June 15, 2017 • 34 mins
Rich people and their addiction to golf: a philosophical investigation.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin. I have a friend who lives in Brentwood, on
the west side of Los Angeles, between Beverly Hills and
Santa Monica. He is a little pool house in his
backyard and I stay there whenever I come to LA,
kind of like cato'kalon if your memory for O. J.
Simpson Esoterica goes back that far. Anyway, my friend's street
(00:39):
dead ends on San Vicente Boulevard, one of the central
east west corridors in LA. And on the other side
of San Vicente is this absolutely gorgeous golf course, one
of the many private country clubs that LA is famous for.
If you drive down Wilshire Boulevard into Beverly Hills, ten
minutes east of Brentwood, you go right past Los Angeles
(01:00):
Country Club, which costs maybe a quarter of a million
dollars just to join. That is, if they'll even consider
your application. There's bel Air Country Club just north of Ucla,
which might be the most beautiful golf course in the country,
Hillcrest offf Pico, Wilshire country Club in Hancock Park. I
could go on. They're everywhere, vast, gorgeous and private. The
(01:27):
one near my friend's house is called Brentwood country Club
and it has a tall chain link fence around it
which goes almost all the way out to the street,
leaving just this narrow, rocky dirt track. There's no sidewalk,
and since there aren't a lot of places to run
in Los Angeles, tons of people run around the Brentwood
Country Club on that narrow dirt track. And there's one
(01:53):
thing that always bothers me every time I run that route.
Why do all the runners of West Los Angeles have
to squeeze into this narrow, rocky little track when there's
a huge, magnificent park just on the other side of
the fence. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, and you're listening
to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
(02:21):
This episode is about the problem with golf. I hate
golf and hopefully by the end of this you'll hate
golf too. I'm standing here would Die day Zac, who
is a very successful landscape architect Santa Monica, and we're
(02:45):
on the corner of Sanma Sente and Berlin Game and
we're looking into the Brentwood Country Club and the first
thing I see is barbed wire.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Looks like a couple of layers of barbed wire.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
This looks like it looks like the Berlin Wall.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
It like they want us to get in there.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Are you what are we seeing? We're seeing this. Move
a little closer here. What's that stand up trees? Do
you know what those are?
Speaker 2 (03:09):
That looks like silk oaks in the foreground? And then
I see a Sadris theodora, quite lovely. Lots of larger trees,
which are unusual in Los Angeles because there's so little
open space. Yeah, there's some piness. Canariensis looks like a
redwood in there.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I don't think Daezak has ever played a round of
golf in her life. That's exactly why I wanted her opinion.
I wanted someone objective to tell me what it would
take to turn this place into a park.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Well, first of all, I would get rid of the
two layers.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Of bark wire. Were the whole Eastern European feel east,
Your German field would have to be corrected.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
I mean that might be some people's bag, but it's
not very welcoming.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
The typical golf course is two hundred acres, give or take.
That's a lot of land. You have to landscape. It,
mow it, drench it, and pesticides keep this sand traps perfect.
I read somewhere that when a fancy golf course rebuilds
its bunkers, it typically takes about three hundred and eighty
nine truckloads of sand three hundred and eighty nine just
(04:21):
to keep everything nice and white and fluffy. But at
the same time, because golf involves launching a potentially lethal
projectile at great speeds across enormous distances, you have to
severely limit the number of people on the course at
any one time. Typically, a good private course can handle
no more than seventy two golfers at once. So that's
(04:42):
one golfer per one hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred
and thirty three square feet. Can you imagine if basketball
had the same population density as golf. I did the math.
If basketball was played according to the geographical requirements of golf,
a basketball court would be thirty acres. Picture that that
had to play on motorcycles. Okay, another fact about golf.
(05:09):
Rich people really really like it. They're obsessed with it
in a way that there just isn't any parallel for
ordinary people. Because serious golfers are super anal about their scores.
We can actually quantify their obsession in order to calculate
their handicap, basically how well they're playing relative to other
people at the country club. They all post their results
(05:30):
on a database maintained by the United States Golf Association.
So we have a record, and it's a gold mine.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
To be able to calculate your handicap and track it
through time. You will log into the system either at
your course or on your home computer.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
I'm talking to an economist at Miami University named Lee
bigger Staff. He's interested in the habits of top corporate executives.
If you have the corner office and a multimillion dollar
stock option and a golf stream five, does that make
you more or less likely to put in a hard
day's work. The USGA database is of serious professional interest
(06:06):
to a guy like bigger Staff.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
And you input you played and what day you played on,
and what your score was, and you know, after a
certain number of rounds being played, the USGA will indicate
what your handicap is, your level of skill, which allows
you to compete against other golfers of different skill level
and kind of normalize against that.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
You know, how you always hear that CEOs play a
lot of golf. Bigger Staff's insight is that the USGA
database allows us to know exactly how much they play.
All you need to do is cross reference that list
of scores with a list of the CEOs of America's
largest companies. So that's what he does. It takes forever,
by the way.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
We started while as a PhD student, and so this
certainly was a multi month process. So it's not something
that nine issy want to repeat in the near term
just because it took a lot of collection time.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
There, how can you not love this? Surely this is
why God invented graduate students. Bigger Staff begins with the
names of the heads the top fifteen hundred publicly held
companies in the US. Three hundred and sixty three of
those fifteen hundred turn out to be I'm so obsessed
with golf that they enter their scores into the USGA database.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
What you're seeing, on average is, I think fifteen rounds
a year is kind of the average CEO is playing
that amount of golf. But it's a heavily skewed distribution, right,
So we have a lot of people that are playing
very little golf, and then we have a tail where
we're picking it up. The top quartile we're looking at,
which is twenty two or more rounds per year, And.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
If you go to the top ten percent of Bigger
Staff sample, the CEOs are playing around at least thirty
seven times a year. A round of golf is a
good four four and a half hours, So if you
play thirty seven times a year, that's more than one
hundred and sixty hours on the course, the equivalent of
(07:52):
five and a half weeks of work. By the way,
these are understatements. They don't include the time spent driving
to the course, warming up, getting changed, having a drink.
Doesn't include the hours spent practicing shots on the putting
green or the driving range, or all the rounds you
play that you don't enter into the database, like if
you're only playing nine holes or playing a fun round,
(08:14):
so the real time is probably way higher. Bigger Staff
then goes on to show that the more golf of
CEO plays, the worse his firm does, and also that
the more golf of CEO plays, the more likely he
is to be fired. In other words, this isn't a
harmless habit, it's a dangerous habit. Remember the Wall Street
(08:34):
investment bank bear Stearns. They went bankrupt during the mortgage
crisis in July of two thousand and seven, Right when
the crisis was beginning. The CEO of bear Stearns would
often helicopter out from Wall Street on Friday afternoons to
his exclusive course in New Jersey to get a round
in before sunset. Even when his company was collapsing, he
(08:55):
couldn't stop playing golf. Out of President Donald Trump's first
four months in office, he visited his own golf courses
twenty five times. One week he played three times. You
would think he would be at the office learning how
to be president, reading intelligence briefings, drading the swamp. No,
he's golfing. It's an addiction, right, because the definition of
(09:17):
an addiction is a self destructive habit. Just think if
I said to you that an important employee of a
major organization made lifestyle choices that caused him to miss
enormous amounts of work, harm his performance, and put his
own career in jeopardy, you would say, WHOA, check that
guy into rehab. That's golf crack cocaine for rich white guys.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
The highest in the sample one hundred and forty six
or one hundred and forty eight rounds recorded in a
single year, which I mean that at that point, that's
a tremendous amount of time spent on the golf course.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
You thought I was engaging in hyperbole, didn't you that
I was using the word addiction metaphorically? One hundred and
forty eight rounds a year is a round of golf
every three days.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
And that would be if it was kind of uniformly
distributed across the year. It's you know, GoF certainly has
a season where it's a little bit more dents in
terms of the summer versus the winner.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
And you can't tell me what company it is. I
want to know what company it is.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Yeah, we're just with this data, given it somewhat sensitive,
we're unwilling to name out CEOs.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
I can't believe you won't tell me. I mean, here,
we have an activity that is incredibly expensive, that is
organized in just about the most extravagant manner possible, and
at the same time, this expensive habit is incredibly addictive,
to the point that there's a chief executive out there
of a major American corporation who plays an average of
one hundred and forty eight rounds of golf a year
(10:48):
and is so completely unself conscious about that fact that
he posts all one hundred and forty eight rounds on
a public database where it can be analyzed by graduate students.
So what happens to rich white guys with a dangerous,
costly obsession. Do they burn through their life savings paying
for their addiction like ordinary addicts do? Please give them
(11:08):
a little more respect.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
By the way, this is my fifteenth year in television.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
Imagine that fifteen years of me.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
The longest stomach test in the history of show.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Of everyone, you could argue, I would say in the
forties and fifties there was no one who was more
widely popular in America than Bob Hope.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
I'm talking to Richard Saglan, Bob Hope's biographer. I think
Bob Hope has been a little forgotten in recent years,
but in his day he was huge.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Every late night comedian who does a stand up monologue
at the beginning of the show owes a debt to
Bob Hope because he kind of invented that thing, a
stand up comedy monologue that sort of took note of
what was going on in the world, what was going
on in Hollywood, what was going on everywhere, and he
was just the voice of America. I think for a
long time.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Bob Hope is a crucial part of the story of
golf in America, although I'm warning you things are going
to get a little complicated, which is sort of the point,
because you don't get to run the world for as
long as rich white guys have without being pretty wily,
and some of their best and wiliest work has been
on the golf course. So there's a principal and property
(12:22):
tax law called highest and best use, which is that
one of the ways you figure out how much to
tax a piece of property is to estimate what its
best use might be. For example, if I have a
one acre plot and the fanciest part of Manhattan that
I used to grow vegetables, I can't say to the
city that land is worthless, it's just a vegetable garden. No,
(12:42):
the city's going to say we're going to value that
one acre and tax it as if it had an
apartment block on it, because that's the best use of
land in the fancy parts of Manhattan. Now, if you've
got a vast golf course in the middle of Beverly
Hills or Brentwood. Highest and best use makes you really
nervous because plainly, the highest and best use of land
(13:02):
in the middle of one of the most expensive and
densely populated cities in the world is not a private
golf course. So years ago, in nineteen sixty, California's country
clubs realize they have to act or they're going to
get taxed into oblivion. They get together and they propose
an amendment to the state constitution that permanently exempts them
(13:23):
from the highest and best use standard. They want their
vegetable garden to be taxed as a vegetable garden. If
you think about it, this is seriously audacious. Private golf
courses are these massive, opulent, gated playgrounds, and membership is
often restricted. In Los Angeles in nineteen sixty, a lot
(13:44):
of these clubs didn't let in Jews. They certainly didn't
let in black people except to work in the kitchen.
Yet they wanted a constitutional exemption to ordinary property taxes
like they were some kind of public amenity. How can
they argue this, They don't, not really. They just bring
in Bob Hope, who in addition to being the most
popular entertainer in America, is also an obsessive golfer. Obsessive
(14:09):
I might.
Speaker 5 (14:10):
As well level with you.
Speaker 6 (14:10):
I spent so much time in Sandtrap they sent me
citizenship papers from Saudi Arabia. Oh yeah, I love to
hear the whole.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Bob Hope once wrote an entire book just devoted to
his golf game, called Confessions of a Hooker, in which
he estimates that he had played on two thousand different
golf courses over the course of his life.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
He belonged to the Lakeside Country Club in La near
where he lived a life of the prestigiousstigious. I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
The genius at picking Bob Hope is the face of
California's country clubs is that his whole persona, his whole act,
was about being every man. He's self deprecating. Half his
jokes are about how he's not part of the inn group,
even though, of course there's no one more in than
Bob Hope.
Speaker 6 (14:56):
Isn't this wonderful love being here in California?
Speaker 2 (14:58):
I just love it. Look at that guy.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
That's the only place in the world where you can
get four seasons in one day.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
I want to tell you that this is.
Speaker 6 (15:05):
We better hurry. We'll be able to be snowing before
the third hole.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Let's move on.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Oh boy, So how did the Bob Hope for Golf
campaign do in nineteen sixty It wins. The proposition passes
and is added to Article thirteen of the California Constitution,
where it remains to this day. In order to win
a set of privileges for the very wealthy, in other words,
California's country clubs turn to a man who symbolizes the
(15:32):
common man. I mean, when does it ever happen that
a TV celebrity wins a sweetheart deal for his rich
golf buddies by posing as a friend of the common man.
If you get my drift to give me back, just like,
totally understand Prop thirteen property has passed in nineteen seventy eight,
(15:55):
and what are the principal stipulations of the proposition. I'm
in a big conference room in the Los Angeles County
Municipal building, one of those beautiful nineteen thirties office buildings
that are all over downtown Las Ane Angels. There are
four people on the other side of the table. They're
from the La County tax Assessor's office. I'm on my
(16:16):
quest to figure out why Brentwood Country Club isn't just
a big park that I can go running through, and
I've decided to start the people who run the tax system.
These are serious folks, deliberate, thoughtful. They have promised to
help me. You'll have to guess what they really think.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
The tax rate is set is one percent of the value,
as opposed to a variable rate, which it was before.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
The man speaking is Brian Donnelly. He's talking about the
most famous amendment to the California Constitution, Proposition thirteen.
Speaker 5 (16:48):
The properties only get reassessed with when there's a transfer
or a change of ownership, or there's new construction. Those
are the primary parts of it.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Here's what he's saying. If you own a house, every
one or two years, typically the value of your property
is reassessed by the city or county where you live.
So if your house doubles in value, the local government
will raise your taxes accordingly. That's the way property taxes work,
except in California. Proposition thirteen said that for tax purposes,
(17:18):
the value of any piece of property in California is
frozen at pre nineteen seventy eight levels, and the only
way that property can be reassessed at its real current
value is if the property is sold, or, to be
more specific, if ownership of more than fifty percent of
the property changes hands. In other words, California has two
(17:40):
kinds of taxpayers, the post nineteen seventy eight people who
pay normal property taxes, and the people lucky and old
enough to be living in the same house they owned
in nineteen seventy eight, who pay a tiny fraction of
their fair share.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
You know, I've got family members who've owned their house
in nineteen sixty nine and they're paying I think their
tax will value is about ninety thousand dollars or something
like that. The houses in that neighborhood sell for six hundred,
so they're paying a lot less than It's the properteen conundrum,
which I'm sure you've read about.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Please understand, this system is insane, totally crazy. I mean,
just think of all the reasons why someone might deserve
a big tax break. I mean, they're sick, they're poor,
they have tons of young kids, they've made a big
investment in their business. The state of California says, no,
we think the most deserving group are people whose property
(18:36):
hasn't changed hands in forty years. Okay, now imagine that
you're a private golf club. You did that spectacular bit
of jiu jitsu with Bob Hope in nineteen sixty, which
means that you don't pay real property taxes. Gift from
God number one. Then comes proposition thirteen, and you get
a second gift from God because proposition thirteen says that
(19:00):
those already artificially low property taxes are now frozen forever
at nineteen seventy eight levels, so long as your country
club does not change hands. And that last part is
crucial because if you have a change in ownership, then
you have to pay real property tax like every other
(19:20):
long suffering California taxpayer who hasn't been in one place
since nineteen seventy eight. So the country clubs of Los
Angeles all hang by a thread. They continue to exist
only so long as the tax system perceives that they
have not changed hands. And for years everyone assumes they
(19:42):
haven't changed hands. I mean Brentwood, LA country Club, Wiltshire.
All the major golf clubs were all founded before nineteen
seventy eight, but then a neighborhood newspaper called the Los
Angeles Garment and Citizen runs an article January sixteenth, twenty ten,
in which they say, wait a minute, most private country
(20:05):
clubs in Los Angeles have what's called equity ownership. They're
owned by their members. When you admit it, you get
a share. When you die or quit, someone else takes
your share. So over time, if enough members die or quit,
isn't that a change in ownership. That question was put
to Rick Auerbach, who was then the head of tax
(20:25):
assessment for La County.
Speaker 5 (20:27):
I think the quote was kind of funny for me.
You said something about, let's see, on most issues we
haven't heard at least the question asked before. He said
he'd worked in the office thirty nine years, but this
was a new one.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
So hour Back refers the question to the city's lawyers.
They put their best and brightest legal minds on it
for six months, and on June second, twenty ten, the
County's tax court issues a solemn, four page ruling. They conclude,
no country clubs haven't changed hands. If you're keeping track,
(20:56):
that's the third straight up gift from God that LA's
private country clubs have gotten in the last fifty years.
I was talking to someone who's a member of Bella
Country Clubs and I said, what percentage of the members
of bel Air today? We're members in seventy eight and
he said, you know, ten percent? So why isn't that
a change of ownership?
Speaker 5 (21:17):
Right? If I haven't had a chance to dig through
this a whole lot since I got it out of
the file the other day. But they kind of get
into it. It's they're saying, if there's no one event
that is that is more than fifty percent of a transfer,
then it's not. Each of those little individual slices are
not a change of ownership on their own.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Did you find that argument plausible? Well, yeah, that's that's.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
We were implementers of the law.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
You don't have opinions? No, Well no, I could swear
as I looked across the table at Donnelly and his
cohorts that they were twitching like they desperately wanted to
say something but had to bite their tongue. You know
what it's like. You know that famous paradox I forgot
with the ship. Well, you the question is if you
(22:06):
change if you have a ship and you change a sex.
Some ancient think and you change one board at a time.
Is at the end of the day, is a ship different?
That's what this is. The thing I can't remember is
a ship of theseus? The famous thought experiment described by
the Greek philosopher Plutarch roughly two thousand years ago. Plutarch says,
(22:28):
imagine theseus is sailing on a ship, and one by
one he replaces every one of the original planks that
make up that ship with a new plank, until every
single piece of the ship is new. The question is,
when theseus reaches shore, is he sailing on the same
ship as he was when he left or a new ship.
One view says it's a new ship. This is called
(22:50):
the myriological theory of identity. The identity of something is
the sum of its component parts. Change the parts, you
change the thing. On the other side of the argument
is something called spatio temporal continuity theory, which says that
an object can maintain its identity so long as the
chain is gradual and the form or shape of the
(23:12):
object is preserved to the changes of its component materials.
I think you can see where I'm going with this.
The city's lawyers take a second view. So long as
a country club replaces its rich white guys gradually, and
so long as each new rich white guy preserves the
form and shape of the rich white guy he is replacing,
(23:33):
then the private golf clubs of today must have the
same existential status as the private golf courses of nineteen
seventy eight. Collections of rich white guys, from the standpoint
of the La County property tax system, possess spatio temporal continuity.
At this point I realized I was in way over
(23:54):
my head. Tax assessors were not going to be enough.
I needed an actual philosopher, so I called Mark Cohen
of the University of Washington to get to the bottom
of the question of whether large groups of rich white
people possess onto life logical permanence.
Speaker 6 (24:11):
Here's an argument that favors the spaciotemporal continuity theory. The
idea that what makes the ship persist through time as
one and the same is that it moves smoothly through
space time. One plank is removed and thrown overboard, and
a replacement plank is installed taken from the cargo the
(24:33):
ship has on board, so when it arrives it doesn't
have a single part that is identical to any of
the parts that started out with, and so there's no
point at which you can say, aha, now we have
a new ship, a different a numerically different ship. So
that if you have that sort of argument in mind,
you think, okay, the Space Show temporal continuity criterion is
(24:55):
the correct one. Forget about requiring that all the parts
are the same.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
But Con is not finished as a philosopher. His job
is to consider all the scenarios raised by the ship
of THESEUS conundrum, like the museum counter example.
Speaker 6 (25:09):
The museum example goes like this. Suppose the ship is
in a museum of ancient ships and a gang of
crooks is trying to steal this ancient ship, and it
realizes it can't just haul it out in one piece.
They would easily be spotted. So they come up with
a clever scheme.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
They sneak in every night and steal the ship, one
board at a time, one plank a day, so the
museum doesn't realize what's going on.
Speaker 6 (25:36):
By the time they're finished on day number an, they
have all end parts of the ship removed. Now they
reassemble them and put it on the black market. They're
selling theseus's ancient ship for a pretty price, and they've
left a replica behind in the museum. I contend that
in this case, when you describe it in this way,
(25:59):
it seems as if Theseus's ship has been stolen piecemeal
from the museum.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Cohen's point is that there's no simple answer to the
ship of Theseus problem. You can go around and around
and around. That's why it's a puzzle. But do you
see what the lawyers at the LA Board of Equalization did.
They just waltz into a philosophical conundrum that has bedeviled
some of the best minds in the world for two
thousand years and declare victory and say, oh, it's definitely
(26:30):
option one spatio temporal continuity.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
The problem as it stands is irresolvable, and you only
come to a conclusion that makes any sense to you
if you place it in a context in which there
is something sort of extra metaphysical, something pragmatic, that helps
that tilts you in one direction or the other.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
So what's the pragmatic, extra metaphysical consideration here? It's at
Los Angeles ranks near the bottom of all major metropolitan
areas in the United States in terms of public parks.
There's Griffith Park off in the northeastern corner of the city,
which only a fraction of the city can even get to.
And then there's basically nothing except these massive golf courses
(27:20):
which are both closed to the general public and subsidized
by the general public. Do you want to know the
size of that subsidy? I asked around a guy I
know knows a guy who's a member of the La
Country Club. That guy's back of the envelope calculation was
that the club's land was worth about six billion dollars.
But that was a couple years ago. Then I heard
(27:41):
from another guy who said that they now think it's
worth nine billion, nine billion. Under normal circumstances, the property
taxes on that much land would come to about ninety
million dollars a year. Do you know what LA Country
Club actually paid after you add up the Bob Hope
exemption and the Spatio temporal continuity ruling two hundred thousand
(28:02):
dollars give or take all. Right, let's do the math together.
They should be paying ninety million. In fact, they're only
paying two hundred thousand dollars in property taxes ninety million
minus two hundred thousand dollars is eighty nine million, eight
hundred thousand dollars. That's how much the tax bearers of
Los Angeles subsidize one of the swankiest country clubs in
(28:26):
the world every year. Well, now I wander to bring
up something else that comes to mind here, which is
that the spatial temporal argument, taken out of philosophical context,
strikes me as being can sometimes be really troubling. For example,
it's a very I mean, I think there's something fundamentally
(28:49):
intuitive about it. And I don't mean that necessarily in
a good way. That it you know, that we get
the fact that we call the Hudson River the Hudson River,
even though the Hudson River is at every second changing.
It's like, you know, the water's up, the same boats
go down on it. You know, it's never that he
(29:10):
never looks the same way twice ever. But we continue
to call it the Hudson River. But it strikes me
that in a political context, as kind of thinking can
be used to perpetuate inequality and injustice.
Speaker 6 (29:24):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
For example, what is the what is an aristocracy but
a political formulation of the spatial temporal continuity principle? Right?
Speaker 6 (29:36):
It is something like that, and it's.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
It's troubling it precisely that way, because they're saying circumstances
can change, and the holders of the privilege can change.
The father can die and the son can inherit the peerage,
but the peerage remains intact. It has this quality that's
independent of all that's going around it.
Speaker 6 (29:56):
And that's yes, where there where the identity of the
object confers, for example, a right or a title, and
if it's considered to be held intact and in by
whoever holds it at any one time, then basically that
removes change altogether from the realm of what matters as
(30:19):
far as as ownership is concerned. Yes, so the seventeenth
great grandson of the peer still has all of the
rights and privileges, even though so far removed from the
rights and privileges as they attached to the original holder
of them. So there is something that is unfair and
(30:41):
anti egalitarian about the way this principle can get applied.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
So the golf clubs of Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic
institutions exactly. I think someone needs to tell Brimwood and
La Country Club and all the others that if they
want to hold space, temporal continuity privileges, they have to
(31:12):
give something back. Take down your barbed wire. Your members
can play golf on weekdays, but evenings and weekends belong
to the ordinary taxpayers of Los Angeles. Let them come
and enjoy the greens and fairways that they've been subsidizing
for generations. It's worth remembering, by the way, that the
most famous golf course in the world, the home of golf,
(31:34):
Saint Andrews in Scotland, is open to the general public
on Sundays. In Toronto, the fanciest golf club is Rosedale
Country Club, right in the middle of the city, but
the golf course is only private in summer. The rest
of the time it's open to anyone who wants to
go for a walk, or play frisbee, or go cross
country skiing. Canada and the United Kingdom, i would point out,
(31:57):
are governed by a queen. They have an actual aristocracy,
but somehow they've figured out a way to have their
fancy golf courses be democratic. It's only on the corner
of the sena day in Berlin game that golf remains
an instrument of medieval privilege.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
I mean, when you fly over LA. The green space
that you see is cemeteries and golf courses.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
And golf courses.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
You don't see parks. We don't have a park like
say San Francisco's Golden Gate Park or New York's Central Park,
Central Park.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
Day.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Doc and I are standing outside the barbed wire or
Brentwood Country Club, peering through a fence. We're trying to
spot one of the privileged few permitted a walk in
the park on the west side of LA.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I see one, guy, I see one.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
That's unbelievable. It's a Saturday afternoon. Sun is now coming
out yep. Like right now, we're standing on the running
track and there's someone running up there. Now, there are
more people on this narrow dirt track than there are
typically on the golf course. You see if you can
still see any kind of I'm still looking for a
(33:08):
golf I'm not.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Oh, I see one.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
You see one?
Speaker 4 (33:12):
Yeah, that's very exciting.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah, next time I'm climbing the fence. Maybe we all should.
(33:38):
Original's History is produced by me LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Ciamara Martinez wife. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Flond Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Guerra. A special thanks to Andy Bauers
and my old pal Jacob Weisberg at Panathley.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
I'm out in Battlo
Bushkin. I have a friend who lives in Brentwood, on
the west side of Los Angeles, between Beverly Hills and
Santa Monica. He is a little pool house in his
backyard and I stay there whenever I come to LA,
kind of like cato'kalon if your memory for O. J.
Simpson Esoterica goes back that far. Anyway, my friend's street
(00:39):
dead ends on San Vicente Boulevard, one of the central
east west corridors in LA. And on the other side
of San Vicente is this absolutely gorgeous golf course, one
of the many private country clubs that LA is famous for.
If you drive down Wilshire Boulevard into Beverly Hills, ten
minutes east of Brentwood, you go right past Los Angeles
(01:00):
Country Club, which costs maybe a quarter of a million
dollars just to join. That is, if they'll even consider
your application. There's bel Air Country Club just north of Ucla,
which might be the most beautiful golf course in the country,
Hillcrest offf Pico, Wilshire country Club in Hancock Park. I
could go on. They're everywhere, vast, gorgeous and private. The
(01:27):
one near my friend's house is called Brentwood country Club
and it has a tall chain link fence around it
which goes almost all the way out to the street,
leaving just this narrow, rocky dirt track. There's no sidewalk,
and since there aren't a lot of places to run
in Los Angeles, tons of people run around the Brentwood
Country Club on that narrow dirt track. And there's one
(01:53):
thing that always bothers me every time I run that route.
Why do all the runners of West Los Angeles have
to squeeze into this narrow, rocky little track when there's
a huge, magnificent park just on the other side of
the fence. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, and you're listening
to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
(02:21):
This episode is about the problem with golf. I hate
golf and hopefully by the end of this you'll hate
golf too. I'm standing here would Die day Zac, who
is a very successful landscape architect Santa Monica, and we're
(02:45):
on the corner of Sanma Sente and Berlin Game and
we're looking into the Brentwood Country Club and the first
thing I see is barbed wire.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Looks like a couple of layers of barbed wire.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
This looks like it looks like the Berlin Wall.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
It like they want us to get in there.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Are you what are we seeing? We're seeing this. Move
a little closer here. What's that stand up trees? Do
you know what those are?
Speaker 2 (03:09):
That looks like silk oaks in the foreground? And then
I see a Sadris theodora, quite lovely. Lots of larger trees,
which are unusual in Los Angeles because there's so little
open space. Yeah, there's some piness. Canariensis looks like a
redwood in there.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I don't think Daezak has ever played a round of
golf in her life. That's exactly why I wanted her opinion.
I wanted someone objective to tell me what it would
take to turn this place into a park.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Well, first of all, I would get rid of the
two layers.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Of bark wire. Were the whole Eastern European feel east,
Your German field would have to be corrected.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
I mean that might be some people's bag, but it's
not very welcoming.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
The typical golf course is two hundred acres, give or take.
That's a lot of land. You have to landscape. It,
mow it, drench it, and pesticides keep this sand traps perfect.
I read somewhere that when a fancy golf course rebuilds
its bunkers, it typically takes about three hundred and eighty
nine truckloads of sand three hundred and eighty nine just
(04:21):
to keep everything nice and white and fluffy. But at
the same time, because golf involves launching a potentially lethal
projectile at great speeds across enormous distances, you have to
severely limit the number of people on the course at
any one time. Typically, a good private course can handle
no more than seventy two golfers at once. So that's
(04:42):
one golfer per one hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred
and thirty three square feet. Can you imagine if basketball
had the same population density as golf. I did the math.
If basketball was played according to the geographical requirements of golf,
a basketball court would be thirty acres. Picture that that
had to play on motorcycles. Okay, another fact about golf.
(05:09):
Rich people really really like it. They're obsessed with it
in a way that there just isn't any parallel for
ordinary people. Because serious golfers are super anal about their scores.
We can actually quantify their obsession in order to calculate
their handicap, basically how well they're playing relative to other
people at the country club. They all post their results
(05:30):
on a database maintained by the United States Golf Association.
So we have a record, and it's a gold mine.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
To be able to calculate your handicap and track it
through time. You will log into the system either at
your course or on your home computer.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
I'm talking to an economist at Miami University named Lee
bigger Staff. He's interested in the habits of top corporate executives.
If you have the corner office and a multimillion dollar
stock option and a golf stream five, does that make
you more or less likely to put in a hard
day's work. The USGA database is of serious professional interest
(06:06):
to a guy like bigger Staff.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
And you input you played and what day you played on,
and what your score was, and you know, after a
certain number of rounds being played, the USGA will indicate
what your handicap is, your level of skill, which allows
you to compete against other golfers of different skill level
and kind of normalize against that.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
You know, how you always hear that CEOs play a
lot of golf. Bigger Staff's insight is that the USGA
database allows us to know exactly how much they play.
All you need to do is cross reference that list
of scores with a list of the CEOs of America's
largest companies. So that's what he does. It takes forever,
by the way.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
We started while as a PhD student, and so this
certainly was a multi month process. So it's not something
that nine issy want to repeat in the near term
just because it took a lot of collection time.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
There, how can you not love this? Surely this is
why God invented graduate students. Bigger Staff begins with the
names of the heads the top fifteen hundred publicly held
companies in the US. Three hundred and sixty three of
those fifteen hundred turn out to be I'm so obsessed
with golf that they enter their scores into the USGA database.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
What you're seeing, on average is, I think fifteen rounds
a year is kind of the average CEO is playing
that amount of golf. But it's a heavily skewed distribution, right,
So we have a lot of people that are playing
very little golf, and then we have a tail where
we're picking it up. The top quartile we're looking at,
which is twenty two or more rounds per year, And.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
If you go to the top ten percent of Bigger
Staff sample, the CEOs are playing around at least thirty
seven times a year. A round of golf is a
good four four and a half hours, So if you
play thirty seven times a year, that's more than one
hundred and sixty hours on the course, the equivalent of
(07:52):
five and a half weeks of work. By the way,
these are understatements. They don't include the time spent driving
to the course, warming up, getting changed, having a drink.
Doesn't include the hours spent practicing shots on the putting
green or the driving range, or all the rounds you
play that you don't enter into the database, like if
you're only playing nine holes or playing a fun round,
(08:14):
so the real time is probably way higher. Bigger Staff
then goes on to show that the more golf of
CEO plays, the worse his firm does, and also that
the more golf of CEO plays, the more likely he
is to be fired. In other words, this isn't a
harmless habit, it's a dangerous habit. Remember the Wall Street
(08:34):
investment bank bear Stearns. They went bankrupt during the mortgage
crisis in July of two thousand and seven, Right when
the crisis was beginning. The CEO of bear Stearns would
often helicopter out from Wall Street on Friday afternoons to
his exclusive course in New Jersey to get a round
in before sunset. Even when his company was collapsing, he
(08:55):
couldn't stop playing golf. Out of President Donald Trump's first
four months in office, he visited his own golf courses
twenty five times. One week he played three times. You
would think he would be at the office learning how
to be president, reading intelligence briefings, drading the swamp. No,
he's golfing. It's an addiction, right, because the definition of
(09:17):
an addiction is a self destructive habit. Just think if
I said to you that an important employee of a
major organization made lifestyle choices that caused him to miss
enormous amounts of work, harm his performance, and put his
own career in jeopardy, you would say, WHOA, check that
guy into rehab. That's golf crack cocaine for rich white guys.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
The highest in the sample one hundred and forty six
or one hundred and forty eight rounds recorded in a
single year, which I mean that at that point, that's
a tremendous amount of time spent on the golf course.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
You thought I was engaging in hyperbole, didn't you that
I was using the word addiction metaphorically? One hundred and
forty eight rounds a year is a round of golf
every three days.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
And that would be if it was kind of uniformly
distributed across the year. It's you know, GoF certainly has
a season where it's a little bit more dents in
terms of the summer versus the winner.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
And you can't tell me what company it is. I
want to know what company it is.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Yeah, we're just with this data, given it somewhat sensitive,
we're unwilling to name out CEOs.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
I can't believe you won't tell me. I mean, here,
we have an activity that is incredibly expensive, that is
organized in just about the most extravagant manner possible, and
at the same time, this expensive habit is incredibly addictive,
to the point that there's a chief executive out there
of a major American corporation who plays an average of
one hundred and forty eight rounds of golf a year
(10:48):
and is so completely unself conscious about that fact that
he posts all one hundred and forty eight rounds on
a public database where it can be analyzed by graduate students.
So what happens to rich white guys with a dangerous,
costly obsession. Do they burn through their life savings paying
for their addiction like ordinary addicts do? Please give them
(11:08):
a little more respect.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
By the way, this is my fifteenth year in television.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
Imagine that fifteen years of me.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
The longest stomach test in the history of show.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Of everyone, you could argue, I would say in the
forties and fifties there was no one who was more
widely popular in America than Bob Hope.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
I'm talking to Richard Saglan, Bob Hope's biographer. I think
Bob Hope has been a little forgotten in recent years,
but in his day he was huge.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Every late night comedian who does a stand up monologue
at the beginning of the show owes a debt to
Bob Hope because he kind of invented that thing, a
stand up comedy monologue that sort of took note of
what was going on in the world, what was going
on in Hollywood, what was going on everywhere, and he
was just the voice of America. I think for a
long time.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Bob Hope is a crucial part of the story of
golf in America, although I'm warning you things are going
to get a little complicated, which is sort of the point,
because you don't get to run the world for as
long as rich white guys have without being pretty wily,
and some of their best and wiliest work has been
on the golf course. So there's a principal and property
(12:22):
tax law called highest and best use, which is that
one of the ways you figure out how much to
tax a piece of property is to estimate what its
best use might be. For example, if I have a
one acre plot and the fanciest part of Manhattan that
I used to grow vegetables, I can't say to the
city that land is worthless, it's just a vegetable garden. No,
(12:42):
the city's going to say we're going to value that
one acre and tax it as if it had an
apartment block on it, because that's the best use of
land in the fancy parts of Manhattan. Now, if you've
got a vast golf course in the middle of Beverly
Hills or Brentwood. Highest and best use makes you really
nervous because plainly, the highest and best use of land
(13:02):
in the middle of one of the most expensive and
densely populated cities in the world is not a private
golf course. So years ago, in nineteen sixty, California's country
clubs realize they have to act or they're going to
get taxed into oblivion. They get together and they propose
an amendment to the state constitution that permanently exempts them
(13:23):
from the highest and best use standard. They want their
vegetable garden to be taxed as a vegetable garden. If
you think about it, this is seriously audacious. Private golf
courses are these massive, opulent, gated playgrounds, and membership is
often restricted. In Los Angeles in nineteen sixty, a lot
(13:44):
of these clubs didn't let in Jews. They certainly didn't
let in black people except to work in the kitchen.
Yet they wanted a constitutional exemption to ordinary property taxes
like they were some kind of public amenity. How can
they argue this, They don't, not really. They just bring
in Bob Hope, who in addition to being the most
popular entertainer in America, is also an obsessive golfer. Obsessive
(14:09):
I might.
Speaker 5 (14:10):
As well level with you.
Speaker 6 (14:10):
I spent so much time in Sandtrap they sent me
citizenship papers from Saudi Arabia. Oh yeah, I love to
hear the whole.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Bob Hope once wrote an entire book just devoted to
his golf game, called Confessions of a Hooker, in which
he estimates that he had played on two thousand different
golf courses over the course of his life.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
He belonged to the Lakeside Country Club in La near
where he lived a life of the prestigiousstigious. I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
The genius at picking Bob Hope is the face of
California's country clubs is that his whole persona, his whole act,
was about being every man. He's self deprecating. Half his
jokes are about how he's not part of the inn group,
even though, of course there's no one more in than
Bob Hope.
Speaker 6 (14:56):
Isn't this wonderful love being here in California?
Speaker 2 (14:58):
I just love it. Look at that guy.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
That's the only place in the world where you can
get four seasons in one day.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
I want to tell you that this is.
Speaker 6 (15:05):
We better hurry. We'll be able to be snowing before
the third hole.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Let's move on.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Oh boy, So how did the Bob Hope for Golf
campaign do in nineteen sixty It wins. The proposition passes
and is added to Article thirteen of the California Constitution,
where it remains to this day. In order to win
a set of privileges for the very wealthy, in other words,
California's country clubs turn to a man who symbolizes the
(15:32):
common man. I mean, when does it ever happen that
a TV celebrity wins a sweetheart deal for his rich
golf buddies by posing as a friend of the common man.
If you get my drift to give me back, just like,
totally understand Prop thirteen property has passed in nineteen seventy eight,
(15:55):
and what are the principal stipulations of the proposition. I'm
in a big conference room in the Los Angeles County
Municipal building, one of those beautiful nineteen thirties office buildings
that are all over downtown Las Ane Angels. There are
four people on the other side of the table. They're
from the La County tax Assessor's office. I'm on my
(16:16):
quest to figure out why Brentwood Country Club isn't just
a big park that I can go running through, and
I've decided to start the people who run the tax system.
These are serious folks, deliberate, thoughtful. They have promised to
help me. You'll have to guess what they really think.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
The tax rate is set is one percent of the value,
as opposed to a variable rate, which it was before.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
The man speaking is Brian Donnelly. He's talking about the
most famous amendment to the California Constitution, Proposition thirteen.
Speaker 5 (16:48):
The properties only get reassessed with when there's a transfer
or a change of ownership, or there's new construction. Those
are the primary parts of it.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Here's what he's saying. If you own a house, every
one or two years, typically the value of your property
is reassessed by the city or county where you live.
So if your house doubles in value, the local government
will raise your taxes accordingly. That's the way property taxes work,
except in California. Proposition thirteen said that for tax purposes,
(17:18):
the value of any piece of property in California is
frozen at pre nineteen seventy eight levels, and the only
way that property can be reassessed at its real current
value is if the property is sold, or, to be
more specific, if ownership of more than fifty percent of
the property changes hands. In other words, California has two
(17:40):
kinds of taxpayers, the post nineteen seventy eight people who
pay normal property taxes, and the people lucky and old
enough to be living in the same house they owned
in nineteen seventy eight, who pay a tiny fraction of
their fair share.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
You know, I've got family members who've owned their house
in nineteen sixty nine and they're paying I think their
tax will value is about ninety thousand dollars or something
like that. The houses in that neighborhood sell for six hundred,
so they're paying a lot less than It's the properteen conundrum,
which I'm sure you've read about.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Please understand, this system is insane, totally crazy. I mean,
just think of all the reasons why someone might deserve
a big tax break. I mean, they're sick, they're poor,
they have tons of young kids, they've made a big
investment in their business. The state of California says, no,
we think the most deserving group are people whose property
(18:36):
hasn't changed hands in forty years. Okay, now imagine that
you're a private golf club. You did that spectacular bit
of jiu jitsu with Bob Hope in nineteen sixty, which
means that you don't pay real property taxes. Gift from
God number one. Then comes proposition thirteen, and you get
a second gift from God because proposition thirteen says that
(19:00):
those already artificially low property taxes are now frozen forever
at nineteen seventy eight levels, so long as your country
club does not change hands. And that last part is
crucial because if you have a change in ownership, then
you have to pay real property tax like every other
(19:20):
long suffering California taxpayer who hasn't been in one place
since nineteen seventy eight. So the country clubs of Los
Angeles all hang by a thread. They continue to exist
only so long as the tax system perceives that they
have not changed hands. And for years everyone assumes they
(19:42):
haven't changed hands. I mean Brentwood, LA country Club, Wiltshire.
All the major golf clubs were all founded before nineteen
seventy eight, but then a neighborhood newspaper called the Los
Angeles Garment and Citizen runs an article January sixteenth, twenty ten,
in which they say, wait a minute, most private country
(20:05):
clubs in Los Angeles have what's called equity ownership. They're
owned by their members. When you admit it, you get
a share. When you die or quit, someone else takes
your share. So over time, if enough members die or quit,
isn't that a change in ownership. That question was put
to Rick Auerbach, who was then the head of tax
(20:25):
assessment for La County.
Speaker 5 (20:27):
I think the quote was kind of funny for me.
You said something about, let's see, on most issues we
haven't heard at least the question asked before. He said
he'd worked in the office thirty nine years, but this
was a new one.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
So hour Back refers the question to the city's lawyers.
They put their best and brightest legal minds on it
for six months, and on June second, twenty ten, the
County's tax court issues a solemn, four page ruling. They conclude,
no country clubs haven't changed hands. If you're keeping track,
(20:56):
that's the third straight up gift from God that LA's
private country clubs have gotten in the last fifty years.
I was talking to someone who's a member of Bella
Country Clubs and I said, what percentage of the members
of bel Air today? We're members in seventy eight and
he said, you know, ten percent? So why isn't that
a change of ownership?
Speaker 5 (21:17):
Right? If I haven't had a chance to dig through
this a whole lot since I got it out of
the file the other day. But they kind of get
into it. It's they're saying, if there's no one event
that is that is more than fifty percent of a transfer,
then it's not. Each of those little individual slices are
not a change of ownership on their own.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Did you find that argument plausible? Well, yeah, that's that's.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
We were implementers of the law.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
You don't have opinions? No, Well no, I could swear
as I looked across the table at Donnelly and his
cohorts that they were twitching like they desperately wanted to
say something but had to bite their tongue. You know
what it's like. You know that famous paradox I forgot
with the ship. Well, you the question is if you
(22:06):
change if you have a ship and you change a sex.
Some ancient think and you change one board at a time.
Is at the end of the day, is a ship different?
That's what this is. The thing I can't remember is
a ship of theseus? The famous thought experiment described by
the Greek philosopher Plutarch roughly two thousand years ago. Plutarch says,
(22:28):
imagine theseus is sailing on a ship, and one by
one he replaces every one of the original planks that
make up that ship with a new plank, until every
single piece of the ship is new. The question is,
when theseus reaches shore, is he sailing on the same
ship as he was when he left or a new ship.
One view says it's a new ship. This is called
(22:50):
the myriological theory of identity. The identity of something is
the sum of its component parts. Change the parts, you
change the thing. On the other side of the argument
is something called spatio temporal continuity theory, which says that
an object can maintain its identity so long as the
chain is gradual and the form or shape of the
(23:12):
object is preserved to the changes of its component materials.
I think you can see where I'm going with this.
The city's lawyers take a second view. So long as
a country club replaces its rich white guys gradually, and
so long as each new rich white guy preserves the
form and shape of the rich white guy he is replacing,
(23:33):
then the private golf clubs of today must have the
same existential status as the private golf courses of nineteen
seventy eight. Collections of rich white guys, from the standpoint
of the La County property tax system, possess spatio temporal continuity.
At this point I realized I was in way over
(23:54):
my head. Tax assessors were not going to be enough.
I needed an actual philosopher, so I called Mark Cohen
of the University of Washington to get to the bottom
of the question of whether large groups of rich white
people possess onto life logical permanence.
Speaker 6 (24:11):
Here's an argument that favors the spaciotemporal continuity theory. The
idea that what makes the ship persist through time as
one and the same is that it moves smoothly through
space time. One plank is removed and thrown overboard, and
a replacement plank is installed taken from the cargo the
(24:33):
ship has on board, so when it arrives it doesn't
have a single part that is identical to any of
the parts that started out with, and so there's no
point at which you can say, aha, now we have
a new ship, a different a numerically different ship. So
that if you have that sort of argument in mind,
you think, okay, the Space Show temporal continuity criterion is
(24:55):
the correct one. Forget about requiring that all the parts
are the same.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
But Con is not finished as a philosopher. His job
is to consider all the scenarios raised by the ship
of THESEUS conundrum, like the museum counter example.
Speaker 6 (25:09):
The museum example goes like this. Suppose the ship is
in a museum of ancient ships and a gang of
crooks is trying to steal this ancient ship, and it
realizes it can't just haul it out in one piece.
They would easily be spotted. So they come up with
a clever scheme.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
They sneak in every night and steal the ship, one
board at a time, one plank a day, so the
museum doesn't realize what's going on.
Speaker 6 (25:36):
By the time they're finished on day number an, they
have all end parts of the ship removed. Now they
reassemble them and put it on the black market. They're
selling theseus's ancient ship for a pretty price, and they've
left a replica behind in the museum. I contend that
in this case, when you describe it in this way,
(25:59):
it seems as if Theseus's ship has been stolen piecemeal
from the museum.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Cohen's point is that there's no simple answer to the
ship of Theseus problem. You can go around and around
and around. That's why it's a puzzle. But do you
see what the lawyers at the LA Board of Equalization did.
They just waltz into a philosophical conundrum that has bedeviled
some of the best minds in the world for two
thousand years and declare victory and say, oh, it's definitely
(26:30):
option one spatio temporal continuity.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
The problem as it stands is irresolvable, and you only
come to a conclusion that makes any sense to you
if you place it in a context in which there
is something sort of extra metaphysical, something pragmatic, that helps
that tilts you in one direction or the other.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
So what's the pragmatic, extra metaphysical consideration here? It's at
Los Angeles ranks near the bottom of all major metropolitan
areas in the United States in terms of public parks.
There's Griffith Park off in the northeastern corner of the city,
which only a fraction of the city can even get to.
And then there's basically nothing except these massive golf courses
(27:20):
which are both closed to the general public and subsidized
by the general public. Do you want to know the
size of that subsidy? I asked around a guy I
know knows a guy who's a member of the La
Country Club. That guy's back of the envelope calculation was
that the club's land was worth about six billion dollars.
But that was a couple years ago. Then I heard
(27:41):
from another guy who said that they now think it's
worth nine billion, nine billion. Under normal circumstances, the property
taxes on that much land would come to about ninety
million dollars a year. Do you know what LA Country
Club actually paid after you add up the Bob Hope
exemption and the Spatio temporal continuity ruling two hundred thousand
(28:02):
dollars give or take all. Right, let's do the math together.
They should be paying ninety million. In fact, they're only
paying two hundred thousand dollars in property taxes ninety million
minus two hundred thousand dollars is eighty nine million, eight
hundred thousand dollars. That's how much the tax bearers of
Los Angeles subsidize one of the swankiest country clubs in
(28:26):
the world every year. Well, now I wander to bring
up something else that comes to mind here, which is
that the spatial temporal argument, taken out of philosophical context,
strikes me as being can sometimes be really troubling. For example,
it's a very I mean, I think there's something fundamentally
(28:49):
intuitive about it. And I don't mean that necessarily in
a good way. That it you know, that we get
the fact that we call the Hudson River the Hudson River,
even though the Hudson River is at every second changing.
It's like, you know, the water's up, the same boats
go down on it. You know, it's never that he
(29:10):
never looks the same way twice ever. But we continue
to call it the Hudson River. But it strikes me
that in a political context, as kind of thinking can
be used to perpetuate inequality and injustice.
Speaker 6 (29:24):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
For example, what is the what is an aristocracy but
a political formulation of the spatial temporal continuity principle? Right?
Speaker 6 (29:36):
It is something like that, and it's.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
It's troubling it precisely that way, because they're saying circumstances
can change, and the holders of the privilege can change.
The father can die and the son can inherit the peerage,
but the peerage remains intact. It has this quality that's
independent of all that's going around it.
Speaker 6 (29:56):
And that's yes, where there where the identity of the
object confers, for example, a right or a title, and
if it's considered to be held intact and in by
whoever holds it at any one time, then basically that
removes change altogether from the realm of what matters as
(30:19):
far as as ownership is concerned. Yes, so the seventeenth
great grandson of the peer still has all of the
rights and privileges, even though so far removed from the
rights and privileges as they attached to the original holder
of them. So there is something that is unfair and
(30:41):
anti egalitarian about the way this principle can get applied.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
So the golf clubs of Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic
institutions exactly. I think someone needs to tell Brimwood and
La Country Club and all the others that if they
want to hold space, temporal continuity privileges, they have to
(31:12):
give something back. Take down your barbed wire. Your members
can play golf on weekdays, but evenings and weekends belong
to the ordinary taxpayers of Los Angeles. Let them come
and enjoy the greens and fairways that they've been subsidizing
for generations. It's worth remembering, by the way, that the
most famous golf course in the world, the home of golf,
(31:34):
Saint Andrews in Scotland, is open to the general public
on Sundays. In Toronto, the fanciest golf club is Rosedale
Country Club, right in the middle of the city, but
the golf course is only private in summer. The rest
of the time it's open to anyone who wants to
go for a walk, or play frisbee, or go cross
country skiing. Canada and the United Kingdom, i would point out,
(31:57):
are governed by a queen. They have an actual aristocracy,
but somehow they've figured out a way to have their
fancy golf courses be democratic. It's only on the corner
of the sena day in Berlin game that golf remains
an instrument of medieval privilege.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
I mean, when you fly over LA. The green space
that you see is cemeteries and golf courses.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
And golf courses.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
You don't see parks. We don't have a park like
say San Francisco's Golden Gate Park or New York's Central Park,
Central Park.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
Day.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Doc and I are standing outside the barbed wire or
Brentwood Country Club, peering through a fence. We're trying to
spot one of the privileged few permitted a walk in
the park on the west side of LA.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I see one, guy, I see one.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
That's unbelievable. It's a Saturday afternoon. Sun is now coming
out yep. Like right now, we're standing on the running
track and there's someone running up there. Now, there are
more people on this narrow dirt track than there are
typically on the golf course. You see if you can
still see any kind of I'm still looking for a
(33:08):
golf I'm not.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Oh, I see one.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
You see one?
Speaker 4 (33:12):
Yeah, that's very exciting.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah, next time I'm climbing the fence. Maybe we all should.
(33:38):
Original's History is produced by me LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Ciamara Martinez wife. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Flond Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Guerra. A special thanks to Andy Bauers
and my old pal Jacob Weisberg at Panathley.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
I'm out in Battlo
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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