The Watch That Is Five Years of Someone’s Pay
Almost every city I know has parts that are safe and parts that are not. Many of the neighborhoods people choose are very safe. In any of them, one thing can change the odds: what you are wearing.
The numbers help put it in proportion. The national death rate from accidents in the United States is about 58 to 67 per 100,000 people a year. The homicide rate in recent years was below 1 per 100,000 in Portugal and Spain, about 2 to 3 in Thailand, and about 25 in Mexico and Colombia. Even in the highest of those, accidents at home are about two and a half times as common as murders. National averages hide a lot, and what you wear and carry can move your own odds more than the average does.
Picture a man named Calvin, who goes to a nice dinner in a safe neighborhood of a city where many people earn little. He wears a watch that cost $9,000. A man who works in a kitchen nearby earns about $1,800 a year. The watch on Calvin’s wrist is five years of that man’s pay.
On the way home, a man on a motorbike takes the watch off Calvin’s wrist at a red light and is gone in seconds. Calvin is not hurt. He is surprised, because the street was one of the safest in town.
What Calvin wore did not make the theft right. It did make it more likely. A watch worth five years of someone’s income is a very large temptation for a person who has little. Nobody in this is a villain. The gap between the watch and the man's pay made the theft tempting.
The same can happen in a very safe neighborhood in your home country. It comes from the gap between what one person carries and what another earns, and that gap exists in many places.
I live in plain clothes and no jewelry. For me it is simple, and it is one fewer thing to think about when I walk home.
You might say it is sad to hide what you own. Some people find it so. I think of it as choosing where to wear it. The watch could stay in a drawer on most nights, and it could go out on the night you take a car from the door to the door.
You could list the five most valuable things you carry in an ordinary day, such as a phone, a watch, a ring, a bag and cash. For each, you could ask what you would do without it, and whether you need it where you are going. You could look up the numbers for the neighborhood you are considering, the way Joel did in an earlier piece, and see how they compare with your own.
What do you leave at home when you go out in a new place? Tell us in the comments. Someone reading may be choosing what to wear tonight.
Tell us in the comments