Time is everywhere, pervading each aspect of intellectual inquiry — from physics to philosophy to biology to psychology, and all the way up to politics. Considerations of time help govern a nation’s self-conception, decide who gets to vote and enjoy other privileges, and put limits on the time spent in office. Not to mention the role of time as a precious commodity, one that is used up every time we stand in line or fill out a collection of forms. Elizabeth Cohen shines a light on the role of time in politics and citizenship, a topic that has been neglected by much political theorizing.
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Elizabeth Cohen received her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. She is currently a professor of political science at Syracuse, and in March 2023 will move to Boston University to become the Maxwell Professor of United States Citizenship in the Department of Political Science. Among her awards are the Moynihan Award for Outstanding Research and Teaching at Syracuse and the Best Book award from the American Political Science section on Migration and Citizenship, for The Political Value of Time.
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0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And here on Mindscape, we often talk about the value of time in different contexts. We’ve talked about the physics of time, the philosophy of time, the psychology of time, the neuroscience of time, the biology of time. What else is there, really? What about the politics of time? Now, of course, part of you is gonna say, I mean there’s some connection between time and politics, ’cause there’s a connection between time and everything, right? Time is everywhere. But the question is, is it an interesting connection? Should we be thinking specifically about the role of time in our political lives? And today’s guest, Elizabeth Cohen, makes the case that, yes, not only should we think about time and politics, but we’ve been under-theorizing it. There are a lot of questions we should be asking about exactly this question.
0:00:51.2 SC: She’s written a book called The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice. And once you start thinking of it, the relationship between politics and time becomes clear in many different ways. For example, just defining what you mean by a democratic nation, there is, of course, the date when the nation starts. Here in the United States, we pretend it is July 4th, 1776, but that’s not really when the Constitution started, and maybe it wasn’t even the date that Declaration of Independence was signed. But anyway, we give a symbolic date then. And then what do you do about people who move to the country after that happens, who gets to be in the country and who gets to be out? And then once the country is older and that’s all in the past, you can start asking who gets to vote, right? Of course, we talk about citizenship when it comes to voting, but we also talk about age. You need to have existed a certain number of years in order to have the right to vote. We think that you need a certain amount of time here on Earth to develop the wisdom and the values that will then legitimate you being part of the democratic process. And then once the country exists, we can think about how that democracy or other political system itself relates to time, how it conceives of the past.
0:02:10.5 SC: You may be aware that we have debates over history and its meaning in this country and every other country in the world, and also how it relates to the future, our democracies, better or worse, at long-term planning than non-democratic governments are. And finally… Or maybe not finally, ’cause there’s a million different aspects here, but yet another interesting aspect is simply how we let people use their time or demand that they give some of their time away for purposes of the government. And this might be something just like filling in your taxes or standing in lie at the DMV. Is everyone’s time more or less equal? If we think that most people have more or less the same lifespan, should you be able to buy yourself out of spending time in line, or is that some fundamental incommensurability?
0:03:00.0 SC: Can we really translate between money and time despite the famous equivalence between them? Anyway, the point is, these are all important questions, and it’s a different way of looking at classical questions in liberal democratic theory by asking, what are the burdens that they put, that these duties put on the citizens of a democracy, and how should the government think about time itself? I forgot to mention term limits and the ways in which we allocate people time in office, yet another way in which time comes up. Anyway, so the book is great. Elizabeth is great to talk about this stuff. And it’s a combination of two very important things; time, which is like the most important thing in the universe, and politics, which is, like it or not, super duper important for our everyday lives. So let’s go.
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0:04:05.2 SC: Elizabeth Cohen, welcome to Mindscape Podcast.
0:04:07.2 Elizabeth Cohen: Thank you so much. It’s really exciting to be here with you.
0:04:10.2 SC: Well, it’s great to talk about time. This is something that I like talking about. My first ever trade book was about the arrow of time and so forth. But you’re looking at it in a completely different context in politics and society and so forth. So I guess an obvious question is, you’ve written a book by the political value of time, what is special about the political value of time versus any other value of time? One of the favorite anecdotes is the time is the most used now in the English language. Time is everywhere. Why is the political version of it or care about it, something we should pay special attention to?
0:04:48.1 EC: That’s a great question, and I think I would probably offer two separate answers. I think the first answer is just that we have very infrequently kind of considered our time and the way in which politics and different political institutions or arrangements affect our time. So if you go back into classics of liberal theory, whether it’s Kant or neo-Kantians, and democratic theory as well, we’ll see all sorts of discussions about fairness with respect to material goods, how we distribute different material resources and how we think about representation and equality and just almost no discussion of either how those decisions affect our time or time on its own, and whether we should have political institutions explicitly dedicated to thinking about our time. And I think we probably should and the reason I think we should draws us into the second part of the answer, which is that every other thing that we care about, that we invest in trying to protect with politics happens in time.
0:06:08.2 EC: And so all of the things that we’ve done… Liberalism is very interested in protecting a certain set of rights and we argue within liberal theory about what accomplishes that best or how to order those rights which are actually most important, but it’s all gonna unfold in time and time’s going to matter to whether we realize the goals that we argue about and defend. And it’s a finite resource. And so there’s… Yeah, once we’ve messed up in some way that affects either how much time people have or their experience of that time, there is absolutely no way to correct that wrong, it is… To use a term that I find very usable, useful, it’s an incommensurable good. We could give people money if we accidentally waste their time or wreck their time, but it is not going to fix… It’s not gonna correct what happened because it’s not giving them their time back. And we absolutely cannot do that in almost any imagined… Any hypothetical we come up with. So I think that’s a start anyway, to getting people in a frame of mind to think about time and politics and why we should be concerned with how politics affects time.
0:07:27.1 SC: So in some sense, if I get this right, time is both taken for granted in some sense, just because it is everywhere, but it’s also unique and special because you can’t give restitution for people losing their time and you’re doing your best to make up for it, but you can’t give them their time back literally.
0:07:44.4 EC: Exactly, exactly. And you know, it’s interesting, I gave a paper on Monday, that’s a new paper from a new project that I’m really excited about, and I was in a room full of people who quite honestly are more famous than I am, [chuckle] more senior scholars. Well, now I’m famous because I think this podcast will reach a lot of people, but at the time I gave the paper, I wasn’t yet famous.
[overlapping conversation]
0:08:05.0 SC: Once we publish the episode, sure. [laughter]
0:08:11.6 EC: And they all work in these areas, they’re really, really well-known liberal theorists and they all sat there and said, “You know, you’re right, we have not considered how very, very basic commitments need to account for things that can go wrong with our time.” And I’m happy to elaborate, I don’t wanna take us down a rabbit hole, on exactly what has gone wrong that this has happened in political theory.
0:08:39.9 SC: Well, you alluded to something I think it’d be fun to dive into a little bit more deeply just to sort of explain the ground work, like where are these other people coming from, ’cause you talk about liberal theory and democratic theory, and I bet that to a lot of people in the street, these sound like the same thing, [chuckle] but they’re clearly not the same thing. So what’s going on there?
0:09:00.1 EC: Good question. So these are two related ways of thinking about politics, and I would say liberalism in political theory precedes democratic theory, and liberalism establishes a set of core claims to which people are entitled or the core claims people are entitled to make, very, very relevant to what I wanna say is that it is characteristic of people to make plans that something all human beings, whether or not they set out to do it, it is something we do, we make plans in our lives, we make short-term, mid-range, long-term plans, you just cannot be a person without thinking about what’s gonna happen next, and it is inevitable that people are gonna try for somethings to happen next and down the road and to avoid other things. And liberalism speaks about individuals and rationality and lots of other things that I’m not really touching on here, but it establishes that we need political institutions to protect people’s opportunities to live their lives and plan their lives. Early liberals are people like Hobbes, he’s a proto liberal. That guy is not a democratic theorist, he likes a good strong monarch. He is just concerned that our lives not being nasty, solitary, brutish and quite critically to what we’re talking about here, short.
0:10:29.1 SC: Short, short in time.
0:10:31.7 EC: Yes, exactly. So that’s quite noticeable to me. And then during the Enlightenment, we start to see different theorists talking about democracy and democratic politics really as a way to allow people to be autonomous, something that’s important to liberalism, and to be self-determining, both as individuals and as members of political societies. So democratic theory gives us institutional arrangements that can actually kind of make good on the promises of liberalism. And so I think about democratic theory, I think about real institutional arrangements and also… So institutional arrangements like bicameralism versus unicameralism, how many houses should we have in our parliament, but also what is representation? What does it mean to be represented? Does it mean you have to actually, in a very, very little way represent yourself in your views, or does it mean you can delegate to somebody, the work of listening to what you want and serving as some kind of representative for you? Things like that. So that’s how I think about those two things.
0:11:44.8 SC: So to see whether I get it, liberalism, more about the rights of the individual, sort of more individual-focused, and then democratic theory, more about the structures that we particularly use to let those individuals govern themselves?
0:12:00.8 EC: I think that’s a good way of thinking about it. I would just add liberalism looks at… Tries to kind of distill justifications for freeing people, for liberty based on what we know about human beings. So we know human beings seek autonomy and don’t like to be completely dominated. A classic Kantian liberal tenet would be that you are your own and you are never a means to somebody else’s end because that’s tantamount to enslavement. And we can’t justify enslaving ourselves. We don’t seek to enslave ourselves. So there’s all of these kind of views of what it is to be a human being that are embedded in liberalism that democratic theory builds on, but doesn’t initiate.
0:12:52.9 SC: Good, got it. You mentioned planning. I don’t wanna let this go before… Just delving into that a little bit more because it’s a pre-occupation of both mine in the podcast, the idea that human beings can in their heads carry different alternative futures with them and plan about them. So it’s intrinsically interesting for human beings. Then we can also ask, do other animals do it? So for what it’s worth, I would just mention that a recent podcast is with Frans de Waal, the primatologist, and he says that certain primates absolutely do it, they clearly plan out how to use this tool to make this thing happen. They’re probably not ready for democratic theory yet, but at least it’s an interesting question to see how those two things relate to each other.
0:13:34.5 EC: Yeah, and this isn’t really exactly my bailiwick or area of expertise, but there’s a whole movement for thinking about animal citizenship and justifications for thinking of the animals that are around us, the animals under our control, the animals we do use as means for our ends and the animals we drive away or extinguish as political beings in our midst with claims. And it’s very compelling work that’s kind of like drawn on my work about citizenship, but I myself have not produced it. But there’s some really good philosophers working in that area.
0:14:16.5 SC: Yeah, it’s very tricky to me because on the one hand, I don’t think the animals should be full citizens, [chuckle] but I think that just asking the question makes us think more clearly about, “Well okay, who should be full citizens? What do we mean by that? Who gets to vote?” And these are things which I think we sort of skip over sometimes, the difficulty of it to make it a little bit more clear in practice than it is theoretically, maybe.
0:14:41.7 EC: I will say when I teach discussions of animal liberation or animal citizenship, by the end of the class, in many cases, students who don’t want to concede the argument that there is such a thing as animal citizenship or the animals deserve to be liberated from human control, often have to take the position, like “We’re going to do this because we can,” rather than this is a justifiable practice, factory farming or something like that. So it’s quite an interesting field of work.
0:15:14.0 SC: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, topic for a different podcast. We’re here to talk about time. So let’s talk about the different ways in which boots on the ground, time is important for political thought. Maybe you have a favorite list or… I’ll just mention that, of course, while we are recording this, there’s a conflict going on in Ukraine, and part of the… There’s always literal combat going on, but there’s always also a discussion of ideas on top of it. What justifies this? Why are we doing it? And part of it is the history. Was Ukraine a separate country? Has it always been? What came first? And time is an important part of that. So I presume that’s one of the ways in which time is kind of crucial politically.
0:15:58.0 EC: Yeah, so sovereignty conflicts are really interesting for people who work in time. And one thing to keep in mind is that any sense of a nation, both the kind of imagined community idea that we have a story and we are a people, and then the just barebones, like the country exists and has borders and is entitled to things based on the external recognition of that fact is grounded in time. So there’s always… If you’re discussing peoplehood, a backstory, a reference to the past and the establishment of the people and the history of the people. There’s no such thing as like you and I get together and decide tomorrow that this group is a people and that’s accepted. That cannot happen. There’s always, always history there, so a reference to the past. But with sovereignty, it is the case that we find a moment of establishment and you have to refer to that. Nothing can exist if you don’t specify when it came into existence. And not just the story behind that, but when it comes to actual legal sovereignty, the moment it happens. And I became interested in that topic because I realized I was reading very early modern British common law and I’m super interested in this case called Calvin’s case, ’cause I’m interested in citizenship, and Calvin’s case was like, “Yikes, we’ve united the Scottish and the English thrones, but there are all these people who were… “
0:17:40.4 EC: That creates a sovereign, a king, and that’s in whose allegiance you’re born into, if you’re born in that newly created territory that just didn’t exist before the moment of the uniting of these two crowns. And so eventually people ended up in court because we were born before this uniting happened, so essentially before the sovereign existed. And what are we? We are not natural born subjects of the king because the king didn’t exist when we were born. What’s our status? And the case decides essentially, “No, you’re not subject of the king. Even though you’re just hanging out and nothing… You didn’t do anything and all of a sudden you’re not subjects anymore because this new political entity has been created.” And then that’s where we get the idea of naturalization, a very early naturalization is like we’re… Because I realized, not only was it conceptually impossible to be born into the allegiance of something that didn’t exist when you were born, but we’re going to have to do something about this ’cause this is like a lot of people and they need some status. And so you’re not a natural born subject, but when we can make you natural.
0:18:53.0 SC: When was this case? What year are we talking?
0:18:55.5 EC: Oh, this is way, way, way back in the 14th century.
0:19:02.2 SC: 14th century? Okay, it was a long time to go, but then it’s not that hard for those of us in the US, for example, where I’m most familiar with what is happening.
0:19:11.0 SC: We have all sorts of rules about who is a citizen and presumably when the revolution happened, I’m not so familiar, maybe I’m sure you are much more than I am, when did people go from being British citizens to American citizens, and how old did you have to be? And have you had to be to vote and all that stuff?
0:19:28.8 EC: This is the question, and I just love this whole, what happened because it is such… It’s so flies in the face of all the kind of claims that nativist in 2022 wanna make, it just upsets everything that people who really wanna believe in the idea that there are clear boundaries that conform to nativist assumptions and conclusions. So first of all, there’s really no agreement on the data, the founding in the United States, ’cause there are multiple points, there’s a declaration, there’s a conclusion of the war, there’s treaties, and then there’s all these points at which we move toward a constitution, and then there are state constitutions as well.
0:20:15.5 EC: And so there are two stories here about what happened that I think are really interesting, the first is that so… And I’ve written about this pretty extensively, similar to the problem of the uniting of the Scottish and English thrones, there’s this problem after the war ends of all these loyalists who were like, Oh, here we are, and we were just like, now we’re in the country, we were just trying to make sure it wasn’t founded. What are we? And it’s very difficult to imagine in 2022, anybody extending a generous solution to this problem, but in fact, a generous solution is what happened, and so as with most of these cases, the real claims, when people go to court are usually about property, they either wanna inherit property or they wanna pass property down, this was the gatekeeping mechanism of citizenship, we don’t think of…
0:21:18.4 EC: We think of voting and things like that, but really in the early modern cases, it’s all about property, and if you really weren’t a citizen, you probably were not gonna be able to inherit or pass down property. So this guy goes to court and Daniel Cox is his name, he goes to court, I think he wanted some land from his aunt… Actually, I can’t remember the exact conflict, but there’s land involved, and he’s like, I was a loyalist. I fought against this country, here I am in the court, please give me citizenship, and the court comes up with a very different answer than in Calvin’s case, they say… They say like, “Oh, well, you’re from New Jersey. Of course, all important people are.” You’re from New Jersey. People might know I’m in New Jersey, in a new… New Jersey just ratified the constitution, you cannot have not known this, everybody knows this is going on. The court specifies the dates, it’s like from this time when they started considering it to this time when the ratification became official, you hung out New Jersey, you new this was happening. We are going to see that, and I use the term lived consent, that period of time was a special time of democratic reasoning, everybody knew a decision was being made if you did not agree to the terms of the constitution, and there was a state constitution of as well, you would have left.
0:22:51.2 EC: That’s what people do, they vote with their feet, but you didn’t, you stayed and we’re gonna take that as consent and… Yes, you are a full citizen, and I think that’s interesting, there’s a separate story that we can get into then about what happens to people who came after that fact and why we are a nation of immigrants and how we’ve dealt with that. That gets back to the naturalization, and we can get into that at any point if you want to…
0:23:15.9 SC: Yeah, no, we definitely will, but it just reminds me of, right there in the constitution, there are… Time comes up and you have to be 35 years old to be president, isn’t that right? And that’s kind of made up, I don’t know. Why did they choose that number? [chuckle]
0:23:33.4 EC: So I actually have a pretty extensive argument that we choose these numbers, and it’s really more a process of negotiation, so 35 doesn’t necessarily mean something, but you have a bunch of people in a room who have certain beliefs about whether it’s maturity or commitment to a place, or experience navigating civic institutions, and two things are going on, they may have a different threshold, so some people might think it should be age 18 when you become an adult, or some people might think you should be much, much older, that we should really be ruled by somebody who’s gone through their full productive, the middle of their adulthood and gained all this wisdom and then can put it to work in politics, and so there’s a negotiation over the date in which you probably find the middle point or something close to the middle point, and then the other second negotiation is like, What does this mean, which is really what your question is, and my belief is that all that matters is that everybody leave the room believing that it represents the thing they think is important and kind of able to shut out that it means something different to other people and not think about that, so if you’re very committed to the idea that this should be about experience and wisdom, you really, really need to believe that you’re getting experience and wisdom in that 35…
0:25:07.7 EC: And if somebody’s out there yammering on about this person needs to just have made this much money, and we think it’s about age 35, they’re gonna have that much property or money or whatever, like you need to just not deal with that because it’s gonna be very disturbing, but the number lets you not deal with that, right, because you simply are like 35… Yeah, I know 35 is about civic. Civic knowledge. Leave it at that, and just never talk about it again.
0:25:32.7 SC: Yeah, this is probably a lesson of much broader political import, the idea that in a democracy, you have to be able to get people to agree on the policy, even if there are reasons to agree on the policy are completely incompatible.
0:25:48.1 EC: Yeah, and numbers are good for that because we all attach our own meaning to numbers, particularly time, because we think about our time in very individual ways, but if you can put a number on it rather than something qualitative, it makes it much easier for people to engage the fiction that the number is what they want it to mean, whereas if we use words, then we are gonna really get ourselves into trouble.
0:26:13.5 SC: Yeah. So it’s not agreeing to disagree, it’s agreeing for disagreeable reasons, but as you’re pointing out, even better, masking the disagreement by just highlighting some numerical value rather than a list of reasons why.
0:26:28.1 EC: Yeah, yeah, I truly think if there were therapists around, they would have a problem with this system of just sweeping everything under the rug of numbers and dates and ages and quantities of time, they would be feel like, “No, this is super unhealthy.”
0:26:41.8 SC: Maybe it’s unhealthy for a person is not unhealthy for a polity, in some sense.
0:26:44.9 EC: I probably, I agree.
0:26:46.3 SC: But the other place obviously where such temporal intervals come in to the constitution is lengths of terms for four years for the President, two years representative, six years for senators, life for members of the supreme court. And there’s an arbitrariness there also, in fact, it always seemed weird, the six years is what seemed weird to me for senators, like two years… I don’t know why that makes sense in four years, maybe that makes sense in six years, just seem to be bizarre.
0:27:16.0 EC: Yeah, I mean, I just… I feel that it’s important to say that many things about the Senate are bizarre and not, it’s very… It’s an anti-democratic institution in a lot of ways, and six is not only kind of like an odd number, but it’s a long time, and so I… To get into all the negotiations would take us too long, but I’ll just give a little tidbit that I have… Once I learned it always found interesting, and that’s… A big player in a lot of these discussions is Jefferson.
0:27:50.9 EC: Jefferson and Franklin are two founders who were in different ways obsessed with time, but if you go to Jefferson’s estate, you will see that he has all these different timekeeping devices, he was fascinated by time, he had very, very particular views on how the timekeeping devices should be placed, so people working freely and not freely on his property were aware of time, but he also had views about lifespan and his view was that the dead should never rule over the living, and so we should be able… In various ways, this was actually a view he held about the Constitution, but it also applies to the different institutions created by the Constitution, that things should expire, political arrangements should expire and be either recreated or not recreated by the people who actually have to live under them, and so we should be renewing or remaking our institutions and the people in those institutions, and he was using actuarial calculations of lifespan at the time, say every 35 years or so, we ought to be rethinking everything because all the people who will have to live under these rules will be new to it.
0:29:09.2 EC: And didn’t consent to it.
0:29:11.4 SC: That’s super fascinating to me. I talked about something related with Astro Taylor in an early podcast episode, the idea that people have wills, they can people… So if we can’t be ruled, if the dead shouldn’t rule over the living, a lot of living people who want to rule over future generations, and then you can ask the question, Why should we ever let that… And I get the argument against it, but I also get an argument for it, namely that right now, I care about what I imagine things are gonna be like in the future, it goes back to this planning thing, so it’s less… The dead ruling over the living than the living, thinking that their present actions will be affecting things in good or bad ways toward the future, I think that’s actually okay, so I don’t know where I come down on this philosophical issue.
0:30:00.5 EC: Well, an interesting question for people to pose to themselves, and this isn’t something I’ve worked on, but I do think about it is like, what are you entitled to after you’re dead? And there’s all these property… I’m kind of trying to teach myself some stuff about intellectual property for this purpose, but I think there’s all these intellectual property rules about that extend past our lifespan, and then there’s other rules that apply it to our other more material goods, that kind of reach beyond our lives, but a very fundamental question is why are we entitled to have any say over these things after we are no longer in the world? So I didn’t really… I have problems with this, but I know there’s work being done now, basically making the argument that once you get to a certain age, your vote should count for less because you’re going to be making decisions that essentially have more… This relates to things like climate change in particular, you’re gonna make decisions knowing you don’t have to live with the consequences, and people might be very, very self… In fact, it does appear that people are short-sighted and selfish and that that’s not good, there’s all kinds of reasons have to do with ages that I think that’s not justifiable probably, but it is something to think about.
0:31:27.0 SC: It’s absolutely something to about… And I get the argument for it. I think I agree with you, there’s probably not a good idea to decrement peoples the… Amount by people’s votes matter, but we also have the fact that young people just don’t vote nearly as much, and maybe that’s a more solvable part of the problem.
0:31:44.6 EC: Agreed. Yeah. Hopefully, we’re working on it.
0:31:47.5 SC: Yeah, we’re working on it. I also don’t wanna quite let go the idea that Jefferson and Franklin were fascinated by time because they were fascinated by the time, and also they were kind of sciencey, they were thinkers and builders and inventors, and I wonder if there’s an explicit connection there. On a completely different subject, Peter Gerdis in the historian of science, has made the point that Einstein and Poincare, two of the founders of relativity…
0:32:17.7 SC: Were influenced by very down to earth things. Einstein worked in a patent office where clocks were the most common invention that he was judging for patents and Poincare worked in the Bureau of longitude where they were trying to figure out how to make maps, figuring out where you are in the world, and these experiences with operationalizing time and space influence their philosophical and scientific ideas, and I’m wondering if similar things politically with Jefferson and Franklin, and the fact that they cared about mapping the world in space and time affected how they thought about it politically.
0:32:53.8 EC: Yeah, I think it’s a moment… Not a brief moment, but it’s a moment in human history in which the idea that we could make our lives better and more secure if we can predict the future, we can not just plan better, but we can be more secure in the present, if we project out into the future, that’s a whole part, I think, of the Scientific Revolution, to give people some political philosophy background on this, there’s a great unwieldy book called The Machiavellian moment by JGA Pocock, in which he goes through Machiavelli’s writings and shows that Machiavelli is justifying all kinds of sacrifices, and in some cases like Hobs, an autocrat and pretty harsh autocracy, just to be able to escape what they call the… What Machiavelli calls Fortuna. So when people’s lives are ruled by Fortuna is luck embodied, and this woman and this kind of wild woman figure of a wild woman who just randomly sends disasters and chaos your way, if we can just get to the point where we’re at least on cycles and cycles come back, so we know some bad things are gonna happen and then we’re gonna start the cycle over and we’ll put some things into place, but if we can at least get into a moment where we cycle…
0:34:44.4 EC: Our lives will be better because we know what’s coming, and that’s vastly preferable to the random, but I think once you fast forward to the 18th century, you’re looking at actuarial work, predicting people’s life spans, predicting weather, so that ships can do things and predicting… Well, predicting the likelihood that a ship would be able to make a crossing without losing its cargo or its crew, so insurance is starting to come out, and insurance is huge, once you can insure you do all sorts of things, including some pretty dramatically terrible things with human cargo, with enslaved people. But it’s just, it has a profound impact on the economy, but also turns us into people who are economizing at every level of thinking about human life.
0:35:47.2 SC: Yeah, and it’s… The moment of history thing is kind of important, I guess, and I don’t really appreciate it as much as I should, but the simultaneous tracks of improvement in science and technology and progress in liberal and democratic theory is something people have commented on before, and I don’t know if we’ve completely figured that out, is there are consensus there is one feeding the other, or are they both coincidental or… What do we think about that?
0:36:18.6 EC: I think a kind of accessible way to think about that question is to say that a lot of people do not believe that you can separate out liberalism and capitalism, and capitalism is really the outcome of that predictive moment, right? Not only does liberalism make possible property, and the idea that you can in contract, you have to have some liberal rights in order for people to be able to contract and expect the state will enforce the contracts, and that itself is kind of a stake in the future because you’re anticipating how things will… A contract is future-oriented, but liberalism, capitalism are these children that grow up together and they need each other. Liberalism is somewhat parasitic on the things, the kind of growth that capitalism allows or promises, and capitalism is very much dependent on a liberal state that thinks of the unit as the individual and cares about property and rights…
0:37:39.0 SC: Right. Good. Okay. So there’s a lot of other aspects of time in politics we still haven’t gotten to yet. So I don’t wanna… We can get down these rabbit holes, but going back to… Probably not the constitution, but sort of how we arrange the role of time in our particular democracies that we have today. One of the sets of issues is when… At what age you’re allowed to do things, right. You’re allowed to drink, you’re allowed to get married, you’re allowed to drive a car, you’re allowed to serve in the army. And they’re not always in some sense, consistent with each other, like you’re usually able to serve in the army long before you’re able to drink, and at least in some places. Again, what is the… What is the philosophy of this? What is the sensibility or the justification that we have for these things? Is it like you said before, just a point that we can all not object to too loudly, or is there a more principle way of thinking about these age limits we put on things?
0:38:37.6 EC: Yeah, so just to take one step back I’ll say, age limits or deadlines, and all deadlines are arbitrary because one moment in time is not particularly different than another moment in time, so if we pick one moment, we say, “Here’s the moment you are allowed to drink alcohol,” it’s gonna be arbitrary. That said, there are thresholds, there are ways of us measuring, I think, types of development… Character development, that we think are necessary for people to responsibly engage in those activities or exercise those rights, and there’s almost no good reason in any individual case to say that 18 is the right age or right now, if people are following the news, there is some serious questions about child marriage in this country… [chuckle]
0:39:40.1 SC: It’s a little weird.
0:39:41.7 EC: In the headlines.
0:39:41.8 SC: Well, but sorry, I don’t wanna interrupt, but this is a wonderful example of how things have changed, right? Child marriage regulations that we would now think are appalling, just used to be very common. Right? And it’s another example where a lot of the argument proceeds by insinuation and rhetoric and emotion rather than really a principle philosophical stance. I’m not in favor of child marriage. I like the idea that, you’re not ready for that until in the modern world, you’re 18 or whatever. But we don’t do a very good job of explaining why.
0:40:18.6 EC: No, and all of those laws reflect biases. So the laws about consent to marriage or sex vary, they will be different for girls and boys, there have been on the books, laws that distinguish essentially between straight relationships and queer relationships and consent. We have also tried to, I think, incorporate some notion of power into laws that don’t make sex between people who are young and of a close age quite as much of a wrong as a 45-year-old seducing a 15-year-old. So we embed a lot of norms into these, but not always in a good way.
0:41:11.7 SC: Is there a way to do it right? Is there a way to sort of… Is there a utopia where we are more careful and reflective about what these numbers are?
0:41:21.8 EC: So in the 2018 book, the political value of time, that’s a book where I talk about temporal formula, and I say that time… I talk about the ways in which time is a bad proxy for things, but a better proxy still, it’s a flawed proxy, that’s better than some other proxies. So when I talk a lot about naturalization, I’m like, Yeah, I really don’t think we wanna go back to a blood base, purely blood-based system, and it’s not a good idea to make this available, we don’t really wanna transact using money, but here are all the ways in which time is also not good, and then I say, “Look, the naturalization laws in the United States are basically a temporal formula in which your time and residents, your character, your proficiency in English, your civic knowledge, all of these things actually are requirements,” and that’s a formula and time is only part of it, and we can adjust the time. And we adjust the formula, if you marry a US citizen, the time… The probationary period, time and residence is reduced. If you serve in the military, it’s reduced. If you serve on active duty, it goes down to basically zero.
0:42:31.9 EC: And so my answer to your question would be probably formula in which it’s not just time we’re relying on, because that can be an unreliable measure of the actual things that we want, the values we want to express. And when everything rests on one particular moment in time, you will always have an arbitrary outcome, and when you expand what’s included in that decision, it becomes less arbitrary, not necessarily perfect or not… It doesn’t… Not maybe not even good, but better opportunity.
0:43:01.8 SC: It’s an interesting point that even things that can be arbitrary, you can be useful or important or helpful, and you mentioned deadlines, which are perfectly arbitrary, I have a complicated relationship with deadlines, as many academics do.
[chuckle]
0:43:16.8 SC: I don’t like them, but maybe I would be less productive without them, it raises this issue that there’s a counterculture hippie feeling that we’re enslaved to clocks and demand and whatever, but clocks are important if you’re a social being, if you wanna coordinate, if you wanna have a podcast and say at 1:30 PM, we’re gonna have this podcast conversation that matters. So we have this love-hate relationship with time or maybe rhetorically hate, but practically useful relationship with it.
0:43:48.0 EC: Yeah, I think what you’re describing, and I deal with this all the time, is a subset of larger questions that we all have about constraining our liberty with authority, and the fact is we voluntarily give up certain types of liberty that we would otherwise have if we weren’t opting into political systems because we get something out of that, coordinating or coordinating has value, not just for efficiency sake, there’s value to being a part of a unit that’s functioning in sync. We’re a dysfunctional country right now…
[chuckle]
0:44:26.0 EC: But there’s an aspiration to coordinate in some way, so that if we say we’re going to have an election, and let’s say we don’t even choose a day, let’s just say we choose a longer period of time, but we are all engaged in a critical process of decision-making at that time together, and the time is what grounds us together, and we put deadlines into place because we need some kind of structure, we’re using a scientific essentially time to set our deadlines in some cases, but in other cases, we are not. So circadian rhythms or biological clocks aren’t… Aren’t human scientific time, those are looser natural forms of time. We’re not very sensitive to them in this country, so biological clocks often conflict with career aspirations in ways they don’t.
0:45:22.5 EC: We don’t need to be like that, but we have not invested much in accommodating career trajectories and biological clocks, we actually don’t care much about people circadian rhythms, which is pretty unhealthy thing.
[laughter]
0:45:36.1 EC: Right? So we could coordinate in other ways that aren’t so reliant on scientific time, but we do want to give up some of our liberty and coordinate, everybody is opting into that.
0:45:46.3 SC: Well, that brings up a great issue of election day, and then early voting. Early voting is increasingly an issue, there’s also online voting and related things, and one of the arguments I’ve heard against early voting is, “Well, what if there’s a terrible scandal the day before Election Day.” And that, I get it, but it never seemed like a very good argument. What if there’s a terrible scandal the day after election day, at some point we have to vote, and I’m not quite sure what to do, but I like the point that coordinating is an important part of that process. We can’t just all vote whatever day we want.
0:46:20.5 EC: Yeah, there are people, there’s good literature, there’s a great dentist Thomson piece from the early 2000s about election day and why election day is good, and in it, he’s like, “Well, if X, Y, and Z were to happen, my argument about why we need to all vote on the same day would probably… ” I’d have to retract it. And of course, X, Y, Z, and 1, 2, and 3 happened…
[chuckle]
0:46:44.6 EC: In 2016. We have rules, like we saw with the 2016 election, that there were rules about what kinds of actions could be taken really close to the election, so Comey got wrapped up in this idea that you can’t do certain things too close to an election. If we wanted to have a longer period of election, we could also allow people the opportunity to re-cast their vote, if new information comes up in that period, there are things we can do to give ourselves most of the benefits of a longer period of election or early voting and of being coordinated, but we’re not a country that likes change.
0:47:26.6 SC: That’s true. Is there a principal reason that we have election day rather than election week, other than it’d just be more costly?
0:47:34.0 EC: I honestly think this country did not have coordinated elections for most of the 19th century, and it was a real battle to get all the states electing, and at that point, the idea for reasons that really just aren’t as relevant anymore, like the idea that we could get ourselves coordinated…
[chuckle]
0:47:53.4 EC: After having been so uncoordinated, was so appealing and so obviously going to be useful that maybe we locked ourselves in a little bit.
0:48:02.0 SC: But we could imagine that it’s still coordinated, but nationwide, you have a week in which to cast your vote, and there’s already issues with election day being a week day and certain people therefore can’t do it. I don’t know, should we be thinking more freely about how to make this work to everyone’s benefit?
0:48:19.2 EC: Yes, absolutely, we should… Other countries have election day as a national holiday. So, at least some traditional forms of public sphere labor don’t interfere, we should be thinking about… We should be thinking about enfranchising as many people as possible, but we do live in a country where one party is benefiting immensely from disenfranchising and they are going to stand in the way of making those changes.
0:48:49.8 SC: Yeah, I’m enough of an ideal theorist, I’d like to imagine what we should do as well as what we can do…
0:48:54.8 EC: Yes.
0:48:55.6 SC: So that’s…
0:48:57.3 EC: I’m right there with you and yes, we should be changing that, we should probably getting rid of the senate, which is a disaster. But… [chuckle]
0:49:02.4 SC: I’m on board with that also. But the voting day, election day conversation brings up what I think is to me the most fascinating part of your book and your work, which is standing in line at election day, the cost of doing things politically and potentially doing important things as a citizen paying taxes once a year, et cetera, and the potential inequitable ways in which this cost of taking time to do things falls on different parts of society.
0:49:36.0 EC: Yeah, so there’s… I think two things embedded in your question first, is that we don’t all experience impositions on our time in the same way, and we should be sensitive to the fact that somebody who needs to work a certain number of hours or at a certain point is going to be disadvantaged, if they have to vote in person and wait in a long line, and here’s where we get back to your first question, I think it’s like, “Yeah, if our political institutions were more sensitive to time, that’s a no-brainer, we know.” The middle of the day is not the same thing for somebody who works as a nurse and somebody who works as a professor.
0:50:17.3 SC: Yeah. [chuckle]
0:50:20.7 EC: That’s just different types of schedules, and then the other element of your question is this standing in line, which is a different temporal issue, the idea that we often either need to or think we need to order people’s… The satisfaction of people’s claims that we need to do so in a particular order, and that the order in a line, as we traditionally define, a line is first come, first served. And that’s a separate temporal question that has all kinds of implications for how we relate to each other, that everybody in the audience, I think probably will know, because they have observed Western queuing or they have experienced Western queuing and we’re total crazy people in lines. [laughter]
0:51:09.6 EC: Or we’re predictable crazy people; there are ways you can predict how people behave and lines, but it’s not always good news.
0:51:14.7 SC: Well, let’s go more into that, ’cause I think the whole theory of queuing and waiting in lines and first come fist serve is again just like time itself, an under-appreciated thing, it’s all around us, but we don’t interrogate it very much. What’s the political theory of queuing?
0:51:31.4 EC: Okay, so I find… I find queuing interesting, partly, ’cause I’m the person who’s really upset in a line when somebody cuts the line or when I think I just have no control over that part of my personality, and I’m not even the good person who thinks there’s reasonable excuses for cutting in front of me. So a total bad actor here, but I’m also interested in immigration politics, and if you believe in first come first served, you are essentially setting up a very, very good explanation for why we should be nativist, because any natives argument is, I was here first, or this people… We were here first, we have claimed to this and you new comers, you immigrants need to get in line and go to the back of the line. And go to the back of the line is something we have heard over and over again with respect to undocumented immigrants in the United States who have been here in many cases for long periods of time, just trying to get some kind of political status recognition. You also see it in Europe, particularly in the UK, which I guess technically is now not Europe. [chuckle]
0:52:44.7 EC: But you’ll see it across the pond with regard to asylum seekers, particularly prior to conflict in Ukraine, when we were talking about non-white asylum seekers, so nativist is like, “Yeah, it’s fine. I got here first.” That’s the basis also for intellectual property, which we talked about informally. Intellectual property, as I thought of it first, or I got my patent first and it’s mine now, we’re very attached to that, but not always with good outcomes.
0:53:17.6 SC: So okay, so I get the movie made here because I’m in favor of… If I’m standing in line at McDonalds, whoever is in line first, gets served first, but what you’re saying is that this is a principle that we could lively spread across all sorts of very different contexts and use it to basically justify what otherwise we would think of as injust behavior… Unjust behavior or inequities of some sort.
0:53:47.1 EC: Yeah, so if you’re… I’m also like you, I want my McDonald’s in the order in which I lined up for it. If you wanna stay the McDonald’s queuer, then one thing you can do is say to the nativist, [chuckle] “You actually were not here first…
0:54:04.8 SC: Well, yes. [chuckle]
0:54:04.9 EC: And we know it.” But I’m not sure that’s the best move. I think the best move is to say that we queue when we have to give things out in order, which is not the case with citizenship, we do not… There’s not a scarcity of citizenship. So we could give out a whole bunch of citizenship simultaneously, and it would not matter at all. These are people who are here, in many cases, they are already paying taxes, they get nothing from those taxes, which is not fair, but it would not change much from the perspective of the nativist, except they’re just angry about that, but McDonald… Being served at McDonalds particularly during rush hour actually is scarce, there’s just not enough people behind the counter to get to everybody at the same time. And then you just wanna say like, “Okay, we have to do some kind of ordering here, and is first come first serve the best.”
0:55:01.2 EC: And I guess I would say if somebody rushes up in a moment of low blood sugar, let’s say I have a type 1 diabetic in my family, they should not have to apply the rule of first come first served, and unlike if it’s explained to even me the irrationally angry line stander. I will actually be like, “No, please go ahead. I do not want you to be hospitalized, get your food in you ASAP.” Right? So again, we need to not be rigid, unless there’s absolutely no… A lottery would be fine too. If it doesn’t matter what order we get things, then first come, first serve is probably gonna be fine, but I do remember just one coder here. We get attached to our place in line, so I have a lot to say about how we start to feel our place in line as our property, and it will change you. Once you’ve waited in a line, you will have feelings about just your place in line and the other people around you that don’t go away, so we really wanna be careful putting ourselves into queues.
0:56:05.0 SC: Or driving in traffic in Los Angeles and things like that.
[laughter]
0:56:08.5 EC: Things I will not do.
0:56:12.6 SC: Okay. But I don’t wanna miss the other part of this, which is that our government asks us to do things that take time. So there’s the queuing thing, but then there’s also the filling in my tax forms or queuing at the DMV for that matter, and regardless of where I am in the line, I still gotta wait. And that’s a burden, and how… I mean, I take one of your lessons to be, we don’t at least think about that burden as explicitly as we should.
0:56:40.4 EC: Yeah, I mean, there’s two kinds of waiting, there’s rules that are just going to say, you have to wait, like the probationary period for immigrants or people who are incarcerated, right? Like, there’s a rule saying you can’t have your full citizenship right now, you’re gonna have to wait, and this is how long you’re gonna have to wait, and here’s why. And then there are circumstances like taxes in which the government’s like, here’s the thing you have to do. And you come to the realization that, “Oh my God, this is a really time-consuming thing, or it’s messing up my time in some way, I can’t use my time the way I want to or my time is polluted.” And with respect to the first, I think it’s really important that we have good justifications from making people wait for things, we don’t always have good justifications, except this is how we’ve always done it. And it’s very important that we treat similarly situated people as… Treat their time as similarly valuable, and that’s something we don’t do well in this country.
0:57:37.3 SC: Right.
0:57:41.3 EC: So, a classic example is the crack cocaine versus powder cocaine disparities and penalties from the early ’90s, which was clearly a facially neutral, did not mention race, but was intended to create a racial disparity in which more black people were incarcerated for longer periods of time than white people, because there was an actually totally erroneous belief that white people used powdered cocaine and black people used and sold salt rock form of cocaine. When we don’t treat people’s time as if it’s equal when they’re similarly situated, we are saying time… We’ve assigned moral value to time. When we punish, there’s a moral value implied by that punishment, and when similarly-situated people have their time treated differently, that’s like you… Your time has moral value, you are morally unequal to this other person. That’s a problem, that’s something the liberal state cannot justify doing.
0:58:41.8 EC: On the flip side, the taxes, and I’m just getting into this now, but like, that is a very obvious waste of our time, and I do not believe it is the kind of intentional obstacle… The taxes in particular are… I don’t think it was… There’s an intentional thing going on there. It’s now being exploited by like into it, is that right? Yeah, TurboTax, they’re exploiting it. But this is a feature of modernity that there’s a lot of administrative burden and it’s being weaponized, but the problem I think, is that it’s there to weaponize. And it’s a particularly stinging thing to realize that your own government has wasted your time [chuckle] and it’s happening a lot and more and more. And I think that because our time has value and we know it has value, we ought to actually have rights about not having our time wasted by our… Especially by our own government, but I’m also not a Verizon that I’ve had to call them six times to get my bill corrected. [laughter] So, also private entities as well.
0:59:47.0 SC: Well, I have read on the Internet, so it must be true, but I haven’t actually looked into it, that the government easily could just do the taxes of large numbers, probably the majority of American citizens. Like, they know, the government knows how much taxes you owe, but they ask you to do it yourself, anyway. And the justification given in my seeing things on Twitter research is that companies like H&R Block and other tax preparation companies lobby, do not let the government do people’s taxes. I have no idea whether that’s true or not.
1:00:24.4 EC: Yeah. I fully believe this is true…
1:00:26.6 SC: Okay.
1:00:27.2 EC: Because I also read it on the Internet. If two of us read it on the Internet, it must be true, but also because…
1:00:31.3 SC: Verification, yeah.
1:00:31.6 EC: I’ve seen people describe the lobbying money that’s gone into this, but that was there for them to exploit. There wasn’t always a TurboTax. TurboTax didn’t come up with the idea that we should do our own taxes, right? That’s a product of decision-making at the federal level. And it’s become really burdensome and TurboTax is profiting. But the problem is that the state made this decision and has made taxes burdensome. And we could do away with that. We could also… You know, the State also makes it very difficult to do things like pay certain types of… To deal with misdemeanors, right? So misdemeanors are kind of an unappreciated administrative burden that falls more heavily on people of colour in the United States, but very often you’re gonna have to deal with the consequences of a misdemeanor by going somewhere, right? And you may be have to take very poor public transportation to get there and you’re probably interrupting work hours that your boss is not okay with you interrupting and views it as your fault, ’cause of the misdemeanor clearly is something you did.
1:01:44.1 EC: You definitely were not charged with the misdemeanor falsely, that would never happen in this country. [laughter] But there we’re wasting people’s time too, and the consequences are much, much worse than they are for me who just is struggling to get the taxes done, because that’s eviction and that’s losing a job and that’s maybe losing custody of your kids, so it’s a real quick downward slide.
1:02:10.0 SC: Well, it is interesting. It goes back to where you started with the incommensurability of time versus other things. I mean, there’s an equation in science that says Time is Money, [chuckle] and basically if you have a lot of money, you can get things done that cost a lot of other people time, right? And that’s kind of… I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but how do you feel about the idea that that’s a fundamental inequity, and we’re treating different people’s time differently because they’re wealthier or poor, which is not anything we could imagine justifying from some principle position. It’s just how things work in society and you put up with it?
1:02:46.8 EC: Yeah. I mean, so this is really interesting, and there’s a philosopher named Michael Sandel who’s talked about this, he’s written a book called What Money Can’t Buy, kind of arguing against a lot of the ways in which affluent people are able to buy back time. The example he uses, which is of course of interest to me is paying line standards and paying for better highway lanes. I don’t live somewhere where you can opt-in to faster highway. Yeah.
[chuckle]
1:03:17.7 SC: I do.
[chuckle]
1:03:17.7 EC: So I haven’t experienced…
1:03:19.2 SC: But I do.
1:03:22.7 EC: We’re real Democrats here in New Jersey…
1:03:26.4 SC: Yeah.
1:03:27.2 EC: Everybody hates, unless you’ve got a helicopter to bring you 15 miles. But the argument is… That he makes is that there are certain democratic goods that you just should not be able to buy access to, and essentially, if you can pay a line standard to wait to talk to your congressman, then you’ve really bypassed the whole idea. And he also says it about, I don’t know, this is his own affection, but baseball tickets. Like, [chuckle] this is the national past time, you should have to wait in line for your tickets.
1:03:56.6 SC: Yeah.
1:03:57.1 EC: You should not be able to buy your way. And there’s something to that, but at the same time, there’s something to be said for trying to move outside of the state of mind that suggests that everybody has time. So he’s like, Yes, you should have to wait in line, and he doesn’t… Because he doesn’t want affluent people buy their way, by their access, but you know, there… Affluent people may have time, but they don’t wanna spend it that way. But lots and lots of people who aren’t affluent don’t have time, and so, will end up disadvantaged either way. And economists love to use like you showed up in time to get something as a proxy for how much you want it, but that’s just not how people in the real world experience having to get to downtown to City Hall, right when they open, so you don’t have to wait to pay your fine or whatever. People really struggle to be able to use their time the way they need to, and that’s not something we need to… That has to be, it doesn’t have to be that way.
1:05:08.2 SC: And am I remembering correctly, I think from your book that it’s kind of obvious that there are wealth-based disparities, and how much time it takes to do certain things. And probably just as obviously there are racial disparities, but I think there is something weird about how wealthy black people required a huge amount of time to get a mortgage or do other things, like, much more than you would expect from the socio-economic class.
1:05:36.1 EC: Yeah, so this is actually… You saw this elsewhere, there’s this guy, a wonderful public administration scholar at the University of Albany, Stephen Holt, who took a look at some time use data and realized that in fact, even if you’re pretty well off in the United States, if you’re a person of color, particularly a black American, many, many activities that we have to engage in in our day-to-day lives, will just take you longer. So one example is, as you said, waiting for mortgages, right? We have long-standing disparities and access to real estate and property in the United States based on race that go back to Jim Crow. We were also kind of speculating that commuting times may be longer if you’re forced to have to take roots that aren’t efficient, because those roots will be less likely to bring you into excessive police encounters, which is something black Americans uniformly report as a really big problem in their lives. We’ve seen this over and over again. So money isn’t… Money isn’t the only source of power in society, and race is a really important factor in distributing power in the United States.
1:07:07.4 SC: Another one where we can imagine what the utopia will look like, but it’s gonna be hard to get there in any small number of steps. So, as we’re winding up, you’ve alluded to a bunch of ways in which the world is kind of harder to navigate than it should be, because it takes more time to do things and so forth, and I’m just gonna out you… ‘Cause you said on Twitter that your next book is gonna be called Why Nothing Works, [laughter] or at least you were thinking about that. [chuckle] You were joking.
1:07:38.2 EC: Okay, I was… I wasn’t committed to the project till I saw how many people were willing to pre-order my book and then I got dollar signs in my eyes.
[chuckle]
1:07:43.8 SC: Well, I know that, yeah, you’ve been writing academic books, I think this is time to write a trade book because yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing. Everyone knows that nothing works, or TV sets, our computers. You and I had to struggle to get this recording done in ways that seem unnecessary, right? Like, of course, some things like light bulbs or burnout or whatever, our cars will need maintenance, but it seems like more often than is necessary, things don’t work, and it’s at least philosophically related to the question of time being wasted, but… I mean, do you have or would you be seeking a theory of why nothing [chuckle] works? Is this the malaise of modernity or is it just the nature of the universe?
1:08:33.4 EC: I don’t think it’s the nature of the universe. I really believe that we have not valued our time, that there’s nobody whose responsibility it is to value our time. It is just not on the agenda in the same way that SNAP benefits or abortion access are. And both of those are related to time, like, if you can use access your SNAP benefits easily, and they do what you need to do and you don’t live in a grocery desert, something that take that much time just acquiring the things it takes to feed your family, that happens. Abortion access is in many… It means… It represents many, many types of freedom, but one is the opportunity to decide when somebody is going to be pregnant, which is a pretty big temporal commitment. You know, people would like to choose when they’re pregnant, and that entails protecting the ways in which that happens.
1:09:44.7 EC: So, I don’t think this is just the way things have to be, but I also think that we’re often trying to solve problems without thinking about the consequences they have for our time. So we think about SNAP benefits as like, nutrition, even though there is a temporal component there. And we think about abortion as like a values conflict that’s, are you Pro-Life or are you in favor of everyone’s right to choose. But time rarely comes up in that, and that I think that… The fact that… And this gets back to liberal theory, the fact that there never was any explicit theorizing about our time causes us to overlook the temporal consequences of decisions. And so outsourcing… It’s super cheap and efficient to outsource customer service, if you don’t care about people’s time.
[laughter]
1:10:38.9 EC: And nobody’s compelling Verizon to care about my time. In contrast, I had two flights cancelled. I was flying back to New Jersey on Monday, and I knew… I know it’s hard to access, but there is actually an air travelers Bill of Rights that at a certain point, the amount of time you’ve been idling in a plane entitles you to some things and cancellations and not being able to get out of somewhere for particular reasons for a particular amount of time, will entitle you to something. And really, that concept needs to be expanded. If Verizon makes me call back over and over again and wait on hold, I should be entitled to something, they took my time.
1:11:22.5 SC: Yeah. So in some sense, a lot of this… I don’t wanna trivialize it, but a lot of this is about consciousness raising. Like, letting people know that time really is valuable and being… Not feeling cheap, just to say, wait, you know, that actually matters, the time that I’m spending on the phone or in line or traveling to some place I don’t wanna be ’cause I need to do something, that should really be valued.
1:11:45.9 EC: Yeah, and we know it when it’s happening to us, it’s enraging, right? But we don’t… If… That has to translate into some kind of political rights to something, and that hasn’t happened.
1:11:57.3 SC: In my book, The Big Picture, I emphasize the fact that the typical… The average, not everyone’s, but the average human lifespan is three billion heartbeats.
1:12:06.3 EC: Okay.
1:12:06.8 SC: Which is not a lot of heart beats, right? Like, it’s a big number, but it’s not an infinite number, and that’s very, very finite and people wasting my heart beats is something that I have a right to be upset about.
[chuckle]
1:12:16.9 EC: Absolutely, yeah.
1:12:20.5 SC: Let’s hope that the world gets better at it. And I think that you’re pushing them in the right direction. So Elizabeth Cohen, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. This was great.
1:12:28.2 EC: Thank you for having me. It was such a pleasurable discussion to have with you.
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Hi Sean, love your work! Are you aware of that there still are laws in the US that allow for childhood marriages if the parents consent to it. There are cases of women who have been married to a man when they were minors and later on broke out of that relationship. If you want to know more I can dig up the reports on that, cheers, hannsx
Hi Sean your interviewing techniques are amazing, Nearly two hundred conversations and each one of them fresh and mind provoking, all of them conducted in a relaxed and productive atmosphere.
I have one question for you, Could it be useful to apply a theory of entropy to the subject of politics and time? Our future is insecure, we have little to no knowledge about it, If we view politics as a means to provide us with some legal and administrative structures to reduce insecurities, in a sense lowering entropy, could it be qualified as work in the sense of physics? And if this holds any merit, perhaps the study of history could be seen as data analysis on entropy and the arrow of time and the effect on society? Just some crazy questions your latest podcast made me think about.
In Sweden the tax process is highly automated for regular tax payers (essentially employed people).
You go to a web page and authenticate using a digital identity (currently managed by a commonly owned bank service).
You review your tax return details, make changes if needed, and finally sign your tax statement electronically.
This process is based on employers sending preliminary income statements to the tax authorities.
I get the impression that the US tax system isn’t very customer oriented.
A US doctor friend who worked a number of years in Sweden, Denmark and Norway,has also noted that the amount of bureaucracy in the US in comparison is enormous.