Episode Transcript
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0:15
Pushkin. I
0:18
have a friend who lives in Brentwood, on
0:20
the west side of Los Angeles, between Beverly
0:22
Hills and Santa Monica. He is
0:25
a little poolhouse in his backyard and
0:27
I stay there whenever I come to LA,
0:29
kind of like cato'calon if your memory
0:31
for O. J. Simpson Esoterica goes back
0:34
that far. Anyway,
0:38
my friend's street dead ends on San Vicente
0:40
Boulevard, one of the central east
0:42
west corridors in LA. And
0:45
on the other side of San Vicente is this
0:47
absolutely gorgeous golf course, one
0:50
of the many private country clubs at LA is
0:52
famous for. If you drive
0:54
down Wilshire Boulevard into Beverly Hills,
0:56
ten minutes east of Brentwood, you go
0:58
right past Los Angeles Country Club, which
1:01
costs maybe a quarter of a million dollars
1:03
just to join. That is, if they'll
1:05
even consider your application. There's
1:09
bel Air Country Club just north of Ucla,
1:12
which might be the most beautiful golf course in
1:14
the country. Hillcraft Staff
1:16
Pico Wiltshire country Club in
1:18
Hancock Park. I could go on. They're everywhere,
1:21
vast, gorgeous and
1:23
private. The
1:27
one near my friend's house is called Brentwood country
1:29
Club and it has a tall chain link
1:31
fence around it which goes almost
1:33
all the way out to the street, leaving just
1:35
this narrow, rocky dirt track.
1:38
There's no sidewalk, and since there
1:40
aren't a lot of places to run in Los Angeles,
1:43
tons of people run around the Brentwood Country
1:45
Club on that narrow dirt track. And
1:52
there's one thing that always bothers me every
1:54
time I run that route. Why
1:56
do all the runners of West Los Angeles have
1:58
to squeeze into this narrow, rocky
2:00
little track when there's a huge, magnificent
2:03
park just on the other side of the fence. My
2:09
name is Malcolm Gladwell, and you're listening
2:11
to Revisionist History, my podcast
2:14
about things overlooked and misunderstood.
2:21
This episode is about the problem
2:23
with golf. I hate
2:25
golf and hopefully by
2:28
the end of this you'll hate golf
2:30
too. I'm
2:37
standing who would die day Zac,
2:39
who is a very successful
2:41
landscape architect, Santa Monica,
2:44
And we're on the corner of seventh Sente
2:47
and Berlin Game and we're looking into
2:50
the Brentwood Country Club and
2:52
the first thing I see is barbed wire. Looks
2:55
like a couple of layers of barbed
2:57
wire. This looks like it looks like the Berlin
3:00
Wall. I don't think they want us to get in there.
3:02
What are you? What are we seeing? We're seeing this move a little
3:04
closer here. What's that stand
3:06
up trees? Do you know what those are? That
3:09
looks like silkoakes in the foreground?
3:12
And then I see a Sadrus deodora,
3:15
quite lovely. Lots of larger
3:17
trees, which are unusual in Los Angeles
3:19
because there's so little open
3:21
space. Yeah, there's
3:24
some Pinus canariensis. Looks
3:26
like a redwood in there. I
3:28
don't think dai Zak has ever played a round of golf
3:30
in her life. That's exactly why
3:32
I wanted her opinion. I wanted
3:34
someone objective to tell me
3:37
what it would take to turn this place into a park.
3:39
Well, first of all, I would get rid of
3:41
the two layers of bar lare the
3:45
whole Eastern European feel East German
3:47
field would have to be corrected. I
3:49
mean, that might be some people's bag, but
3:53
it's not very welcoming. Yeah.
3:59
The typical golf course is two hundred
4:02
acres, give or take. That's a lot of
4:04
land. You have to landscape. Bit
4:06
mow it drenched in pesticides,
4:08
keep the sand traps perfect. I
4:11
read somewhere that when a fancy golf course rebuilds
4:13
its bunkers, it typically takes about
4:15
three hundred and eighty nine truckloads
4:17
of sand three hundred
4:19
and eighty nine just to keep
4:22
everything nice and white and fluffy. But
4:24
at the same time, because golf involves
4:27
launching a potentially lethal projectile
4:29
at great speeds across enormous distances,
4:32
you have to severely limit the number of people on the
4:35
course at any one time. Typically,
4:37
a good private course can handle no more than
4:39
seventy two golfers at once. So
4:41
that's one golfer per one hundred and twenty thousand,
4:44
eight hundred and thirty three square feet. Can
4:46
you imagine if basketball had the same population
4:49
density as golf. I did the math.
4:51
If basketball was played according to the geographical
4:54
requirements of golf, a basketball
4:56
court would be thirty acres. Picture
5:00
that that had to play on motorcycles.
5:06
Okay, another fact about golf.
5:09
Rich people really really like
5:12
it. They're obsessed with it in a way
5:14
that there just isn't any parallel for ordinary
5:16
people. Because serious golfers
5:18
are super anal about their scores. We
5:20
can actually quantify their obsession in
5:23
order to calculate their handicap, basically
5:25
how well they're playing relative to other people at
5:28
the country club. They all post their results
5:30
on a database maintained by the United
5:32
States Golf Association, So we
5:34
have a record, and it's a gold
5:36
mine to be able to calculate your
5:38
handicap and track it through time. You
5:41
will log into the system either at your course
5:44
or on your home computer. I'm talking to
5:46
an economist at Miami University named
5:48
Lee Biggerstaff. He's interested
5:51
in the habits of top corporate executives.
5:53
If you have the corner office and a multimillion
5:56
dollars stock option and a golf stream
5:58
five, does that make you more or
6:00
less likely to put in a hard day's work. The
6:03
USGA database is of serious
6:05
professional interest to a guy like Biggerstaff.
6:07
And you input are you played, and
6:10
what day you played on, and what your
6:12
score was, and you know, after
6:14
a certain number of rounds being played, the
6:17
USGA will will indicate what your handicap
6:19
is, your level of skill, which allows you
6:21
to compete against other golfers of different skill level
6:23
and kind of normalize against that you
6:25
know how you always hear that CEOs play
6:27
a lot of golf. Bigger Staff's
6:29
insight is that the USGA database
6:32
allows us to know exactly how much
6:34
they play. All you need to do is
6:36
cross reference that list of scores with
6:38
a list of the CEOs of America's largest
6:41
companies. So that's what he does. It
6:43
takes forever, by the way, we started while as
6:45
a PhD student, and so the certainly
6:47
was a multi month process. So it's not something
6:49
that necessarily want to repeat in the near term just because it took
6:52
a lot of collection time. There, how
6:54
can you not love this? Surely this
6:56
is why God invented graduate students. Bigger
6:58
Staff begins with the names of the heads the
7:01
top fifteen hundred publicly held companies
7:03
in the US. Three hundred
7:05
and sixty three of those fifteen hundred
7:08
turn out to be so obsessed with golf
7:10
that they enter their scores into the USGA database.
7:13
What you're seeing on average is
7:15
I think fifteen rounds a year. It's kind of the average
7:18
CEO is playing that amount of golf, but
7:20
it's a heavily skewed distribution, right, So we have a lot of
7:22
people that are playing very little golf, and then
7:25
we have a tail where we're picking it
7:27
up. You know, the top quartile of what we're looking at, which
7:30
is twenty two or more rounds per year. And if you
7:32
go to the top ten percent of Bigger Staff sample,
7:35
the CEOs are playing around at least
7:37
thirty seven times a year. A
7:43
round of golf is a good four four and a half hours,
7:45
So if you play thirty seven times a year,
7:48
that's more than one hundred and sixty hours
7:50
on the course, the equivalent of five and
7:52
a half weeks of work. By
7:55
the way, these are understatements. They
7:58
don't include the time spent driving to the course,
8:00
warming up, getting changed, having
8:02
a drink. Doesn't include the hours
8:04
spent practicing shots on the putting green
8:06
or the driving range, or all the rounds
8:08
you that you don't enter into the database,
8:11
like if you're only playing nine holes or playing a
8:13
fun round, so the real time is
8:15
probably way higher. Bigger
8:18
Staff then goes on to show that the more
8:20
golf of CEO plays, the worse
8:22
his firm does, and also that the
8:24
more golf of CEO plays, the more likely
8:26
he is to be fired. In other
8:28
words, this isn't a harmless habit.
8:31
It's a dangerous habit. Remember
8:34
the Wall Street investment bank bear Sterns.
8:36
They went bankrupt during the mortgage crisis
8:39
in July of two thousand and seven, Right
8:42
when the crisis was beginning. The
8:44
CEO of bear Stearns would often helicopter
8:47
out from Wall Street on Friday afternoons to his
8:49
exclusive course in New Jersey to get
8:51
a round in before sunset. Even
8:53
when his company was collapsing, he couldn't
8:56
stop playing golf. Out
8:59
of President Donald Trump's first four months
9:01
in office, he visited his own golf
9:03
courses twenty five times. One
9:06
week he played three times. You
9:08
would think he would be at the office learning
9:10
how to be president, reading intelligence briefings,
9:12
drading the swamp. No, he's golfing. It's
9:14
an addiction, right, because the
9:16
definition of an addiction is a self destructive
9:19
habit. Just think if I said
9:21
to you that an important employee
9:23
of a major organization made lifestyle
9:25
choices that caused him to miss enormous
9:27
amounts of work, harm his performance,
9:30
and put his own career in jeopardy, you
9:32
would say, WHOA check that guy
9:34
into rehab. That's golf crack
9:38
cocaine for rich white guys the
9:41
highest and the sample one
9:43
hundred forty six or one hundred forty eight rounds
9:46
recorded in a single year, which I mean at that point, that's
9:48
a tremendous amount of time it's been on a golf
9:50
course. You thought I was engaging in hyperboly,
9:53
didn't you that I was using the word addiction
9:55
metaphorically. One hundred and forty
9:57
eight rounds a year is a round of golf every
10:00
three days, and that would
10:02
be if it was kind of uniformly distributed across
10:04
the year. It's you know,
10:06
golf certainly has a season where it's a little bit more sense
10:09
in terms of the summer versus the winner.
10:12
And you can't tell me what company
10:15
is. I want to know what company is.
10:18
Yeah, this we're just with this data, given
10:20
it somewhat sensitive, we're
10:23
unwilling to name out CEOs.
10:25
I can't believe you won't tell me. I mean,
10:28
here, we have an activity that is incredibly
10:30
expensive, that is organized in just
10:32
about the most extravagant manner possible.
10:35
And at the same time, this expensive habit
10:37
is incredibly addictive, to the point that there's
10:39
a chief executive out there of a major
10:42
American corporation who plays
10:44
an average of one hundred and forty
10:46
eight rounds of golf a year and is so
10:48
completely unself conscious about that
10:50
fact that he posts all one hundred
10:53
and forty eight rounds on a public database
10:55
where it can be analyzed by graduate students.
10:59
So what happens to rich white guys with a dangerous,
11:01
costly obsession. Do they burn
11:03
through their life savings paying for their addiction
11:05
like ordinary addicts do? Please
11:08
give them a little more respect. By
11:12
the way, this is my fifteenth year in television.
11:14
Imagine that fifteen years of me the
11:18
longest stomach test in the history of show. You
11:22
could argue, I would say in the forties
11:24
and fifties there was no one who was more
11:26
widely popular in American than Bob Hope.
11:29
I'm talking to Richard Zoglin, Bob
11:31
Hope's biographer. I think Bob
11:33
Hope has been a little forgotten in recent years,
11:36
but in his day he was huge.
11:38
Every late night comedian who does a
11:41
stand up monologue at the beginning of the show
11:43
owes a debt to Bob Hope because he kind of invented
11:46
that thing, a stand up comedy monologue
11:48
that sort of took note of what was going on in the world,
11:50
what was going on in Hollywood, what was going
11:53
on everywhere, and he was just the voice
11:56
of America. I think for a long
11:58
time. Bob Hope is
12:00
a crucial part of the story of golf in America,
12:03
although I'm warning you things are
12:05
going to get a little complicated, which
12:07
is sort of the point, because you don't get to run
12:09
the world for as long as rich white guys have without
12:12
being pretty wily, and some
12:14
of their best and wiliest work has
12:16
been on the golf course. So
12:20
there's a principle in property tax law called
12:22
highest and best use, which is
12:24
that one of the ways you figure out how much
12:27
to tax a piece of property is to
12:29
estimate what its best use might be. For
12:32
example, if I have a one acre plot
12:34
and the fanciest part of Manhattan that I
12:36
used to grow vegetables, I can't say to
12:38
the city that land is worthless, it's
12:40
just a vegetable garden. No, the
12:42
city's going to say, we're going to value that
12:45
one acre and tax it as if it had
12:47
an apartment block on it, because
12:49
that's the best use of land in the fancy
12:51
parts of Manhattan. Now,
12:53
if you've got a vast golf course in the middle of
12:55
Beverly Hills or Brentwood Highest
12:57
and best use makes you really nervous
13:00
because plainly, the highest and best
13:02
use of land in the middle of one of the most expensive
13:04
and densely populated cities in the world is
13:06
not a private golf course. So
13:09
years ago, in nineteen sixty, California's
13:12
country clubs realize they have to act
13:14
or they're going to get taxed into oblivion. They
13:17
get together and they propose an amendment
13:19
to the state constitution that permanently
13:22
exempts them from the highest and best
13:24
use standard. They want their vegetable
13:26
garden to be taxed as a vegetable
13:29
garden. If
13:31
you think about it, this is seriously
13:33
audacious. Private golf
13:36
courses are these massive, opulent,
13:38
gated playgrounds, and membership
13:40
is often restricted. In Los Angeles
13:42
in nineteen sixty, a lot of these clubs didn't
13:44
let in Jews. They certainly didn't let
13:47
in black people except to work in the kitchen. Yet
13:49
they wanted a constitutional exemption
13:52
to ordinary property taxes like they
13:54
were some kind of public amenity. How
13:57
can they argue this, They don't,
13:59
not really. They just bring him Bob Hope
14:02
who, in addition to being the most popular entertainer
14:05
in America, is also an obsessive
14:07
golfer. Obsessive I
14:09
might as well level with you. I spent so much time
14:11
in Santraff they sent me citizenship papers
14:14
from Saudi Arabia. Oh yeah, I
14:16
love to hear the whole. Bob
14:18
Hope once wrote an entire book just devoted
14:21
to his golf game, called Confessions
14:23
of a Hooker, in which he estimates
14:25
that he had played on two thousand
14:27
different golf courses over the course of
14:29
his life. He belonged to the Lakeside
14:32
Country Club in La near where
14:34
he lived A little of the pious,
14:36
Yes, I think
14:39
so. Yeah. The genius at picking
14:41
Bob Hope is the face of California's country
14:43
clubs is that his whole persona,
14:45
his whole act, was about being everyman.
14:48
He's self deprecating. Half his jokes
14:50
are about how he's not part of the in group,
14:53
even though of course there's no one more in than
14:55
Bob Hope. Isn't this wonderful all being here
14:57
in California? I just love it. Look at that sky.
15:00
That's the only place in the world where you can get four seasons
15:02
in one day. I want to tell you that this
15:05
is the vie. We're better. Hurry, we'll be It'll be snowing
15:07
before the third hole. Yeah, let's
15:09
move on. Oh boy, So,
15:11
how did the Bob Hope for Golf campaign do?
15:13
In nineteen sixty It wins, The
15:16
proposition passes, and it's added
15:18
to Article thirteen of the California Constitution,
15:21
where it remains to this day.
15:24
In order to win a set of privileges
15:26
for the very wealthy. In other words, California's
15:29
country clubs turned to a man who symbolizes
15:32
the common man. I mean,
15:34
when does it ever happen that a TV celebrity
15:36
wins a sweetheart deal for his rich golf
15:38
buddies by posing as a friend of the common
15:41
man. If you get my drift
15:48
to give me back, just should like totally
15:51
understand Prop thirteen properties
15:53
past in nineteen seventy eight, and
15:56
what are the principal stipulations
15:58
of the proposition. I'm
16:01
in a big conference room in the Los Angeles
16:03
County Municipal Building, one of those
16:05
beautiful nineteen thirties office buildings
16:07
that are all over downtown Las Ange Angelists. There
16:10
are four people on the other side of the table. They're
16:12
from the La County Tax Assessor's office.
16:15
I'm on my quest to figure out why Brentwood
16:18
Country Club isn't just a big park that I can
16:20
go running through, and I've decided
16:22
to start with the people who run the tax system.
16:25
These are serious folks, deliberate,
16:27
thoughtful. They have promised to help me. You'll
16:31
have to guess what they really think. The
16:34
tax rate is set is one percent of
16:36
the value, as opposed to a variable
16:38
rate, which it was before. Demand speaking
16:41
is Brian Donnelly. He's talking about
16:43
the most famous amendment to the California Constitution,
16:46
Proposition thirteen. The
16:49
properties only get reassessed with when there's
16:51
a transfer or a change of ownership,
16:54
or there's new construction. Those are the
16:56
primary parts of it. Here's what he's
16:58
saying. If you own a house, every
17:00
one or two years, typically the value of your
17:03
property is reassessed by the city or county
17:05
where you live. So if your house doubles
17:07
in value, the local government will raise
17:09
your taxes accordingly. That's the way
17:11
property taxes work, except
17:14
in California. Proposition
17:16
thirteen said that for tax purposes,
17:18
the value of any piece of property in California
17:21
is frozen at pre nineteen seventy
17:23
eight levels, and the only way that
17:25
property can be reassessed at its
17:27
real current value is if the
17:30
property is sold, or, to be
17:32
more specific, if ownership
17:34
of more than fifty percent of the property
17:36
changes hands. In other words,
17:38
California has two kinds of taxpayers,
17:41
the post nineteen seventy eight people who
17:43
pay normal property taxes, and the
17:46
people lucky and old enough to
17:48
be living in the same house they owned in nineteen
17:50
seventy eight, who pay a tiny fraction
17:53
of their fair share. You know, I've got family
17:55
members who owned their houses nineteen sixty nine,
17:58
and they're paying I
18:00
think their TAXI values about ninety
18:03
thousand dollars or something like that. The houses in that neighborhood
18:05
sel for six hundred, so it's so
18:08
they're paying a lot less than It's
18:10
the proper teen conundrum, which I'm sure you've read about.
18:16
Please understand this system
18:18
is insane, totally crazy. I
18:20
mean, just think of all the reasons why someone might
18:22
deserve a big tax break. I mean, they're
18:24
sick, they're poor, they have
18:27
tons of young kids, they've made a big
18:29
investment in their business. The State of
18:31
California says no, we think
18:33
the most deserving group are people whose
18:35
property hasn't changed hands in forty years.
18:38
Okay, now, imagine that
18:40
you're a private golf club. You
18:43
did that spectacular bit of jiu jitsu
18:45
with Bob Hope in nineteen sixty, which
18:47
means that you don't pay real property taxes.
18:50
Gift from God number one. Then
18:52
comes proposition thirteen, and
18:55
you get a second gift from God because
18:58
proposition thirteen says that
19:00
those already artificially low
19:02
property taxes are now frozen
19:04
forever at nineteen seventy eight levels,
19:07
so long as your country club does
19:09
not change hands. And that last
19:12
part is crucial, because if
19:14
you have a change in ownership, then
19:16
you have to pay real property tax
19:19
like every other long suffering
19:21
California taxpayer who hasn't been
19:23
in one place since nineteen seventy eight. So
19:27
the country clubs of Los Angeles all
19:30
hang by a thread. They
19:32
continue to exist only
19:34
so long as the tax system perceives
19:37
that they have not changed hands, and
19:40
for years everyone assumes they
19:42
haven't changed hands. I mean Brettwood,
19:45
LA country Club, Wilshire. All
19:47
the major golf clubs were all founded before
19:49
nineteen seventy eight, but
19:52
Then a neighborhood newspaper called
19:54
the Los Angeles Garment and Citizen
19:56
runs an article January sixteenth,
19:59
twenty ten, in which they say,
20:02
wait a minute, most private
20:04
country clubs in Los Angeles have
20:06
what's called equity ownership. They're
20:09
owned by their members. When
20:11
you admitted, you get a share. When you die
20:13
or quit, someone else takes your share.
20:16
So over time, if enough members
20:18
die or quit, isn't that a change in ownership.
20:22
That question was put to Rick Auerback, who
20:24
was then the head of tax assessment for Ella
20:26
County. I think the quote was kind of funny for him.
20:28
You said something about, let's see on
20:31
most issues we haven't heard at least the question asked
20:33
before he said, Who'd worked in the office thirty nine years,
20:35
But this was a new one. So Auerback
20:37
refers the question to the city's lawyers.
20:40
They put their best and brightest legal minds
20:42
on it for six months, and
20:44
on June second, twenty ten, the
20:46
county's tax court issues a solemn,
20:49
four page ruling. They conclude,
20:51
no country clubs haven't
20:54
changed hands. If you're keeping
20:56
track, that's the third straight up gift
20:58
from God that Ellie's private country clubs
21:00
have gotten in the last fifty years. I
21:02
was talking to someone who's a member of Feller
21:05
Country Club, okay, and I said, what
21:07
percentage of the members of bel Air today?
21:10
We're members in seventy eight and he said, you
21:13
know, ten percent? So why
21:15
isn't that a change of ownership? Right? If
21:18
I haven't had a chance to dig through this a whole lot since
21:20
I got it out of the file the other
21:22
day. But they kind of get into it. It's
21:25
they're saying, if there's no one event
21:27
that is that is more than fifty percent
21:30
of a transfer, then it's not.
21:32
Each of those little individual slices are not a
21:34
change of ownership on their own. Did
21:37
you find that argument plausible? Well,
21:41
it's prop Yeah, that's that's were
21:45
implementers of the law. You don't have opinions.
21:47
No, Well, I
21:50
could swear as I looked across the table at
21:52
Donnelly and his cohorts that they were
21:54
twitching like they desperately wanted
21:56
to say something but had to bite their tongue. You
21:59
know what it's like. You know that famous
22:02
paradox I forgot with the ship.
22:05
Well, you the question is if you change, If you
22:07
have a ship and you change, it's like some ancient greeking,
22:09
and you change one board at a time, is
22:12
at the end of the day as a ship different. That's
22:15
what this is. The thing
22:17
I can't remember is a ship of theseus.
22:20
The famous thought experiment described by the
22:22
Greek philosopher Plutarch roughly two thousand
22:24
years ago. Plutarch
22:27
says, imagine theseus is sailing
22:29
on a ship, and one by one he replaces
22:32
every one of the original planks that make up
22:34
that ship with a new plank, until
22:36
every single piece of the ship is new.
22:39
The question is, when Theseus reaches
22:41
shore, is he sailing on the same ship as
22:44
he was when he left or a new ship.
22:47
One view says it's a new ship. This
22:49
is called the meriological theory of identity.
22:52
The identity of something is the sum of its
22:54
component parts. Change the parts,
22:57
you change the thing. On
22:59
the other side of the argument is something called spatio
23:02
temporal continuity theory, which
23:04
says that an object can maintain
23:06
its identity so long as
23:08
the change is gradual and the
23:10
form or shape of the object is
23:13
preserved to the changes of its component
23:15
materials. I think
23:17
you can see where I'm going with this. The
23:20
city's lawyers take the second view,
23:23
so long as a country club replaces its
23:25
rich white guys gradually, and
23:27
so long as each new rich white guy
23:29
preserves the form and shape of the rich
23:31
white guy he is replacing, then the private
23:34
golf clubs of today must have the
23:36
same existential status as
23:38
the private golf courses of nineteen seventy
23:40
eight. Collections of rich white
23:42
guys, from the standpoint of the La County
23:44
property tax system, possess spatio
23:47
temporal continuity.
23:51
At this point I realized I was in
23:53
way over my head. Tax assessors
23:56
were not going to be enough. I needed
23:58
an actual philosopher, so
24:00
I called Mark Cohen of the University
24:02
of Washington to get to the bottom
24:05
of the question of whether large groups
24:07
of rich white people possess on too logical
24:09
permanence. Here's an
24:11
argument that favors the space
24:13
EO temporal continuity theory.
24:16
The idea that what makes
24:18
the ship persists
24:20
through time as one and the same is
24:23
that it moves smoothly through space
24:25
time. One plank is removed
24:28
and thrown overboard, and a
24:30
replacement plank is installed taken
24:32
from the cargo the ship has on board, so
24:34
when it arrives it doesn't have a
24:36
single part that is identical
24:39
to any of the parts it started out with, and
24:41
so there's no point at which you can say, aha,
24:44
now we have a new ship, a different a numerically
24:46
different ship. So
24:48
that if you have that sort of argument
24:51
in mind, you think, okay, the Space Show
24:53
temporal continuity criterion is the correct
24:55
one. Forget about requiring that all the
24:57
parts are the same. But Cone
25:00
is not finished as a philosopher.
25:02
His job is to consider all the scenarios
25:05
raised by the ship of theseus conundrum, like
25:08
the museum count example. The museum
25:10
example goes like this. Suppose
25:12
the ship is
25:14
in a museum of ancient ships and
25:17
a gang of crooks is trying to steal this
25:19
ancient ship, and it realizes
25:22
it can't just haul it out in one
25:24
piece. They would easily be spotted. So
25:26
they come up with a clever scheme. They
25:28
sneak in every night and steal the ship,
25:31
one board at a time, one plank
25:33
a day, so the museum doesn't realize
25:35
what's going on. By the time they're finished
25:38
one day number n they have all
25:40
end parts of the ship removed. Now
25:43
they reassemble them and put it on
25:45
the black market. They're selling Theseus's
25:48
ancient ship for a pretty price,
25:51
and they've left a replica
25:53
behind in the museum. I
25:55
contend that in this case, when you describe
25:57
it in this way, it seems
26:00
as if Theseus's ship
26:02
has been stolen piecemeal from
26:04
the museum.
26:07
Cohen's point is that there's no sim will
26:09
answer to the ship of Theseus problem.
26:11
You can go around and around and around.
26:14
That's why it's a puzzle. But do
26:16
you see what the lawyers at the LA Board
26:18
of Equalization did. They just
26:20
waltz into a philosophical conundrum
26:23
that has bedeviled some of the best minds in the
26:25
world for two thousand years and
26:27
declare victory and say, oh, it's
26:29
definitely option one spatio temporal
26:31
continuity. The
26:36
problem as it stands is
26:39
irresolvable, and you
26:41
only come to a conclusion that makes any
26:43
sense to you if you
26:46
place it in a context
26:49
in which there is something sort
26:51
of extra metaphysical, something pragmatic,
26:55
that helps that tilts you in one
26:57
direction or the other. So what's the pragmatic,
27:00
extra metaphysical consideration here?
27:02
It's at Los Angeles ranks near the bottom
27:04
of all major metropolitan areas
27:07
in the United States. In terms of public parks,
27:10
there's Griffith Park off in the northeastern
27:12
corner of the city, which only a fraction of
27:14
the city can even get to. And then
27:17
there's basically nothing except
27:19
these massive golf courses which
27:21
are both closed to general public and
27:23
subsidized by the general public. Do
27:25
you want to know the size of that subsidy?
27:28
I asked around a guy I
27:30
know knows a guy who's a member of the La Country
27:32
Club. That guy's back of the envelope
27:34
calculation was that the club's land was
27:36
worth about six billion dollars. But
27:39
that was a couple of years ago. Then I heard
27:41
from another guy who said that they now think it's worth
27:43
nine billion, nine billion.
27:46
Under normal circumstances, the property
27:48
taxes on that much land would come to about
27:51
ninety million dollars a year. Do
27:54
you know what LA Country Club actually paid
27:56
after you add up the Bob Hope exemption and
27:58
the spatio temporal continuity ruling
28:01
two hundred thousand dollars give
28:03
or take all. Right, let's
28:06
do the math together. They
28:08
should be paying ninety million. In
28:10
fact, they're only paying two hundred
28:12
thousand dollars in property taxes. Ninety
28:15
millions two hundred thousand dollars is
28:17
eighty nine million, eight hundred thousand
28:19
dollars. That's how much the tax
28:22
bearers of Los Angeles subsidize one
28:24
of the swankiest country clubs
28:26
in the world every year. Well,
28:29
now I wanted to bring up something else that comes
28:31
to mind here, which is that the
28:34
spatial temporal argument, taken
28:37
out of philosophical context strikes
28:40
me as being can
28:42
sometimes be really troubling. For
28:45
example, it's a very I mean, I
28:47
think there's something fundamentally intuitive
28:49
about it. And I don't mean that necessarily
28:52
in a good way. That it you
28:54
know that we get the fact that we
28:57
call the Hudson River the Hudson
28:59
River, even though the Hudson River is
29:02
at every second changing.
29:05
It's like, you know, the water's up, the same boats
29:08
go down on it. You know, it's never that he never
29:10
looks the same way twice ever, But we continue
29:13
to call it the Hudson River. But
29:15
it strikes me that in a political
29:17
context, as kind of thinking can be
29:19
used to perpetuate inequality
29:22
and injustice. Interesting,
29:26
for example, what is the what is an aristocracy
29:28
but a political formulation of
29:30
the spatial temporal continuity
29:34
principle. Right, it is
29:36
something like that, and it's it's troubling
29:38
it precisely that way, because they're saying circumstances
29:42
can change, and the holders of the privilege
29:44
can change. The father can die and
29:46
the son can inherit the peerage, but
29:49
the peerage remains intact. It
29:52
has this quality that's independent of
29:54
all that's going around it. And that's yes.
29:58
Where where the identity of
30:00
the object confers, for example,
30:02
a right or a title, and
30:05
if it's considered to be held
30:07
intact and in full by
30:10
whoever holds it at any one time, then
30:13
basically that removes
30:15
change altogether from the realm
30:17
of what matters as far as ownership
30:21
is concerned. Yes, so
30:24
the seventeenth great grandson
30:26
of the peer still has all of the rights
30:28
and privileges, even though so
30:30
far removed from the rights
30:33
and privileges as they attached to
30:35
the original holder of them.
30:38
So there is there is something that is
30:40
unfair and anti egalitarian
30:43
about the way this principle can get
30:46
applied. So
30:50
the golf clubs of Los Angeles are
30:53
essentially aristocratic institutions
30:57
exactly. I
31:03
think someone needs to tell Bromwood in La
31:05
Country Club and all the others that
31:07
if they want to hold space she owed temporal
31:10
continuity privileges, they have to
31:12
give something back. Take down
31:14
your barbed wire. Your members
31:16
can play golf on weekdays, but evenings
31:19
and weekends belong to the ordinary
31:21
taxpayers of Los Angeles. Let
31:23
them come and enjoy the greens and fairways
31:26
that they've been subsidizing for generations.
31:29
It's worth remembering, by the way, that the most famous
31:31
golf course in the world, the home of golf,
31:34
Saint Andrews in Scotland, is open
31:36
to the general public on Sundays. In
31:38
Toronto, the fanciest golf club is
31:41
Rosedale Country Club, right in
31:43
the middle of the city, but the golf course
31:45
is only private in summer. The
31:47
rest of the time it's open to anyone
31:49
who wants to go for a walk, or play frisbee,
31:52
or go cross country skiing. Canada
31:55
and the United Kingdom, i would point out, are
31:57
governed by a queen. They have an actual
32:00
aristocracy, but somehow
32:02
they've figured out a way to have their fancy
32:04
golf courses be democratic. It's
32:07
only on the corner of sen the sen day in
32:09
burling game that golf remains an instrument
32:12
of medieval privilege. I
32:14
mean when you fly over LA,
32:17
the green space that you see is cemeteries
32:20
and golf courses and golf courses. You don't see
32:22
parks. We don't have a park like say
32:25
San Francisco's Golden Gate Park or New
32:27
York's Central Parks Central Park.
32:30
Guys, Doc and I are standing outside the barbed wire
32:32
or Brownwood Country Club, peering
32:34
through a fence. We're trying to spot
32:36
one of the privileged few permitted a walk
32:38
in the park on the west side of LA. I see
32:41
one, guy, I
32:44
see one. That's
32:46
unbelievable. It's a Saturday afternoon. Sun is
32:48
now coming out, like
32:51
right now. We're standing on the running
32:53
track and there's someone
32:55
running up right now. There are more people
32:57
on this narrow dirt
32:59
track than there are typically
33:02
on the golf course. Let see if you
33:04
can still see any kind of I'm
33:08
still looking for a golf off. I'm
33:10
not I see one. You see
33:12
one? Yeah, that's very exciting.
33:15
Yeah, next
33:18
time I'm climbing defense, maybe
33:22
we all should. Origion's
33:39
History is produced by Meila Bell and Jacob Smith,
33:41
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,
33:43
and Clmr Martinez, wife our
33:46
editor is Julia Barton. Flawn
33:48
Williams is our engineer. Original
33:50
music by Luis Guerra. Special
33:52
thanks to Andy Bowers and my old
33:54
pal Jacob Weisberg. At Panoply,
33:58
I'm Malcolm Bradwell.
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