Broken Window Theories, Applied Domestically

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the Broken Windows Theory: if you ignore minor vandalism like broken windows or graffiti, people start to think of your neighborhood as a place where that kind of behavior is tolerated -- or even expected -- and are encouraged to commit further acts of destruction and even more serious crimes. And if you fix the broken windows and paint out the graffiti promptly, you send the message that this is a place people are invested in, a place they care about -- thus inspiring further acts of community investment and improvement.

The effort to eliminate graffiti from New York City's subway cars in the 1980s is often cited as an example of the Broken Windows Theory in action. And it was: in 1985 the NYC Transit Authority hired George Kelling, who (along with James Q. Wilson) had coined the phrase in an Atlantic Monthly article three years earlier. Prior to Kelling's consultancy, NYC subway cars were totally covered with graffiti, inside and out. Some were quite beautiful, in their own weird way -- I remember being awestruck during a childhood visit to NYC by a particularly colorful one screeching into the station like some kind of angry tropical robot dragon. But I suppose the ubiquitous graffiti did give an air of lawlessness to the whole subway experience. By cracking down on this relatively harmless but highly visible infraction, the authorities hoped to curb the more serious ones -- like muggings, say -- that made the subways, and the City in general, feel unsafe to many people. A decade later Kelling's idea had earned its place in urban sociology: the subway cars were spic and span, Mayor Giuliani was nailing fare-evaders and jaywalkers to the wall, and -- voila! -- violent crime was way, way down.

The Broken Windows Theory has since been questioned by some social scientists*, but I often think about it as I'm gathering up wet towels in the bathroom. I have this vague idea that if I make a concerted effort to keep the bathroom floor towel-free, the next person who gets out of the shower will be slightly less likely to fling theirs down in a soggy heap and walk away. Or if they do, they will glance back at it laying there in the middle of an otherwise empty expanse of blue tile and think, "Well, that doesn't look right... Gee, I'd better hang that up somewhere." Back downstairs, I imagine George Kelling pointing out that if the computer table is always aclutter with empty yogurt containers, old coffee cups, granola bar wrappers, and half-eaten bowls of cereal, it's only natural for someone to shove one more mug in among them when she's done slurping down her breakfast ramen.

And so I keep diligently whisking away the detritus so the computer table won't look quite so much like a home for dirty dishes, and wiping dribbled coffee off the lower kitchen cabinets in the hopes that a clean white surface will somehow radiate the idea that it should stay clean. And once in a while I ponder the royal blue Manic Panic spattered all over the pillowcase I tacked up over the bathroom window after the remodel two years ago and wonder: if I found time to reinstall the curtain rod and make some actual curtains, would the girls instinctively be more careful when they dye their hair?

Now, as a community -- or a Transit Authority -- a commitment to picking up litter and painting out graffiti clearly calls for an ongoing allocation of resources -- a standing line item in the City budget, say. But as a parent, you can't help hoping that your children will eventually get the freakin' idea already and hang up their own goddamn towels. You're also aware that if you persist in doing it for them in order to maintain an illusory (but hopefully contagious) sense of order and cleanliness, they may well go off to college unaware that dirty socks just lie there on the floor, limp and helpless, if someone doesn't pick them up and put them in the hamper. And then wash them. And pair them up. And put them back in the drawer. (Indeed, the Laundry Elf Fallacy has followed more than one American man to his grave.)

So I complement the daily maintenance routine with a behavior modification campaign involving cheerful reminders, firm requests, outright nagging, carrots and sticks, irate signage, nagging louder, and the occasional maternal meltdown. It's all part of our job as parents, you see, to somehow inculcate a series of unnatural habits -- dental hygiene, apologizing -- in the lovable savages entrusted to us. And because children do not appear to come equipped with an instinct to put things away (except possibly Menna, who has been known to pause in the middle of a Nerf battle to straighten up Simon's desk), one of the most challenging habits to instill is that old saw, "a place for everything, and everything in its place." 

I remember Emmett pointing out the little shelf in our garage that had nothing on it but the needle you attached to the bike pump when you were pumping up the volleyball. "This goes here," he said. And every time, it did. And -- this is the amazing part -- whenever you wanted to pump up the volleyball, there it was! Over the years I have learned the value of this arrangement the hard way, through wasted hours spent searching for the scissors instead of finishing the baby quilt, or struggling to adjust the water balloon launcher with the needle-nose pliers because the slip-joint pliers have gone AWOL again. (Our household has managed to establish universally accepted "homes" for many crucial objects -- a Scissors Bin, a Dust Pan Hook, and so on. My favorite is the Pensieve, a rune-covered ceramic basin the kids made at pottery camp; it sits on the table in our front hall and serves as a repository for glasses, keys, phones -- all those small, critical objects that people tend to empty out of their pockets onto any available surface and immediately lose track of.) 

But establishing a place for everything is only step one. Getting everything regularly returned to its place -- pitting your stamina and patience against the inexorably increasing entropy stipulated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- that's where the rubber meets the road, right? Whether you're doing it yourself or compelling others to do it by sheer force of will, fighting entropy consumes energy. And as the First Law of Thermodynamics warns us, energy may be transformed, transferred, redirected -- but it cannot be created.

French economist Frédéric Bastiat illustrates this point with a Broken Window story of his own. In this one a boy throws a rock through the front window of the bakery, and the townspeople are gathered around shaking their heads in sympathy. Then someone points out brightly, "Well, at least it's work for the glazier!" Yes, everyone agrees: if nobody ever broke windows the glazier would go hungry. From there they start talking about how the glazier will spend his windfall at the butchershop or the massage parlor or whatever, and then the butcher will have money for a new hat, and so on -- so it's really going to benefit everyone in the end. Pretty soon they've concluded that broken windows are actually a kind of grass-roots Stimulus Plan, and everyone is reaching for the nearest stone to throw.

But then Bastiat steps in and points out that -- hello? -- there's a loss here they're not taking into account. The baker had plans for that money too, you see: he was going to buy a new suit, but now he can't afford it. So the glazier may be shouting everyone's drinks at the pub tonight, but the baker is out a new suit, and the tailor -- a guy nobody even realized was part of the equation -- is S.O.L. too. The libertarian Henry Hazlitt used Bastiat's example to illustrate what he called the One Lesson of Economics -- hidden costs.

There are hidden costs to cleaning up, too, you see. Not only the time it takes -- though it's certainly true that if you spend your day hauling wet towels to the basement and loading up the dishwasher and emptying the fridge of moldy leftovers and sweeping up spilled cat food, there's no time left for you to write the Great American Novel, or cure cancer, or even finish that dang grant report so you can finally get paid for your last three months of work. Nor will you have energy for baby quilts or water balloon launchers or parade floats or theatrical productions in the neighbors' basement.

It's not just the zero-sum time trade-off, though: it's also what this constant Sisyphean struggle does to your psyche over time. Sure, you can take pleasure in restoring order (however temporary) to the chaos, and it can be highly rewarding to create an orderly, clean, pleasant, welcoming space that you and your family can enjoy living in. But if you start to feel like that's all you're doing, like that's your whole raison d'être? Like you were put here on the planet to follow people around picking up their dirty socks? Well, that's when the stir-crazy resentment we call House Elf Syndrome sets in, and you start calling up to make an all-day appointment at the spa, or fantasizing about burning the house down and moving to Bali. When what you really need isn't a cucumber scrub and a long lie-down in the steam room (though that is awfully nice) but to actually do something. Something that means something to the world outside your front door. Something -- God help you -- that stays done. 

Andrew's response to House Elf Syndrome is to quote Camus: La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d'homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux. ("The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.") Which helps, a lot of the time. But I find that if I try too hard to embrace the idea that this particular struggle is supposed to fulfill me, I can wind up with my sense of self so intertwined with the state of my spice rack that I forget that cleaning up the house is a means, not an end -- that the important thing is not putting back the pump needle, but pumping up the volleyball and heading to the beach.

The ultimate goal is to establish and maintain an environment that supports the needs and priorities of our families, where we can all feel comfortable, and live the lives we want to live. This is going to look different for every household, of course. (Even within households it's often a balancing act, as different members of the family may have different needs and priorities, and different requirements for comfort. Which is perhaps why, as Josie points out, "at our house it's not so much a balancing act as a teeter totter.") There are people out there whose mental health requires a habitat pristine enough that nobody would ever dream of building a water balloon launcher in the kitchen, let alone doing it while making five racks of ribs and three pans of mac 'n' cheese, as we did last Sunday. And that is certainly a perfectly reasonable -- and enviably peaceful -- way to go.

But it's not what I'm after at our house. I want our home to foster creativity and passion and action-packed adventure -- to support the serious pursuit of silly ideas and the repeated beta-testing of unlikely inventions.  I also want our kids to develop the discipline to maintain order: to hang up their towels and put away the hair straightener and clean up the cut-off plastic cup rims they have strewn all over the floor. Not just for order's sake, or because they're tired of being nagged at, or even because it's the only way to be sure there will be snacks in the cupboard when they're hungry and duct tape in the Adhesives Drawer when they need it. I want them to shoulder their share of the Sisyphean struggle out of respect for the needs of the people they live with.  

With that in mind I try to take as much joy as possible in the chaos-producing projects we engage in at our house, and as much satisfaction as possible in restoring order when we are done. I share both kinds of pleasure with my offspring. And I keep reminding myself that when they've left home, I will be able to put up snow-white lace curtains in the bathroom without worrying about flying spatters of blue hair dye. Whole days -- months -- years -- will go by without anyone launching a penny through the front hall window with a toilet-paper-roll catapult. Our Broken Windows Days will be over. And what fun will that be?

*2018 note: My breezy description of Giuliani's clean up of New York City ("voila!") was meant to acknowledge that this was a ridiculously simplistic explanation for the drop in crime during that period, but ten years later my flipness feels insensitive to the devastating effect "broken windows policing" has had on communities of color. I have learned a lot since I wrote this, I guess.