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A Good Walk Spoiled · Revisionist History

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