Complete forensic accounting will establish if Britons got value for money on the wedding of William and Kate. Doing the math is a highly partisan game. Anti-monarchists grumble that this Friday’s national holiday amounts to a $6.4-billion hit to the economy but that’s a cheap math trick that consists of dividing the country’s annual output by the number of working days and then subtracting one out. What if everyone busily ups their productivity this week out of sheer excitement about the coming royal nuptials
600,000-800,000 people drawn from outside the United Kingdom this week — more than doubling the number of tourists already gobbling up hotel rooms, restaurant meals and guided tours. I spent Easter Sunday morning in a crush of 20,000 outside of Buckingham Palace taking in one of the dullest shows in town, the Changing of the Guard. The mere promise of traditional ritual and bearskin hats is sufficient to generate excitement.
