kind of absurdity that our little party of Archers, Blackwells, and Joyces brought to it. Most of the other parties there were groups of grandparents, parents, and little kids in Eton suits and fancy velvety Christmas dresses. They could not understand why Elizabeth and I were gulping down martinis.

Still, perhaps it would have been nice to return to such an iconic institution at a calmer time. Like, after Elizabeth or James have gotten engaged (whether to each other or... not...); when my bus is not an hour late; and when my veneer is not chipped. We could have laughed, maybe, about how young we were then, and how absurd that night was. But now we will not, except, perhaps, in some other place, and in some other way.

*Yes, of course these are pseudonyms. James Joyce = because although this guy has never written a sentence that is 12, 931 words long, it sometimes feels like he might someday (and I mean that with the warmest possible affection.) Elizabeth Blackwell = because she's an aspiring doctor.

Not much of a libertarian litmus test

Megan McArdle ably bats back the notion that this hypothetical is supposed to be a hard question for libertarians. Yeah, incapacity to contract was recognized as a defense at deep common law -- i.e. when society was much more classically liberal than now.

Also, there's one more distinction between the very poor and the elderly wealthy victims in the hypothetical. Merchants are often reluctant to give credit to the former because the very poor are bad risks. To lower their downside risk, they charge higher interest rates and so forth -- the practices that are sometimes characterizes as exploitative. See generally. Without the ability to charge higher rates to protect themselves from risk, some merchants won't make risky loans at all. And the poor can wind up worse off. That's not the case in the example of the wealthy elderly person. In that regard, the two scenarios are actually quite different.

There's another post about why this scheme, as well as being immoral, would also be stupid.

Polyamory: love's new frontier?

The Boston Globe has a long article up about whether acceptance for the polyamorous will become the latest new social battle. I read it with interest, since my undergrad friends and I have had a few long, fascinating discussions on this question. Yes, I have some odd undergrad friends. Though part of it is that polyamory is a great debate topic because it's something on which liberals actually disagree with each other. Debating gay marriage, on the other hand, is no fun. The few Republicans in our circle are all sort of libertarian-ish, and we wind up stuck on devil's advocate making arguments like "I don't actually think this, but I'm the only one here who actually reads National Review, so let me tell you what an actual social conservative would say if one was here. Also, um, Edmund Burke!"

Before anyone wonders, I've never had any interest in polyamory myself. Not because I've any deep-seated moral aversion to it, but because I've never been in a happy relationship where I've thought, "You know, I'd really like to involve some extra people. How do I do that?" But maybe others work differently. Love as thou wilt and all?

Still, polyamory is logistically different in ways in which monogamy is not. As my friend A. once observed, "Like, it's hard enough for just two people to coordinate grad school and career plans. If you're polyamorous, that could mean that, like, throwing three or four extra people into the mix."

There was a small but vibrant, if disproportionately nerdy, poly community at my college. I told Pnin about this once, and he seemed confused by my assertion that the hyper-nerdy people had much more baroque personal lives than everyone else. But to wit, from this same polyamory article:

Information technology, academia, and biotech are well represented among the professions, but, though the group is somewhat skewed toward the sciences, plenty of Poly Boston people work in the humanities or the service industry, according to Sekora. The most obvious common feature beyond their lifestyle may be a love of intellectual ferment...

Both Alan and Michelle identified as non-monogamous when they met and hit it off 15 years ago at a science-fiction convention in Philadelphia. Authors such as Robert Heinlein, whose stories often feature nontraditional marriages, are frequently credited with the striking overlap of poly people and science-fiction fans. But there seems to be no causal relationship between discovering these ideas in books and putting them into practice. More likely the Internet, a longtime hangout for sci-fi fans and poly people, is the common denominator.

In other news regarding fits of vexation and dyspepsia

D.C. has now enacted a tax requiring stores to charge customers five cents for every plastic bag they use. I was a sucker and paid the odious five cents today for the first time for the plastic bag in which my sandwich was wrapped.

Apparently D.C. encourages the use of cloth bags instead. I have free, allegedly environmentally friendly ones from both the libertarian fellowship program I did last year and my undergrad alma mater. The latter largely fell apart under the weight of Russian and Barbri books. It's been hanging in its current tattered state on the coatrack in my office, a shadow of its former self. Maybe that's a good thing: the linked post indicates the cloth bags are actually less environmentally friendly anyway.

What's odd about this tax is that generally if you're a policymaker trying to entrench a revenue-generating program, you want the relevant program to be as invisible as possible. Therein lies the genius of income tax withholding, Milton Friedman's infamous brainchild. The five cent plastic bag tax, on the other hand, is about as visible as possible -- there are little signs in many of the covered retail shops telling the customer that she has a choice to escape the five cents. It's almost as though the D.C. government has chosen this particular approach purely to needle anyone who isn't already a dyed in the wool environmentalist.

Unified field theory for annoying populists

State that the current "man-cession" (a coinage which does dishonor to portmanteaux everywhere) is a reason to replace free trade with "fair trade" to protect American men from "unfair competition." Okay, I am perhaps being overly harsh, since there were some other parts of this article that did not make me want to throw knives at people.* Wilcox does concede that it is okay for women to work outside the home, after all.

Pnin, who is nicer than I am, says that I should avoid the use of snark if I actually want to persuade people to think what I do. He may have a point. Rather than attempt to explain why free trade is good, man-cession or man crisis aside, I refer those who are curious to Alan Blinder's excellent essay on the topic.


*In high school, I was once told I could not quip in essays about some pet peeve making me want to throw knives at people because, post-Columbine, lots of serious people were very concerned about Violence In The Schools. Now that I am no longer near any schools on a regular basis, I plan to take delight in using it with abandon.

Golden retrievers are excellent

Here is an example of a retriever doing something valiant.

In partial defense of bad sociologists

I should just let this alone and kick to it to Pnin, who has both the comparative and absolute advantage here, but I can't resist the urge to pick on Charles Rounds's "Bad Sociology, Not Law." The gist of it is not surprising: Rounds wants law schools to be more traditional. They should be less nterdisciplinarity and instead "get back to basics." While I agree that some of the courses he cites are probably unfortunately heavy on identity politics and light on anything else, I wouldn't go nearly so far. Some scattered observations:

1)In several places, Rounds singles out the downfall of traditional courses in Agency as particularly unfortunate. My law school covered agency law in a four-hour required course on Business Associations, which covered the law of agency, partnership, and corporations. Most schools do it this way; in fact, I was just talking to one of Pnin's friends at dinner on Saturday, a law professor in the Southeast, who's trying to move his school from the patchwork model and develop a five-hour class in Business Associations. While my school may have been somewhat unusual in requiring all students to take BA, my sense is that it's popular enough elsewhere that many students do anyway.

I suspect that may be why Rounds isn't seeing Agency as separately listed in the course catalogs. I believe that many of the schools that don't have a separate course in Agency combine it with Partnership - I'm not sure, honestly, if there's enough meat to justify a full three hour course (or even a two hour one) of just Agency. But I should defer to the judgment of people who actually work in an area where they use these concepts more than I do.

2)Aside from grade inflation and sensitivity concerns, there are plenty of good reasons not to employ Socratic. See, e.g.

3)Rounds is against lawyers being bad sociologists. Fine. But can we be bad economists instead? Antitrust lawyers, for example, generally need to be well-versed in economic concepts, even though most are not qualified to be professional economists. Is Rounds against all multi-disciplinarity, including law and economics? If not, why is training lawyers to be bad economists worse than training us to be bad sociologists?

4)He says, "As for Property, well, let’s just say, it is no longer your father’s Property course. It’s now more about politics than the fee simple." Is it really worse that baby lawyers spend their time on, say, contentious eminent domain battles rather than the traditional common law estates? Note specifically the opportunity costs of teaching the complex and frustrating Rule Against Perpetuities, which I understand is of limited use in actual practice.

5)Also somewhat strange: Rounds writes "Those who are less sociologically inclined are likely preoccupied with some ultra-technical aspect of the Constitution, some piece of legislation, or a regulation. Many professors manage to cobble together entire courses around their preoccupations." Because Rounds says he is in favor of practicality, and in training lawyers who can hit the ground running, this sentence is bizarre. There are lots of jobs for young lawyers who are well versed in particular statutes or regulations! See, e.g., ERISA! Title VII! The ADA! I'm sure there are plenty of others, and that my list reflects my own narrow interests. ( I'm told it can be useful to be well versed in the food and drug regulations, but I never bothered to become such, so I couldn't cite the key sections of the CFR to you.)