A consultant flew into the Triangle last month to tell a room of us that our regional productivity was down four percent. He had a spreadsheet the size of a quilt and the posture of a man who has never once been wrong in a conference room and has therefore never learned anything.

I asked him what he was measuring. He said output per labor hour. I asked him whether he had accounted for the forty-five minutes every afternoon when the whole county stops to drink tea on a porch and decide, collectively and without a memo, whether anything that happened that day was worth repeating. He had not. It was not in the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet, like most spreadsheets, measured only the things that are easy to measure, which are almost never the things that matter.

Sweet tea is not productive. It produces nothing but conversation, and conversation produces nothing but the slow accumulation of knowing who your neighbors are, which produces nothing but the thing that holds a place together when the economy does the thing economies do. You cannot put that in a cell. You can only notice its absence, years later, in the towns that optimized it away.

He flew home. The tea stayed. I know which one I would bet the county on.