Speaker 1: Pushkin. Every writer lives in fear of one thing, that
Speaker 1: what they say won't matter. You toil away in obscurity.
Speaker 1: You scrub your prose until it's shiny and perfect. You
Speaker 1: put your work out for the world to see, and
Speaker 1: in the back of your mind is always a thought
Speaker 1: that all that effort will sink quietly into the sea,
Speaker 1: like a corpse witted down with concrete shoes. Have I
Speaker 1: had this fear? Oh? Yes, worse. I've seen it happen
Speaker 1: to me again and again. It was a time in
Speaker 1: my life when I was obsessed with the relative age effect,
Speaker 1: wrote about it, did episodes about it on this very podcast.
Speaker 1: You look at a room full of third graders or
Speaker 1: fifth graders and you say, Tommy is a poor student,
Speaker 1: Alice is a good one. But what if Alice was
Speaker 1: born in January and Tommy was born in December, And
Speaker 1: what looks like superior ability on Alice's part is actually
Speaker 1: just the fact that she's a year older than Tommy,
Speaker 1: and the year's extra maturity at the age of eight
Speaker 1: is a really, really big deal. I made this argument
Speaker 1: until I was horse And what did I want? I
Speaker 1: wanted elementary and middle schools to devedop their students by
Speaker 1: birth month, so the oldest kids would be in one
Speaker 1: class and those born in the middle months would be
Speaker 1: in another class, and the youngest kids would be in
Speaker 1: a class by themselves, and the playing field could be leveled.
Speaker 1: Did any school superintendent ever call me up and say,
Speaker 1: I love your idea. I've reorganized my kids by birth month.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: Never.
Speaker 1: My own daughter is going to kindergarten this fall, and
Speaker 1: some part of me wanted to ask her principal, can
Speaker 1: she be in a class with all the other kids
Speaker 1: born at the same time as her? But I didn't.
Speaker 1: And you know why, because I'm demoralized. Because this fixation
Speaker 1: of mine, this beautiful, radical, provocative idea that I put
Speaker 1: out into the world, sank quietly into the sea like
Speaker 1: a waited corpse. I had all but given up until,
Speaker 1: like an angel descending from heaven, became adrenarian Los Angeles
Speaker 1: City Council member and revisionist history listener. Thank you for doing.
Speaker 4: This, Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1: No no, so I was delighted to hear that you
Speaker 1: are the author, the instigator of a proposal to be
Speaker 1: put before the voters of Los Angeles.
Speaker 4: Well, you were the instigate.
Speaker 1: Well, I you know, I'm I was a provocateur. I
Speaker 1: just I just raise issues. Others have to make them
Speaker 1: actually happen. So I could you tell me straight? How
Speaker 1: did you did you? How did you come across my podcast?
Speaker 4: So one of my staff members brought this to my
Speaker 4: attention and said, you got to hear.
Speaker 1: This, council member, you got to hear this. And did
Speaker 1: he hear this? Oh?
Speaker 5: Yes he did.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Glabwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Later this week,
Speaker 1: we're going to be dropping the first of our epic
Speaker 1: five episode blockbuster, The Staten Island Problem. But before we do,
Speaker 1: as a little amuse bouosh, we're going to revisit one
Speaker 1: of my all time favorite episodes in the Revisionist History
Speaker 1: canon from ten years ago, A Good Walk Spoiled. I'm
Speaker 1: going to play it for you now in case you
Speaker 1: need a little refresher, and then I'm going to come
Speaker 1: back at the end and tell you how finally, a
Speaker 1: decade into Revisionist History, somebody listened. A friend who lives
Speaker 1: in Brentwood on the West side of Los Angeles between
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. He has a little pool
Speaker 1: house in his backyard and I stay there whenever I
Speaker 1: come to LA, kind of like Cato Kalon if your
Speaker 1: memory for O. J. Simpson Esoterica goes back that far. Anyway,
Speaker 1: my friend's street dead ends on San Vicente Boulevard, one
Speaker 1: of the central east west corridors in LA. And on
Speaker 1: the other side of San Vicente is this absolutely gorgeous
Speaker 1: golf course, one of the many private country clubs that
Speaker 1: LA is famous for. If you drive down Wilshire Boulevard
Speaker 1: into Beverly Hills, ten minutes east of Brentwood, you go
Speaker 1: right past Los Angeles Country Club, which costs maybe a
Speaker 1: quarter of a million dollars just to join, that is,
Speaker 1: if they'll even consider your application. There's bell Air Country
Speaker 1: Club just north of Ucla, which might be the most
Speaker 1: beautiful golf course in the country, Hillcrest offf Pico, Wilshire
Speaker 1: country Club, and Hancock. I could go on. They're everywhere, vast,
Speaker 1: gorgeous and private. The one near my friend's house is
Speaker 1: called Brentwood country Club, and it has a tall chain
Speaker 1: link fence around it which goes almost all the way
Speaker 1: out to the street, leaving just this narrow, rocky dirt track.
Speaker 1: There's no sidewalk, and since there aren't a lot of
Speaker 1: places to run in Los Angeles, tons of people run
Speaker 1: around the Brentwood country Club on that narrow dirt track.
Speaker 1: And there's one thing that always bothers me every time
Speaker 1: I run that route. Why do all the runners of
Speaker 1: West Los Angeles have to squeeze into this narrow, rocky
Speaker 1: little track when there's a huge, magnificent park just on
Speaker 1: the other side of the fence. My name is Malcolm Gladwell,
Speaker 1: and you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things
Speaker 1: Overlooked and Misunderstood. This episode is about the problem with golf.
Speaker 1: I hate golf and hopefully by the end of this
Speaker 1: you'll hate golf too. I'm standing here would die day Zac,
Speaker 1: who is a very successful landscape architect Santa Monica, and
Speaker 1: we're on the corner of Sana Cente in Berlin Game
Speaker 1: and we're looking into the Brentwood Country Club and the
Speaker 1: first thing I see is barbed wire.
Speaker 5: Looks like a couple of layers of barbed wire.
Speaker 1: This looks like it looks like the Berlin Wall.
Speaker 5: It's like they want us to get in there?
Speaker 1: Are you what are we seeing? We're seeing smooth. A
Speaker 1: little closer here, what's that stand up trees? Do you
Speaker 1: know what those are?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 5: That looks like silk oakes in the foreground. And then
Speaker 5: I see a sadrus theodora, quite lovely. Lots of larger trees,
Speaker 5: which are unusual unless angelists because there's so little open space.
Speaker 5: There's some piness. Canariensis looks like a redwood in there.
Speaker 1: I don't think Dayezac has ever played a round of
Speaker 1: golf in her life. That's exactly why I wanted her opinion.
Speaker 1: I wanted someone objective to tell me what it would
Speaker 1: take to turn this place into a park.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, I would get rid of the
Speaker 5: two layers of barter wire.
Speaker 1: Were the whole Eastern European feel east. Your German field
Speaker 1: would have to be corrected.
Speaker 5: I mean, that might be some people's bag, but it's
Speaker 5: not very welcoming.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The typical golf course is two hundred acres, give
Speaker 1: or take. There's a lot of land. You have to
Speaker 1: landscape it, mow it, drench it in pesticides, keep the
Speaker 1: sand traps perfect. I read somewhere that when a fancy
Speaker 1: golf course rebuilds its bunkers. It typically takes about three
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty nine truckloads of sand three hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty nine just to keep everything nice and white and fluffy.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, because golf involves launching a
Speaker 1: potentially lethal projectile at great speeds across enormous distances, you
Speaker 1: have to severely limit the number of people on the
Speaker 1: course at any one time. Typically, a good private course
Speaker 1: can handle no more than seventy two golfers at once.
Speaker 1: So that's one golfer per one hundred and twenty eight
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty three square feet. Can you imagine if
Speaker 1: basketball had the same population density as golf. I did
Speaker 1: the math. If basketball was played according to the geographical
Speaker 1: requirements of golf, a basketball court would be thirty acres.
Speaker 1: Picture that that had to play on motorcycles. Okay, another
Speaker 1: fact about golf. Rich people really really like it. They're
Speaker 1: obsessed with it in a way that there just isn't
Speaker 1: any parallel for ordinary people. Because serious golfers are souper
Speaker 1: anal about their scores, we can actually quantify their obsession
Speaker 1: in order to calculate their handicap. Basically how well they're
Speaker 1: playing relative to other people at the country club. They
Speaker 1: all post their results on a database maintained by the
Speaker 1: United States Golf Association. So we have a record and
Speaker 1: it's a gold mine.
Speaker 6: To be able to calculate your handicap and track it
Speaker 6: through time. You will log into the system either at
Speaker 6: your course or on your home computer.
Speaker 1: I'm talking to an economist at Miami University named Lee
Speaker 1: bigger Staff. He's interested in the habits of top corporate executives.
Speaker 1: If you have the corner office and a multimillion dollar
Speaker 1: stock option and a Gulf Stream five, does that make
Speaker 1: you more or less likely to put in a hard
Speaker 1: day's work. The USGA database is of serious professional interest
Speaker 1: to a guy like bigger Staff.
Speaker 6: And your input where you played, and what day you
Speaker 6: played on, and what your score was, and you know,
Speaker 6: after a certain number of rounds being played, the USGA
Speaker 6: will indicate what's your hand indicaptives your level of skill,
Speaker 6: which allows you to compete against other golfers of different
Speaker 6: skill level and kind of normalize against that.
Speaker 1: You know, how you always hear that CEOs play a
Speaker 1: lot of golf. Bigger Staff's insight is that the USGA
Speaker 1: database allows us to know exactly how much they play.
Speaker 1: All you need to do is cross reference that list
Speaker 1: of scores with a list of the CEOs of America's
Speaker 1: largest companies. So that's what he does. It takes forever.
Speaker 6: By the way, Well started while as a PhD student,
Speaker 6: and so this certainly was a multi month process. So
Speaker 6: it's not something that nine is really want to repeat
Speaker 6: in the near term just because it took a lot
Speaker 6: of collection time.
Speaker 1: There, how can you not love this? Surely this is
Speaker 1: why God invented graduate students. Bigger staff begins with the
Speaker 1: names of the heads the top fifteen hundred publicly held
Speaker 1: companies in the US. Three hundred and sixty three of
Speaker 1: those fifteen hundred turn out to be so obsessed with
Speaker 1: golf that they enter their scores into the USGA database.
Speaker 6: What you're seeing on average is, I think fifteen rounds
Speaker 6: a year is kind of the average CEO is playing
Speaker 6: that amount of golf. But it's a heavily skewed distribution, right,
Speaker 6: So we have a lot of people that are playing
Speaker 6: very little golf, and then we have a tail where
Speaker 6: we're picking it up, you know, the top quartile of
Speaker 6: we're looking at which is twenty two or more rounds
Speaker 6: per year.
Speaker 1: And if you go to the top ten percent of
Speaker 1: Bigger Staff sample, the CEOs are playing around at least
Speaker 1: thirty seven times a year. A round of golf is
Speaker 1: a good four four and a half hours, So if
Speaker 1: you play thirty seven times a year, that's more than
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty hours on the course, the equivalent
Speaker 1: of five and a half weeks of work. And by
Speaker 1: the way, these are understatements. They don't include the time
Speaker 1: spent driving to the course, warming up, getting changed, having
Speaker 1: a drink. Doesn't include the hours spent practicing shots on
Speaker 1: the putting green or the driving range, or all the
Speaker 1: rounds you play that you don't enter into the database,
Speaker 1: like if you're only playing nine holes or playing a
Speaker 1: fun round, so the real time is probably way higher.
Speaker 1: Bigger Staff then goes on to show that the more
Speaker 1: golf of CEO plays, the worse his firm does, and
Speaker 1: also that the more golf of CEO plays, the more
Speaker 1: likely he is to be fired. In other words, this
Speaker 1: isn't a harmless habit, it's a dangerous habit. Remember the
Speaker 1: Wall Street investment bank bear Stearns. They went bankrupt during
Speaker 1: the mortgage crisis. In July of two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: right when the crisis was beginning, the CEO of Bear
Speaker 1: Stearns would often helicopter out from Wall Street on Friday
Speaker 1: afternoons to his exclusive course in New Jersey to get
Speaker 1: a round in before sunset. Even when his company was collapsing,
Speaker 1: he couldn't stop playing golf. Out of President Donald Trump's
Speaker 1: first four months in office, he visited his own golf
Speaker 1: courses twenty five times. One week he played three times.
Speaker 1: You would think he would be at the office learning
Speaker 1: how to be president, reading intelligence briefings, drading the swamp. No,
Speaker 1: he's golfing. It's an addiction, right, because the definition of
Speaker 1: an addiction is a self dis destructive habit. Just think
Speaker 1: if I said to you that an important employee of
Speaker 1: a major organization made lifestyle choices that caused him to
Speaker 1: miss enormous amounts of work, harm his performance, and put
Speaker 1: his own career in jeopardy, you would say, WHOA check
Speaker 1: that guy into rehab. That's golf crack cocaine for rich
Speaker 1: white guys.
Speaker 6: The highest in the sample one hundred and forty six
Speaker 6: or one hundred and forty eight rounds recorded in a
Speaker 6: single year, which I mean that at that point, that's
Speaker 6: a tremendous amount of time spent on the golf course.
Speaker 1: You thought I was engaging in hyperbolely, didn't you that
Speaker 1: I was using the word addiction metaphorically. One hundred and
Speaker 1: forty eight rounds a year is a round of golf
Speaker 1: every three days.
Speaker 6: And that would be if it was kind of uniformly
Speaker 6: distributed across the year. It's you know, GoF certainly has
Speaker 6: a season where it's a little bit more intense in
Speaker 6: terms of the summer versus the winner.
Speaker 1: And you can't tell me what company it is. I
Speaker 1: want to know what company it is.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're just with this data, given it somewhat sensitive,
Speaker 6: we're unwilling to name out CEOs.
Speaker 1: I can't believe you won't tell me. I mean, here,
Speaker 1: we have an activity that is incredibly expensive, that is
Speaker 1: organized in just about the most extravagant manner possible, and
Speaker 1: at the same time, this expensive habit is incredibly addictive,
Speaker 1: to the point that there's a chief executive out there
Speaker 1: of a major American corporation who plays an average of
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty eight rounds of golf a year
Speaker 1: and is so completely unself conscious about that fact that
Speaker 1: he posts all one hundred and forty eight rounds on
Speaker 1: a public database where it can be analyzed by graduate students.
Speaker 1: So what happens to rich white guys with a dangerous,
Speaker 1: costly obsession? Do they burn through their life savings paying
Speaker 1: for their addiction like ordinary addicts do? Please give them
Speaker 1: a little more respect.
Speaker 3: By the way, this is my fifteenth year in television.
Speaker 1: Imagine that fifteen years of me.
Speaker 4: Longest stomach test and the history of showb.
Speaker 2: You could argue, I would say in the forties and fifties,
Speaker 2: there was no one who was more widely popular in
Speaker 2: America than Bob Hope.
Speaker 1: I'm talking to Richard Saglan, Bob Hope's biographer. I think
Speaker 1: Bob Hope has been a little forgotten in recent years,
Speaker 1: but in his day he was huge.
Speaker 2: Every late night comedian who does a stand up monologue
Speaker 2: at the beginning of the show owes a debt to
Speaker 2: Bob Hope, because he kind of invented that thing, a
Speaker 2: stand up comedy monologue that sort of took note of
Speaker 2: what was going on in the world, what was going
Speaker 2: on in Hollywood, what was going on everywhere, And he
Speaker 2: was just the voice of America. I think for a
Speaker 2: long time.
Speaker 1: Bob Hope is a crucial part of the story of
Speaker 1: golf in America, although I'm warning you things are going
Speaker 1: to get a little complicated, which is sort of the point,
Speaker 1: because you don't get to run the world for as
Speaker 1: long as rich white guys have without being pretty wily,
Speaker 1: and some of their best and wiliest work has been
Speaker 1: on the golf course. So there's a principal and property
Speaker 1: tax law called highest and best use, which is that
Speaker 1: one of the ways you figure out how much to
Speaker 1: tax a piece of property is to estimate what its
Speaker 1: best use might be. For example, if I have a
Speaker 1: one acre plot and the fanciest part of Manhattan that
Speaker 1: I used to grow vegetables, I can't say to the
Speaker 1: city that land is worthless, it's just a vegetable garden. No,
Speaker 1: the city's going to say, we're going to value that
Speaker 1: one acre and tax it as if it had an
Speaker 1: apartment block on it, because that's the best use of
Speaker 1: land in the fancy parts of Manhattan. Now, if you've
Speaker 1: got a vast golf course in the middle of Beverly
Speaker 1: Hills or Brentwood, highest and best use makes you really nervous,
Speaker 1: because plainly, the highest and best use of land in
Speaker 1: the middle of one of the most expensive and densely
Speaker 1: populated cities in the world is not a private golf course.
Speaker 1: So years ago, in nineteen sixty, California's country clubs realize
Speaker 1: they have to act or they're going to get taxed
Speaker 1: into oblivion. They get together and they propose an amendment
Speaker 1: to the state constitution that permanently exempts them from the
Speaker 1: highest and best use standard. They want their vegetable garden
Speaker 1: to be taxed as a vegetable garden. If you think
Speaker 1: about it, this is seriously audacious. Private golf courses are
Speaker 1: these massive, opulent, gated playgrounds, and membership is often restricted.
Speaker 1: In Los Angeles in nineteen sixty, a lot of these
Speaker 1: clubs didn't let in Jews. They certainly didn't let in
Speaker 1: black people except to work in the kitchen. Yet they
Speaker 1: wanted a constitutional exemption to ordinary property taxes, like there
Speaker 1: were some kind of public amenity. How can they argue this?
Speaker 1: They don't not really. They just bring in Bob Hope, who,
Speaker 1: in addition to being the most popular entertainer in America,
Speaker 1: is also an obsessive golfer obsessive. I might as well
Speaker 1: level with you.
Speaker 4: I spent so much time in Sandstraft they sent me
Speaker 4: citizenship papers from Saudi Arabia. Oh yeah, I love to
Speaker 4: hear the whole story.
Speaker 1: Bob Hope once wrote an entire book just devoted to
Speaker 1: his golf game, called Confessions of a Hooker, in which
Speaker 1: he estimates that he had played on two thousand different
Speaker 1: golf courses over the course of his life.
Speaker 2: He belonged to the Lakeside Country Club in La near
Speaker 2: where he lived, one of the prestigiousstigious I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The genius at picking Bob Hope is the face of
Speaker 1: California's country clubs is that his whole persona, his whole act,
Speaker 1: was about being every man. He's self deprecating. Half his
Speaker 1: jokes are about how he's not part of the inn group,
Speaker 1: even though of course there's no one more in than
Speaker 1: Bob Hope.
Speaker 3: Isn't this wonderful all being here in California?
Speaker 4: I just love it.
Speaker 3: Look at that skuy, That's the only place in the
Speaker 3: world where you can get four seasons in one day.
Speaker 3: I want to tell you that this is we better hurry,
Speaker 3: We'll be able to be snowing before the third.
Speaker 2: Hold, you know, let's move on.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, So, how did the Bob Hope for Golf
Speaker 1: campaign do in nineteen sixty It wins. The proposition passes
Speaker 1: and is added to Article thirteen of the California Constitution,
Speaker 1: where it remains to this day. In order to win
Speaker 1: a set of privileges for the very wealthy, in other words,
Speaker 1: California's country clubs turn to a man who symbolizes the
Speaker 1: common man. I mean, when does it ever happen that
Speaker 1: a TV celebrity wins a sweetheart deal for his rich
Speaker 1: golf buddies by posing as a friend of the common man?
Speaker 1: If you get my drift to take me back, just
Speaker 1: to I totally understand Prop thirteen property has passed in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, and what are the principal stipulations of
Speaker 1: the proposition. I'm in a big conference room in the
Speaker 1: Los Angeles County Municipal Building, one of those beautiful nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties office buildings that are all over downtown Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: There are four people on the other side of the table.
Speaker 1: They're from the LA County tax Assessor's office. I'm on
Speaker 1: my quest to figure out why Brentwood Country Club isn't
Speaker 1: just a big park that I can go running through.
Speaker 1: And I've decided to start with the people who run
Speaker 1: the tax system. These are serious folks, deliberate, thoughtful. They
Speaker 1: have promised to help me. You'll have to guess what
Speaker 1: they really think.
Speaker 7: The tax rate is set is one percent of the value,
Speaker 7: as opposed to a variable rate, which it was before.
Speaker 1: The man speaking is Brian Donnelly. He's talking about the
Speaker 1: most famous amendment to the California Constitution, Proposition thirteen.
Speaker 7: The properties only get reassessed with when there's a transfer
Speaker 7: or a change of ownership, or there's new construction. Those
Speaker 7: are the primary parts of it.
Speaker 1: Here's what he's saying. If you own a house, every
Speaker 1: one or two years, typically the value of your property
Speaker 1: is reassessed by the city or county where you live.
Speaker 1: So if your house doubles in value, the local government
Speaker 1: will raise your taxes accordingly. That's the way property taxes work,
Speaker 1: except in California. Proposition thirteen said that for tax purposes,
Speaker 1: the value of any piece of property in California is
Speaker 1: frozen at pre nineteen seventy eight levels, and the only
Speaker 1: way that property can be reassessed at its real current
Speaker 1: value is if the property is sold, or to be
Speaker 1: more specific, if ownership of more than fifty percent of
Speaker 1: the property changes hands. In other words, California has two
Speaker 1: kinds of taxpayers, the post nineteen seventy eight people who
Speaker 1: pay normal property taxes, and the people lucky and old
Speaker 1: enough to be living in the same house they owned
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight, who pay a tiny fraction of
Speaker 1: their fair share.
Speaker 7: You know, I've got family members who've owned their house
Speaker 7: in nineteen sixty nine and they're paying I think their
Speaker 7: tax will value is bad ninety thousand dollars or something
Speaker 7: like that. The houses in that neighborhood sell for six hundred,
Speaker 7: so they're paying a lot less. It's the property conundrum,
Speaker 7: which I'm sure you've read about.
Speaker 1: Please understand, this system is insane, totally crazy. I mean,
Speaker 1: just think of all the reasons why someone might deserve
Speaker 1: a big tax break. I mean, they're sick, they're poor,
Speaker 1: they have tons of young kids, they've made a big
Speaker 1: investment in their business. The State of California says, no,
Speaker 1: we think the most deserving group are people whose property
Speaker 1: hasn't changed hands in forty years. Okay, Now, imagine that
Speaker 1: you're a private golf club you did that spectacular bit
Speaker 1: of jiu jitsu with Bob Hope in nineteen sixty, which
Speaker 1: means that you don't pay real property taxes. Gift from
Speaker 1: God number one. Then comes proposition thirteen, and you get
Speaker 1: a second gift from God, because proposition thirteen says that
Speaker 1: those already artificially low property taxes are now frozen forever
Speaker 1: at nineteen seventy eight levels, so long as your country
Speaker 1: club does not change hands. And that last part is crucial,
Speaker 1: because if you have a change in ownership, then you
Speaker 1: have to pay real property tax like every other long
Speaker 1: suffering California taxpayer who hasn't been in one place since
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight. So the country clubs of Los Angeles
Speaker 1: all hang by a thread. They continue to exist only
Speaker 1: so long as the tax system perceives that they have
Speaker 1: not changed hands. And for years everyone assumes they haven't
Speaker 1: changed hands. I mean Brentwood, LA country Club, Wiltshire, all
Speaker 1: the major golf clubs were all founded before nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1: But then a neighborhood newspaper called the Los Angeles Garment
Speaker 1: and Citizen runs an article January sixteenth, twenty ten, in
Speaker 1: which they say, wait a minute, Most private country clubs
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles have what's called equity ownership. They're owned
Speaker 1: by their members. When you're admitted, you get a share.
Speaker 1: When you die or quit, someone else takes your share.
Speaker 1: So over time, if enough members die or quit, isn't
Speaker 1: that a change in ownership. That question was put to
Speaker 1: Rick Auerbach, who was then the head of tax assessment
Speaker 1: for La County.
Speaker 7: I think the quote was kind of funny for me.
Speaker 7: You said something about, let's see, on most issues we
Speaker 7: haven't heard at least the question asked before. He said
Speaker 7: he'd worked in the office thirty nine years, but this
Speaker 7: was a new one.
Speaker 1: So Aurback refers the question to the city's lawyers. They
Speaker 1: put their best and brightest legal minds on it for
Speaker 1: six months, and on June second, twenty ten, the County's
Speaker 1: tax court issues a solemn, four page ruling. They conclude,
Speaker 1: no country clubs haven't changed hands. If you're keeping track,
Speaker 1: that's the third straight up gift from God that LA's
Speaker 1: private country clubs have gotten in the last fifty years.
Speaker 1: He was talking to someone who's a member of Bellair
Speaker 1: Country Club and I said, what percentage of the members
Speaker 1: of bel Air today were members in seventy eight? And
Speaker 1: he said, you know, ten percent? So why isn't that
Speaker 1: a change of ownership?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 7: If I haven't had a chance to dig through this
Speaker 7: a whole lot since I got it out of the
Speaker 7: file the other day. But they kind of get into it.
Speaker 7: It's they're saying, if there's no one event that is
Speaker 7: that is more than fifty percent of a transfer, then
Speaker 7: it's not. Each of those little individual slices are not
Speaker 7: a change of ownership.
Speaker 2: On their own.
Speaker 1: Did you find that argument plausible?
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, that's that's we're implementers of the law.
Speaker 1: You don't have opinions. No, well no, no. I could
Speaker 1: swear as I looked across the table at Donnelly and
Speaker 1: his cohorts that they were twitching like they desperately wanted
Speaker 1: to say something but had to bite their tongue. You
Speaker 1: know what it's like. You know that famous paradox I
Speaker 1: forgot with the ship. Well, you the question is if
Speaker 1: you change If you have a ship and you change
Speaker 1: a sex some ancient Greek think, and you change one
Speaker 1: at a time, is at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: is a ship different that's what this is. The thing
Speaker 1: I can't remember is a ship of theseus. The famous
Speaker 1: thought experiment described by the Greek philosopher Plutarch roughly two
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Plutarch says, imagine theseus is sailing on
Speaker 1: a ship, and one by one he replaces every one
Speaker 1: of the original planks that make up that ship with
Speaker 1: a new plank, until every single piece of the ship
Speaker 1: is new. The question is, when theseus reaches shore, is
Speaker 1: he sailing on the same ship as he was when
Speaker 1: he left or a new ship. One view says it's
Speaker 1: a new ship. This is called the myriological theory of identity.
Speaker 1: The identity of something is the sum of its component parts.
Speaker 1: Change the parts, you change the thing. On the other
Speaker 1: side of the argument is something called spatio temporal continuity theory,
Speaker 1: which says that an object can maintain its identity so
Speaker 1: long as the change is gradual and the form or
Speaker 1: shape of the object is preserved to the changes of
Speaker 1: its component materials. I think you can see where I'm
Speaker 1: going with this. The city's lawyers take a second view.
Speaker 1: So long as a country club replaces its rich white
Speaker 1: guys gradually, and so long as each new rich white
Speaker 1: guy preserves the form and shape of the rich white
Speaker 1: guy he is replacing. Then the private golf clubs of
Speaker 1: today must have the same existential status as the private
Speaker 1: golf courses of nineteen seventy eight. Collections of rich white guys,
Speaker 1: from the standpoint of the La County property tax system,
Speaker 1: possess spatio temporal continuity. At this point I realized I
Speaker 1: was in way over my head. Tax assessors were not
Speaker 1: going to be enough. I needed an actual philosopher, so
Speaker 1: I called Mark Cohen of the University of Washington to
Speaker 1: get to the bottom of the question of whether large
Speaker 1: groups of rich white people possess ontological permanence.
Speaker 3: Here's an argument that favors the spaciotemporal continuity theory. The
Speaker 3: idea that what makes the ship persist through time as
Speaker 3: one and the same is that it moves smoothly through
Speaker 3: space time. One plank is removed and thrown overboard, and
Speaker 3: a replacement plank is installed taken from the cargo the
Speaker 3: ship has on board, So when it arrives, it doesn't
Speaker 3: have a single part that is identical to any of
Speaker 3: the parts it started out with. And so there's no
Speaker 3: point at which you can say Aha, Now we have
Speaker 3: a new ship, a different a numerically different ship. So
Speaker 3: that if you have that sort of argument in mind,
Speaker 3: you think, okay, the Space show temporal continuity criterion is
Speaker 3: the correct one. Forget about requiring that all the parts
Speaker 3: are the same.
Speaker 1: But con is not finished. As a philosopher, his job
Speaker 1: is to consider all the scenarios raised by the ship
Speaker 1: of THESEUS conundrum, like the museum counterexample.
Speaker 3: The museum example goes like this. Suppose the ship is
Speaker 3: in a museum of ancient ships and a gang of
Speaker 3: crooks is trying to steal this ancient ship, and it
Speaker 3: realizes it can't just haul it out in one piece.
Speaker 3: They would easily be spotted. So they come up with
Speaker 3: a clever scheme.
Speaker 1: They sneak in every night and steal the ship, one
Speaker 1: board at a time, one plank a day, so the
Speaker 1: museum doesn't realize what's going on.
Speaker 3: By the time they're finished on day number n they
Speaker 3: have all end parts of the ship removed. Now they
Speaker 3: reassemble them and put it on the black market. They're
Speaker 3: selling Theseus's ancient ship for a pretty price, and they've
Speaker 3: left a replica behind in the museum. I contend that
Speaker 3: in this case, when you describe it in this way,
Speaker 3: it seems as if Theseus's ship has been stolen piecemeal
Speaker 3: from the museum.
Speaker 1: Cohen's point is that there's no simple answer to the
Speaker 1: ship of Theseus prop You can go around and around
Speaker 1: and around. That's why it's a puzzle. But do you
Speaker 1: see what the lawyers at the LA Board of Equalization did.
Speaker 1: They just waltz into a philosophical conundrum that has bedeviled
Speaker 1: some of the best minds in the world for two
Speaker 1: thousand years and declare victory and say, oh, it's definitely
Speaker 1: option one spatio temporal continuity.
Speaker 3: The problem as it stands is irresolvable, and you only
Speaker 3: come to a conclusion that makes any sense to you
Speaker 3: if you place it in a context in which there
Speaker 3: is something sort of extra metaphysical, something pragmatic, that helps
Speaker 3: that tilts you in one direction or the other.
Speaker 1: So what's the pragmatic, extra metaphysical consideration here? It's at
Speaker 1: Los Angeles ranks near the bottom of all major metropolitan
Speaker 1: areas in the United States in terms of public parks.
Speaker 1: There is Griffith Park off in the northeastern corner of
Speaker 1: the city, which only a fraction of the city can
Speaker 1: even get to, and then there's basically nothing except these
Speaker 1: massive golf courses, which are both closed to the general
Speaker 1: public and subsidized by the general public. Do you want
Speaker 1: to know the size of that subsidy? I asked around
Speaker 1: a guy I know knows a guy who's a member
Speaker 1: of the La Country Club. That guy's back of the
Speaker 1: envelope calculation was that the club's land was worth about
Speaker 1: six billion dollars. But that was a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: Then I heard from another guy who said that they
Speaker 1: now think it's worth nine billion, nine billion. Under normal circumstances,
Speaker 1: the property taxes on that much land would come to
Speaker 1: about ninety million dollars a year. Do you know what
Speaker 1: La Country Club actually paid after you add up the
Speaker 1: Bob Hope exemption and the Spatio temporal continuity ruling two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars give or take all. Right, let's do
Speaker 1: the math together. They should be paying ninety million. In fact,
Speaker 1: they're only paying two hundred thousand dollars in property taxes.
Speaker 1: Ninety million minus two hundred thousand dollars is eighty nine million,
Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand dollars. That's how much the tax bearers
Speaker 1: of Los Angeles subsidize one of the swankiest country clubs
Speaker 1: in the world every year. Well, now I wander to
Speaker 1: bring up something else that comes to mind here, which
Speaker 1: is that the spatial temporal argument, taken out of philosophical context,
Speaker 1: strikes me as being can sometimes be really troubling. For example,
Speaker 1: it's a very I mean, I think there's something fundamentally
Speaker 1: intuitive about it, and I don't mean that necessarily in
Speaker 1: a good way. That it you know, that we get
Speaker 1: the fact that we call the Hudson River the Hudson River,
Speaker 1: even though the Hudson River is at every second changing.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, the water's up, the same boats
Speaker 1: go down at you know, it's never that you never
Speaker 1: look the same way twice ever. But we continue to
Speaker 1: call it the Hudson River. But it strikes me that
Speaker 1: in a political context, as kind of thinking can be
Speaker 1: used to perpetuate inequality and injustice.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 1: For example, what is the what is an aristocracy but
Speaker 1: a political formulation of the spatial temporal continuity principle?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 3: It is something like that, And it's it's.
Speaker 1: Troubling it precisely that way, because they're saying circumstances can change,
Speaker 1: and the holders of the privilege can change. The father
Speaker 1: can die and the son can inherit the peerage. But
Speaker 1: the peerage remains intact. It has this quality that's independent
Speaker 1: of all that's going around it.
Speaker 3: And that's yes, where the where the identity of the
Speaker 3: object confers, for example, a right or a title, and
Speaker 3: if it's considered to be held intact and in full
Speaker 3: by whoever holds it at any one time, then basically
Speaker 3: that removes change altogether from the realm of what matters
Speaker 3: as far as as ownership is concerned. Yes, so the
Speaker 3: seventeenth great grandson of the peer still has all of
Speaker 3: the rights and privileges, even though so far removed from
Speaker 3: the rights and privileges as they attached to the original
Speaker 3: holder of them. So there is something that is unfair
Speaker 3: and anti egalitarian about the way this principle can get applied.
Speaker 1: So the golf clubs of Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic
Speaker 1: institutions exactly. I think someone needs to tell Brimwood and
Speaker 1: La Country Club and all the others that if they
Speaker 1: want to hold spatio temporal continuity villages, they have to
Speaker 1: give something back. Take down your barbed wire. Your members
Speaker 1: can play golf on weekdays, but evenings and weekends belong
Speaker 1: to the ordinary taxpayers of Los Angeles. Let them come
Speaker 1: and enjoy the greens and fairways that they've been subsidizing
Speaker 1: for generations. It's worth remembering, by the way, that the
Speaker 1: most famous golf course in the world, the home of golf,
Speaker 1: Saint Andrews in Scotland, is open to the general public
Speaker 1: on Sundays. In Toronto, the fanciest golf club is Rosedale
Speaker 1: Country Club, right in the middle of the city, but
Speaker 1: the golf course is only private in summer. The rest
Speaker 1: of the time it's open to anyone who wants to
Speaker 1: go for a walk, or play frisbee, or go cross
Speaker 1: country skiing. Canada and the United Kingdom, I would point out,
Speaker 1: are governed by a queen. They have an actual aristocracy,
Speaker 1: but somehow they figured out a way to have their
Speaker 1: fancy golf courses be democratic. It's only on the corner
Speaker 1: of San Vicente and Berlin Game that golf remains an
Speaker 1: instrument of medieval privilege.
Speaker 5: I mean, when you fly over La the green space
Speaker 5: that you see is cemeteries and golf courses, and golf
Speaker 5: courses you don't see parks. We don't have a park
Speaker 5: like say San Francisco's Golden Gate Park or New York's
Speaker 5: Central Park Central Park.
Speaker 1: Day Zac and I are standing outside the barbed wire
Speaker 1: or Brentwood Country Club, peering through a fence. We're trying
Speaker 1: to spot one of the privileged few permitted a walk
Speaker 1: in the park on the west side of.
Speaker 5: La I see one, guy, I see one.
Speaker 1: That's unbelievable. It's a Saturday afternoon. Sun is now coming
Speaker 1: out yep. Like right now, we're standing on the running
Speaker 1: track and there's someone running up there. Now, there are
Speaker 1: more people on this narrow dirt track than there are
Speaker 1: typically on the golf course. See if you can still
Speaker 1: see any kind of I'm still looking for a golfer.
Speaker 5: I'm not. Oh, I see one.
Speaker 1: Do you see one?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Oh, that's very exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, next time, I'm climbing the fence. Maybe we all should.
Speaker 1: That episode dropped on June fifteenth, twenty seventeen, ten years later,
Speaker 1: almost to the month. One of Audrin Nazarian's staffers comes
Speaker 1: to him and says, you should listen. So he does.
Speaker 1: When we come back, all hell breaks loose Adrin Nazarian.
Speaker 1: It turns out had for a long time asked himself
Speaker 1: the same question I asked myself whenever I went to
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, which is, how on earth do these massive
Speaker 1: golf courses on some of the most expensive land in
Speaker 1: the world afford their property taxes? And after listening to
Speaker 1: that episode from twenty seventeen, he finally had his answer,
Speaker 1: because basically, they don't pay property taxes. The six major
Speaker 1: LA country clubs sit on land worth conservatively fifteen billion dollars.
Speaker 1: You know how much they pay in property taxes in
Speaker 1: a typical year, less than a million dollars. And thus enlightened,
Speaker 1: he decided to act and introduce a ballot proposition. So
Speaker 1: tell me, what does your proposal? Tell me exactly what
Speaker 1: your proposal says how you would like to address this problem.
Speaker 4: The proposal was meant to be a conversation starter to
Speaker 4: force this issue. So what my team came up with
Speaker 4: was to look at maybe a four dollars proposal per
Speaker 4: square foot parcel tax, which does not contradict the state's Prop.
Speaker 4: Thirteen requirement. It's a local city based parcel tax, and
Speaker 4: the goal of the four dollars per square foot was
Speaker 4: to make it almost commensurate to what a one percent
Speaker 4: property tax valuation for best and highest use would have produced.
Speaker 1: So back of the envelope calculation, what would a club
Speaker 1: like LA Country Club be paying every year under your proposal?
Speaker 4: It depends. Oh, if it was at four dollars, I
Speaker 4: don't even know if they would be able to pay.
Speaker 4: They would shut down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's do the math. The Los Angeles Country Club,
Speaker 1: the laccs, it's called the fanciest and most exclusive of
Speaker 1: all Los Angeles country clubs, occupies roughly three hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five acres that's just over fourteen million square feet.
Speaker 1: A four dollars a square foot tax comes to roughly
Speaker 1: fifty five million dollars a year in proper taxes. Right now,
Speaker 1: membership dues for the LACC total somewhere around twenty million
Speaker 1: dollars a year. Under the Nazarian ballot proposal, that have
Speaker 1: to triple their fees just to pay their property taxes. Now,
Speaker 1: technically at all the millionaires and millionaires who belong to
Speaker 1: the LA Country Club afford that, sure, But everything we
Speaker 1: know about very rich people is that they don't like
Speaker 1: to pay market rates for things they've previously got for free.
Speaker 1: For the well heeled golfers of Beverly Hills, then this
Speaker 1: is existential. In May, Nasarian put his proposal on the
Speaker 1: ballot for November. Let the voters of Los Angeles decide,
Speaker 1: did you ever? You must have done polling.
Speaker 4: We did do polling because we wanted to not just
Speaker 4: make assumptions and understand that we actually have something that
Speaker 4: the public would feel strongly about. And in our initial
Speaker 4: polling from a reputable polster, we saw a sixty four
Speaker 4: percent approval rating. So it's pretty strong.
Speaker 1: Oh you, so that these guys had a reason to
Speaker 1: be scared.
Speaker 4: There Again, these are all folks that are part of
Speaker 4: the fabric of the city, so they understand that something
Speaker 4: like this would be seen as a populist issue and
Speaker 4: would garner quite a bit of support. They understand that.
Speaker 1: The country clubs freaked out. Someone I'm not going to
Speaker 1: say who, who is a member of the LACC, forwarded
Speaker 1: me an email sent to him by the club's board
Speaker 1: of directors. Here's what it said. We want you to
Speaker 1: know that we are taking this matter very seriously. We
Speaker 1: are confident that we have the right people with the
Speaker 1: right experience engaged to address this issue on our collective behalf.
Speaker 1: While we won't get into specific details of our approach
Speaker 1: in a broadly distributed communication, please be assured that we
Speaker 1: are active and thoughtfully engaged. In case you're wondering, these
Speaker 1: are all rich people euphemisms for we're going to the
Speaker 1: mattresses on this one. An entire busload of white shoe
Speaker 1: lawyers just pulled up downstairs. We've locked the gates. We've
Speaker 1: stocked up, but enough wagu beef and forty years single
Speaker 1: malt to fortify us until November. But then the email continues.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you have particular expertise, insight, or
Speaker 1: relationships that you believe may be relevant to the situation,
Speaker 1: we encourage you to reach out to our general manager,
Speaker 1: which is rich people euphemism for we're totally panicking right now.
Speaker 1: We wish we'd said yes to that membership application twenty
Speaker 1: years ago from Donald Trump. So the clubs get together
Speaker 1: tell Nazarian they want to negotiate. He puts the ballot
Speaker 1: measure on hold. But then the second fanciest club in
Speaker 1: the city, Country Club, says no, we're going to fight.
Speaker 1: I have to confess that I didn't know there was
Speaker 1: such a thing as a society of golf historians. But
Speaker 1: there is, and they wait in. What the city of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles seems to overlook is that the preservation of
Speaker 1: these clubs should be viewed in much the same way
Speaker 1: we preserve great works of art. Their importance is no
Speaker 1: less significant than a Frank Lloyd write home or the
Speaker 1: value of a Picasso painting. The artists behind them are
Speaker 1: equally important, and their canvas is a living, breathing landscape
Speaker 1: that requires stewardship, investment, and at times thoughtful restoration. The
Speaker 1: tabloids get wind of the story. It makes page six.
Speaker 1: Twitter blows up. My friend emails me again. They are
Speaker 1: throwing their nine irons at me at the LACC. It's chaos.
Speaker 1: It's rich white guy on rich white guy violence. But
Speaker 1: play with me for a moment. Last time I was
Speaker 1: in La I went to the top of I wanted
Speaker 1: to see La Country Club from high up. So I
Speaker 1: went to the top of the Waldorf, that little restaurant there,
Speaker 1: and looked down and said, this is an astonishing piece
Speaker 1: of property. And if they came back to you, to
Speaker 1: suppose I was thinking, what all the things? I suppose
Speaker 1: they came back and said, all right, they have two
Speaker 1: parcels on either side of Wiltshire, right, am I? Right?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 1: What if they said, okay, we'll give you one of
Speaker 1: those parcels for a park if you let us keep
Speaker 1: the other for our country club.
Speaker 4: Who says no, Well, I like how you're thinking, and
Speaker 4: if this is a precursor to how the negotiations go,
Speaker 4: then that's a good place to be.
Speaker 1: Why you're doing this negotiation kind of make a personal request.
Speaker 4: Please.
Speaker 1: The whole I think experience in the in the podcast,
Speaker 1: the whole thing that got me going on this is
Speaker 1: I would stay with a friend of mine in Brentwood
Speaker 1: and go running around the Breadwood country Club on that
Speaker 1: little narrow, rocky gravel path that is between the fence
Speaker 1: of the Red Country Club and the street. And I
Speaker 1: would always say, they have whatever three hundred acres and
Speaker 1: there's no one on there three hundred acres and I'm
Speaker 1: being forced to run this narrow track all I want.
Speaker 1: Can they just move their fence, Audrey? Could they just
Speaker 1: move their fence in three feet so that the runners
Speaker 1: of Brentwood would have a nice path as opposed to
Speaker 1: running on like a thig of rocks. Can you make it?
Speaker 1: Just say just say Malcolm wants you to move your
Speaker 1: fence in three feet and we can talk.
Speaker 4: But it couldn't my favorite. We'll name it the Malcolm Path.
Speaker 1: So that's where we are, dear listeners, A revolt on
Speaker 1: the verdant greens of Los Angeles, sparked by yours truly
Speaker 1: in combination with a city council member who is now
Speaker 1: my hero. And next time you're in Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: happen to drive by any of those fancy golf clubs
Speaker 1: Lacc bel Air, Brentwood, Hilcrest, Lakeside, lower your window, raise
Speaker 1: your middle finger, honk your horn, and shout out. I
Speaker 1: stand with Babel and mis Arian mother. And if anyone
Speaker 1: ever tells you the truth cannot be spoken to power,
Speaker 1: you should answer, actually, that's not true. May I direct
Speaker 1: you to Season two, Episode ten of Revisionist History. Revisionist
Speaker 1: History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and
Speaker 1: Ben the Daphaffrey. Our editor is Karen Hikerji. Our executive
Speaker 1: producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird law Lawrence.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the newest member of our team, Isaac Scribner.
Speaker 1: An extra special thanks to the people who worked on
Speaker 1: the original A Good Walk Spoiled Meil LaBelle, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Camille Baptiste and Stephanie Daniel. Original music by Luis Gerra,
Speaker 1: Sound design and mastering by Marcelo di'alivera. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.