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April 9, 2007

Busking, Distraction, and the Trouble with Value

Lovely Gene Weingarten piece in the weekend WashPost on whether one of the nation's great musicians -- violinist Joshua Bell -- can make any money busking incognito in a Washington subway at rush hour. Read the piece for the answer, but it turns into a wonderful meditation on street corner economics, partial attention, and epistemology.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

Great stuff from Gene. It ranks up there with his classic political confab in a Britney Spears chatroom.

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