Pub culture and pub economy

By M.S.

WHY are pubs in London better than bars in New York, which are better than bars in Washington, DC? I've given a good deal of thought to this question recently, though the quality of said thought has been somewhat impaired by the very high quality of the pubs in London. But Matthew Yglesias is still thinking clearly, and an interesting report by Sarah Laskow on liquor licences in the East Village gets him wondering about the natural tendency of businesses to cluster, and the suboptimal result of over-regulation.

Street noise is a very real issue in large swathes of Manhattan and I think it's perfectly understandable that people prefer not to have lively nightlife scenes located directly outside their windows... (But) basically the East Village really "wants" to be full of nightlife establishments just like Qiaotou, China wants button factories. Restricting the creation of new button factories in Qiatou will help incumbent button makers (and alleviate neighborhood concerns about factory smoot) but it's hard to call a bar scene into existence that way. Similarly, making it hard to open a new bar in the East Village isn't going to create a button factory. It's going to create an underutilized space.

Ryan Avent brings in the London-to-Washington comparison, and makes the key point that such restrictions actually tend to make the pubs themselves less pleasant.

London, like cities and towns across the British Isles, is filled with pubs. They vary in type, quality, and clientele. I was very lucky this time around to find a near-perfect gastropub just a five minute walk from my flat. It was quiet and well-maintained with a great menu, and while there were always people there, there was also always a free seat. Kids were welcome during the day, as were dogs. Every time I went I thought to myself how great it would be to have such a place close by back in Washington. And every time I thought that, I immediately reminded myself that such a place, back in Washington, would be perpetually packed and fairly unpleasant. In the Washington area, you can't have a place that's both really good and quiet in a neighborhood-y sort of way.

That's largely because it's very difficult to open new bars. And the result is a pernicious feedback loop. With too few bars around, most good bars are typically crowded. This crowdedness alienates neighbors, and it also has a selecting effect on the types of people who choose to go to bars — those interested in a loud, rowdy environment, who will often tend to be loud and rowdy. This alienates neighbors even more, leading to tighter restrictions still and exacerbating the problem.

Megan McArdle agrees, with a caveat:

London has a sizeable population of obnoxious drunks, many of whom decide to get into fistfights outside their local pub. (An editor at the Economist who had recently moved to the United States was asked how he had enjoyed his first New Year's in New York. "It made me quite homesick," he replied. "All those drunks throwing up in the subway were like a breath of London.") But it is true that London also has more quiet pubs than New York—and New York, in turn, has more of them (outside of the East Village) than DC does.

I think these observations are all apt, but I'm also wondering why a comparison of pub quality in these three places would focus primarily on regulatory or economic issues rather than that diffuse and confusing beast we call culture. I can think of two reasons why people tend to write disproportionately about economic and regulatory reasons for these kinds of problems. First, they're concrete. You can investigate the regulatory issues surrounding licensing businesses in your area pretty easily, and those rules are discrete and public and clear. Then you can analyze the expected results. Second, problems with regulatory and eocnomic origins are amenable to solution. Change the regulations and you might in principle have solved the problem, even if in this case nobody can figure out quite how to do that.

But what strikes me overwhelmingly about the difference between bars/pubs in London, New York and Washington is that these three cities have completely different nightlife cultures. Those cultures are irreducible to the regulatory environment or to economic behaviour. The regulatory environment in London doesn't do much to explain why, when you walk through Southwark on a winter's evening at 6:30pm with the thermometer tipping 0 degrees centigrade, you see crowds of men and women in long dark coats standing on the sidewalk sipping pints of bitter. It doesn't explain the fact that up until 1990 there basically wasn't a decent atmospheric bar with good food in Washington, DC, or not one that would be recognised as such by someone from New York or London. It doesn't explain the fact that even though breweries are allowed to own pubs in England, and are prevented from doing so in America, most pubs in London that are bought up by breweries or conglomerates have retained their individual characters and atmospheres, while in America they would almost certainly be swept under by company-wide branding campaigns. It doesn't even explain why bars in Washington have gotten so much better over the past 15 years that when I go back, I barely recognise the place.

These are all manifestations of culture. But it's incredibly hard to say anything about culture. Especially at the length of a blog post. Even the word "culture" will probably get me some pushback here: what is it? What's it made up of? What are the rules? Isn't it just a fuzzyheaded humanities major's excuse to refuse to talk about regulations and economics? Well, maybe. But I think the pubs in London will still be very different from bars in Washington in 50 years, even if Washington decides to adopt the regulatory arsenal of London, right down to closing time, and what I'm wondering is whether there might be a better way to blog about why and how that's so.

(Photo credit: AFP)