The New York Inflation Index

Inflation is slowly eating away at America’s standard of living. A stop at the gas pump makes that evident for anyone who drives to work, and so do the Labor Department figures that show that last year’s wholesale prices rose by seven and a half percent—the fastest pace in more than 26 years.

But in New York City, the inflation indicator that seems to me most salient comes from how much money people give when asked for a handout. With the ever-increasing economic pressure, for more and more New Yorkers, the new going rate seems to be a dollar.

It is as if an implicit understanding has been reached that it won’t do to just hand over loose change. If someone has to depend on quarters to buy a Big Mac or a slice of pizza—let alone feed his or her children—it is going to take too long for the needed change to accumulate. New Yorkers who believe in giving on the street have changed their old habit of handing whatever they can pull out of their pockets and moving on.

I do not know how this view on giving has come about, and I worry that it may have a down side. Will people who give a dollar when asked to help out now decide to give less often? More important, will the impulse to give a dollar make people feel so vulnerable that they are reluctant to give at all?

For a man, reaching into a front pocket and coming up with loose change has always been easy. It is a gesture that takes a few seconds. But for a man to reach into his hip pocket for a wallet or for a woman to open her purse coming up with a dollar bill is a different story. This kind of giving stops people in their tracks. Before they do it, they need to feel they are in a safe neighborhood as well as in no danger from the person to whom they are handing money.

As a result, I am unsure where the new going rate for giving on the street is leading us. My hope is that this new generosity is a political omen for the presidential election—the informal equivalent of a rise in the minimum wages that tells us more and more people have concluded that it is getting tougher to be poor.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.