I remain fascinated by the unintended consequences of policy decisions. A few weeks ago we watched some really boring Jennifer Lopez film about the murders in the maquiladora trade zones. Since NAFTA went into effect, as is well known, huge manufacturing operations have opened up on the US-Mexico border. This is no surprise: labor is cheaper and, with no tariffs, importing goods is not prohibitive. But as the debates over NAFTA raged, nobody predicted that these zones would turn into murder factories, where hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of young women drawn to the factory wages would be killed; they are rootless, alone, and vulnerable. The trade zones turn into an ideal hunting ground; NAFTA essentially created an environment that is extremely friendly to the predator. Granted, people might have seen this coming, but nobody really did. Nobody got up on the floor of the Congress and predicted such a thing. You have a policy decision that utterly transformed the ecology of a region – and not just the physical ecology, but the psychological ecology as well.
On a somewhat lighter note, we have the smoking ban in bars. I’m a smoker, but I really have no objection to the smoking ban. I don’t smoke in my house, and I really don’t smoke indoors at all anymore. One professor I know – a smoker – joked about the smoking ban as follows: “Yeah, that’s what you want. A bunch of drunks out on the street at 3 o’clock in the afternoon or 3 o’clock in the morning.” The bar, it seemed to be the point, serves a very specific ecological purpose in social space: it isolates certain elements, keeps them out of sight. But the ban goes beyond that.
A few weeks ago, I was at The Grafton Pub, probably as close to a good local that I have now, even though I very rarely go to bars anymore. As I was heading out to smoke – not grumpily – on one of the coldest nights of the year, I noticed a group at another table, maybe five adults and an infant, a small infant, maybe eight weeks old. It struck me. The smoking ban – which went into effect here on January 1 – allows this child to be in the bar. These parents would never bring the kid to a smoky bar. This is a policy effect, the creation of a new bar ecology.
In New York, the bar ecology has already been in effect for quite awhile. It is even more noticeable, because bars stay open until 4 am, and bars are usually not that far removed from residential spaces (which is to say, plenty of people live directly above a bar). A few years ago, I was out smoking with some people around 3 am, and somebody living upstairs trued to dump water on us from a window. I can’t say I blame the person: we were drunk and loud directly below their window on a weeknight. Not so good. The other big conflict is developing around the stroller set, as described in this great read appearing in today’s New York Times Style Section (“Look Who’s Getting Rolled Out Of the Bar“). I especially love this article because it is about our old neighborhood in Brooklyn. Apparently, some bars are banning strollers, and enforcing the “21 and over rule,” but not for fake ID 19 year-olds. They don’t want people bringing their kids to the bar.
Some bars, on the other hand, encourage the kids in the bar, like The Gate – my favorite bar in New York City, and my old local when we lived on 5th Avenue. The Gate is a pub-style bar with a great outdoor space and a cozy little fireplace (or maybe it was a wood-burning stove). When we were living in Brooklyn, you could find us there on most Sunday afternoons, either snuggled up with a few pints on a wintry day or lounging out on the patio playing dominoes during the summer and spring. Needless to say, they carried Jever, and so I was rarely happier than I was hanging out with good friends at The Gate. My brother and I also used to go there for baseball games. He’d call me up around 6:30 and just say “Gate?” Ayup. WE watched some classic games in that bar. This was, of course, before the smoking ban, but The Gate even then was fairly open to kids. I remember many parent bringing even small infants there, even though smoking was allowed. So I wasn’t surprised to see this in the article:
Dawn D’Arcy, the manager of the Gate, a bar in Park Slope that routinely sees groups of parents and children drop by during the afternoon, agreed, saying that the Gate was “modeled on an Irish pub.”
“This is a place where people bring dogs in, this is a ‘local,’ ” she said. “Families are a part of that.”
Ah, Brooklyn. But to get back to the point, can you imagine a city council member getting up and arguing that the smoking ban is going to cause conflict between stroller roller bar patrons and people opposed to kids in the bar, that it will force bar owners to ban strollers? It would be a hilarious argument, for sure. When we teach policy arguments, we struggle mightily enough to get our students to anticipate even the obvious negative consequences. They tend to focus on the good, which is fair enough, but they often do so to the exclusion of the manifest downsides to any policy change. But it is perhaps more interesting to try to anticipate the outlandish, the bizarre consequences, something that seems a million miles away from the standard positions in the debate. But this would require not linear policy thought – a thought that derives consequences from the current state of things, but a more ecological thought, and that’s much tougher.
What new forces might emerge in that ecology? Dead women and strollers in bars.
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