Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 199 | Elizabeth Cohen on Time and Other Political Values

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

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. Support Mindscape on Patreon. 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. Web page Google Scholar publications Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

On this episode of Plant Killers, we'll explore one nation's most notorious fruit and vegetable killer, Bad Dirt. What makes Bad Dirt so bad? The answer? The ingredients. But fear not, true crime enthusiasts. This story has a happy ending. Miracle Grow organic raised bed and garden soil. It's made with quality organic ingredients from upcycled green waste like compost and aged bark. Unlike the other guys who can't say the same, looks like Bad Dirt's murdering days are over. Thanks to Miracle Grow. Join us next time on plant killers. Post-partum, depression, or PPD. Consistently sad. Loss of interest. Numb. Alone. Irritable. Empty. Hopeless. Anxious. Exhausted. These aren't even all the symptoms. And it's different for every woman. PPD is a real medical condition and there is treatment available.

Trust what you're feeling. Talk to a doctor. And visit treatpd.com to learn more. Sponsored by Supernus and Biogen. 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 going to say, I mean, there's some connection between time and politics, because there's a connection between time and everything, right? Time is. 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 in politics, but we've been under-theorizing it. There are a lot of questions we should be asking about exactly this question. 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, right? 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 the 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, right? 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. Are democracies better or worse at long-term planning than non-democratic governments are? And finally, or maybe not finally, because 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 line 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, right? 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 ways in which we allocate people time in office, right? 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. Elizabeth Cohen, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you so much. It's really exciting to be here with you. Well, it's great to talk about time, because 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 about the political value of time. What is special about the political value of time versus any other value of time? I mean, one of the favorite anecdotes is that time is the most used noun in the English language. You know, time is. Time is. everywhere? Why is the political version of it or care about it, something we should pay special attention to? 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 Neocontians and Democratic theory as well, we'll see all sorts of discussions about fairness with respect to material goods, you know, 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. And so all of the things, that we've done, you know, liberalism is very interested in protecting a certain set of rights. And we argue within liberal theory about what what accomplishes that best or how to order those rights, which are actually most important. But, but it's all going to unfold in time. And time's going to matter to whether we realize the goals that we argue about and, and defend. And it's,

it's a finite resource. And so, you know, there's, yeah, like, Once we've messed up in some way that affects either how much time people have or their experience of that time, there's absolutely no way to correct that wrong. It is to use a term that I find very useful. It's an incommensurable good, right? Like, you know, 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 going to correct what happened because it's not giving them their time back. And we absolutely, you know, cannot do that in almost any imagined, you know, 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. 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 know, you can't give restitution for people losing. their time. You're doing your best to make up for it, but you can't give them their time back literally. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, it's interesting. I'm, 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, 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 would, It wasn't yet famous. 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. Like, 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, you know, to elaborate. I don't want to, like, take us down a rabbit hole, but on exactly what has gone wrong that this has happened in political. theory. But you've alluded to something, I think it would be fun to dive into a little bit more

deeply just to sort of explain the groundwork, like, where are these other people coming from? Because you talk about liberal theory and democratic theory. And I bet that to a lot of people on the street, these sound like the same thing. They're clearly not the same thing. So what's going on there? Good, 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 kind of core claims to which people are entitled or that core claims people are entitled to make very, very relevant to what I want to say is that it is characteristic of people to make plans.

That is 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 going to happen next. And it is inevitable that people are going to try for some things 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 Hobbs.

Like he's a proto-liberal. I mean, that guy is not a democratic theorist. He likes a good, strong monarch. He is just concerned that our lives not be nasty, solitary, brutish, and quite critically to what we're talking about here, short. Short, short in time. 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 like so institutional arrangements like, you know, bicameralism versus unicameralism, how many houses should we have in our parliament. But also, you know, what is a representation? What does it mean to be represented? Does it mean you have to actually like 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, as, you know, some kind of representative for you, things like that. So that's how I think about those two things. So just to see whether or I get it. Liberalism more about the rights of the individual, a sort of more individual focused and then democratic theory more about the structures that we particularly use to let those individuals govern themselves? I think that's a good way of thinking about it. I would just add liberalism, like looks at, tries to kind of distill justifications for freeing,

like for freeing people for liberty based on what we know about human beings. So we know human beings, you know, seek autonomy and, and don't like to be completely dominated. A classic, you know, Kantian liberal tenant would be that you are your own end. You are never a means to somebody else's end

because that's, you know, tantamount to enslavement. And we can't justify, you know, enslaving ourselves. We don't seek to enslave ourselves. So there's all 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. Good. Got it. I mean, you mentioned planning. I don't want to let this go before just delving into that a little bit more because it's a preoccupation of both mine and 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 will just mention that a recent podcast is with Franz de Wall, 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. Yeah.

And, you know, 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 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 that I myself have not produced it. But there's some really good philosophers working in that area. This June, the world comes to Los Angeles.

Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA Fan Festival of the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Watch matches live on Giant Scream. Feel every goal with thousands of fans and celebrate with music, culture, and flavors from around the world. Join us June 11th through 14th opening weekend as the tournament kicks off in Los Angeles. Tickets are just $10 and kids under 12 are free. Get yours now at Los Angeles FWC26.com. The next 30 seconds could save you hundreds on your car insurance.

At the Hartford, we're passionate about your protection. If you're 50 or over AARP auto insurance from the Hartford gives you benefits that really matter and you could save $597 when you switch. How's that for a little peace of mind? Visit trusthartford.com today. The Hartford, your protection is our passion. The Hartford Insurance Group, Inc. Pays Royalty fees to AARP for the use of its intellectual property. AARP and its affiliates are not insurers.

Savings vary. Yeah, it's very tricky to me because on the one hand, I don't think the animals should be full citizens. 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. 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 like this is a justifiable practice, you know, factory farming or something like that. So it's quite an interesting field of work. 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, you know, boots on the ground, time is important for, political thought. I mean, 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 like literal combat going on, but there's always also a discussion of ideas on top of it, right? Like, what justifies this? Why are we doing it? And part of it is the history, right? It was Ukraine a separate country. Has it always been? What came first? And time is an important part of that. I presume

that's one of the ways in which time is kind of crucial politically. Yeah. So sovereignty conflicts are really interesting for people who work in time. And, you know, one thing to keep in mind is that any sense of a nation, both the kind of imagined community idea that like we have a story and we are a people. and then that just bare bones 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. You know, that cannot happen. There's always, always history there. So a reference to the past. But with sovereignty, you know, 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, like, you know, when it came into existence. And kind of 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 because I'm interested in citizenship. And Calvin's case was like, yikes, we've united the Scottish and the English thrones. But that creates a sovereign, a king. And like, that's who 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, like, people ended up in court because they're, we were born before this, 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 porn, what's our status? And the case decides essentially, no, you're not subjects of the king. Like, 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 because they 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 because this is like a lot of people and they need some status. And so you're not a natural born subject, but you can

make you natural. When was this case? What year are we talking? Oh, this is way, way back in the 14th century. 14th century. Okay. It was a long time ago. But then, I mean, it's not that hard for those of us in the U.S., for example, where I'm most familiar with what's happening, 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 how old did you have to be to vote and all that stuff?

This is the question. And I just love this whole what happened because it is such, it so flies in the face of all the kind of claims that nativists in 2020. to want to make. It just upsets everything that people who really want to believe in the idea that there are clear boundaries that conform to nativist assumptions and conclusions. So it's super, first of all, there's really no agreement on the date of the founding in the United States because there's multiple points, right? There's a declaration, there's a war, 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's state constitutions as well. And so there are two stories here

about what happened that I think are really interesting. The first is that, 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? Right? And like 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. Like, they either want to inherit property or they want to pass property down. This was the gatekeeping mechanism of citizenship. We don't think of, we think of like voting and things like that. But really, in the early modern cases, it's all about property. And if you really, if you really weren't a citizen, you probably were not going to be able to inherit or pass down property. So this guy goes to court. And Daniel Cox is his name. He goes to court and I think he wanted like some land from his aunt.

I actually, I can't remember like the exact conflict, but like there's land involved. And he's like, you know, I was a loyalist. Like I fought against this country. Here I am in the court. Like, please give me citizenship. And the court comes up with a very different answer than in Calvin's case. They say like, oh, well, you're from New Jersey, of course. Like all important people are.

You're from New Jersey. People might know I'm in New Jersey right now. They'll get. They'll figure it out. And like, New Jersey just ratified the Constitution. You cannot have not known this. Like, 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 in New Jersey. You knew this was happening. We're going to see that. And I use the term lived consent. That period of time was a spruce. 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 up as well, you would have left.

That's what people do. They vote with their feet. But you didn't. You stayed. And we're going to 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 yeah no we definitely will but it just reminds me of right there in the constitution there are i mean time comes up right like and you have to be 35 years old to be president isn't that isn't that right uh and that's yeah kind of made up i don't know what why did they choose that number so i actually have a pretty extensive

argument that we choose these numbers and like 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 like, and two things are going on. They may have a different threshold, Right. So some people might think it should be, you know, 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 like gone through their full productive, you know, 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 they, 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. Right. So like 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 like, experience and wisdom in that 35. And if somebody's out there like yammering on about, you know, this person needs to just have made this much money and we think it's about, about age 35, they're going to have that much property or money or whatever. Like, you need to just not deal with that because it's going to 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. Yeah, I mean, 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 for agreeing on the policy are completely incompatible. 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 like something qualitative, it makes it much easier for people to engage the fiction that the number is what they wanted to mean. Whereas if we use words, then we are going to really get ourselves into trouble.

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. Yeah, yeah. I truly think if there were therapists around,

they would have a problem with this system of like just sweeping everything under the rug of numbers. and dates and ages and quantities of time, they would be like, no, this is super unhealthy. Maybe what's unhealthy for a person is not unhealthy for a polity in some sense. I probably agree. But the other place, obviously, where such temporal intervals come in to the Constitution, is lengths of terms, right, for four years for the president,

two years of representative, six years for senators, life for members of the Supreme Court. And there's an arbitrariness there also. it always seemed weird. The six years is what seemed weird to me for senators, right? Like two years, I don't know why that makes sense. And four years, maybe that makes sense. And six years just seem to be bizarre. 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 like very, you know, 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 long time. And so I, you know, to get into all the

negotiations would take us too long, but I'll just give like a little tidbit that I have, once I learned it, always found interesting. And that's, you know, a big player in these, a lot of these discussions is Jefferson. 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, 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. I mean, 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, you know, 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 like 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 and didn't consent to it. I mean, that's super fascinating to me. I talked about something related with Astra Taylor in an early podcast episode,

the idea that people have wills. So if we can't be ruled, dead shouldn't rule over the living. A lot of living people who want to rule over future generations, right? And 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 going to be like in the future. It goes back to this planning thing, right? 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. 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 as like, how, what are you entitled to after you're dead? And with, you know, there's all these property. I'm kind of trying to teach myself some stuff about intellectual property for, 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 to our other, you know, more material goods about, you know, that kind of reach beyond our lives. But like a very fundamental question is why are we entitled to have any say over these things after we are no longer in the world? Yeah.

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, you know, this relates to things like climate change in particular, like you're going to 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 that that's not good. There's all kinds of reasons have to do with ageism that I think that's, you know, not justifiable probably, but it is something to think about. It's absolutely something

to think about it. I get the argument for it. I think I agree with you that it's probably not a good idea to decrement people's, uh, the amount by which people's votes matter. But we also have the fact that young people just don't vote nearly as much, right? And maybe that's a more solvable part of the problem. Agreed. Yeah. Hopefully we're working on it. Yeah, we're working on it. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audio Book Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary. Massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get tears. as I'm narrating some of these sections, and it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.

But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Eursay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I also don't want to quite let go the idea that Jefferson and Franklin were fascinated by time because they were fascinated by time. And also they were kind of sciencey, right?

They were tinkers and builders and inventors. And I wonder if there's an explicit connection there. On a completely different subject, you know, Peter Gallison, the historian, science has made the point that Einstein and Poincere, two of the founders of relativity, 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 Poincerey 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

influenced their philosophical and scientific ideas. And I'm wondering if similar things politically with Jefferson and Franklin, the fact that they cared about mapping the world in space and time affected how they thought about it politically. 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. Like we can we can not just plan better, but we can, you know, be more secure in the present if we project out into the future. Like 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.

J. G. G.A. Pocock in which he goes through Machiavelli's writings and shows that Machiavelli is justifying all kinds of sacrifices. And in some case, like Hobbs, you know, an autocrat and pretty kind of harsh autocracy, just to be able to escape what they call, what Machiavelli calls Fortuna. So when people's lives are ruled by like Fortuna is is luck embodied in kind of this woman and this kind of wild woman figure of a wild woman who just you know randomly sends disasters and chaos your way. If we can just get to the point where we're at least on cycles, right? And cycles come back. So we know like some bad things are going to happen and then we're going to 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, our lives will be better because we know what's coming. And, you know, that's vastly preferable to the random. But I think once you fast forward to the 18th century, you're looking at actuarial work, right? Predicting people's lifespans. predicting weather so that ships can, you know, do things and predicting like, well, predicting like 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 about and insurance is huge, right? 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. Yeah. And it's a, 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 democracy. 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 a consensus there? Is one feeding the other? Are they both coincidental? Or what do we think about that? I mean, I think, you know, 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, like the outcome of that predictive moment, right? Like it not only does liberalism make possible property and the idea that you can in contract, right? Like 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 but liberalism capitalism are like these children that grow up together and and they need each other right like you liberalism is somewhat parasitic on on the things the kind of growth that capitalism allows or or promises and and capitalism

is very much dependent on a liberal state that thinks of the unit as the individual and cares about property and rights. Right. Good. Okay. So, who, there's a lot of other aspects of time in politics we still haven't gotten to yet. So I don't want to, I mean, we can get done 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,

at least in some places. Again, 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 sort of a point of, that we can all not object to too loudly, or is there a more principled way of thinking about these age limits we put on things? Yeah. So, I mean, just to take one step back, I'll say age limits are deadlines and all deadlines are arbitrary, right? Because like one moment in time is not particularly different than another moment in time. So if we pick one moment, we say, like, here's the moment you are allowed to drink alcohol.

it's going to be arbitrary. That said, there are thresholds, like 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, you know, there's almost no good reason in any. individual case to say that 18 is the right age, you know, or, you know, right now, if people are following the news, there's some serious questions about child marriage in this country. It's a little weird, yeah.

In the headlines. Well, but sorry, but I mean, I don't want to interrupt, but this is a wonderful example of how things have changed, right? Like, you know, child marriage regulations that we would now think are kind of 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 principled philosophical stance. I'm not in favor of child marriage. I like the idea that, you know, 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. No. And, you know, all of those laws reflect biases, right? 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 like sex between people who are young and of a close age quite as much of a wrong as like, you know, 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. I mean, what is there a way to do it right? Is there a way to sort of, is there a utopia where we're more careful and reflective about what these numbers are? So in the 2018 book, The Political Value of Time, that's a book where I talk about temporal formula. And I say that, you know, time, I talk about the ways in which time is like a bad proxy for things. But a better proxy still, like 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 want to go back to a purely blood-based system.

and it's not a good idea to make this available. We don't really want to 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 in residence, your character, your proficiency in English, you know, your civic knowledge, like all of these things actually are requirements, and that's a formula.

And time's only part of it. and we can adjust the time, and we adjust the formula, if you marry a U.S. citizen, the time, the probationary period, time in residence is reduced. If you serve in the military, it's reduced. If you serve on active duty, it goes down to basically zero. 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, maybe not even good, but better opportunity. I mean, it's an interesting point that even things that can be arbitrary 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. I don't like them, but maybe I would be less productive without them. I mean, it raises this issue that there's sort of a counterculture, a hippie feeling that we're enslaved to clocks and the man and whatever. But clocks are kind of important if you're a social being. If you want to coordinate, if you want to have a podcast and say,

at 1.30 p.m., we're going to have this podcast conversation that kind of matters. So we have this love-hate relationship with time, or maybe like rhetorically hate but practically useful relationships. with it. Yeah. I mean, 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 our coordinating has value not just for efficiency's sake like there's value to being a part of a

unit that's functioning in sync right like not we're a dysfunctional country right now but like you know there's an aspiration to coordinate in some ways 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 like we're all engaged in a critical process of decision making at that. time together and the time is what grounds us together. And we, you know, 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're not. So circadian rhythms or biological clocks aren't kind of human scientific time. Those are looser kind of natural for,

forms of time. We're not very sensitive to them in this country. So biological clocks often conflict with career aspirations in ways we don't need to be like that. But we have not invested much in kind of accommodating career trajectories and biological clocks. We actually don't care much about people's circadian rhythms, which is pretty unhealthy thing. Right. You know, 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. The next 30 seconds could save you hundreds on your car insurance.

At the Hartford, we're passionate about your protection. If you're 50 or over AARP auto insurance from the Hartford gives you benefits that really matter. And you could save $597 when you switch. How's that for a little peace of mind? Visit trusthartford.com today. The Hartford, your protection is our passion. The Hartford Insurance Group, Inc.

pays royalty fees to AARP for the use of its intellectual property. AARP and its affiliates are not insurers. Savings vary. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart audiobook club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science,

and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story.

People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, that brings up a great issue of election day and then early voting, right? I mean, 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? Like, 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. Yeah. I mean, there are, you know, people, there's good literature. There's a great Dennis Thompson 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, And 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 one, two, and three happened 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 kind of wrapped up in this idea that, like, 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 recast their vote if new information comes up in that period. Like 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. That's true. Is there a principled reason that we have election day rather than election week other than to just be more costly? I honestly think, you know, this country did not have coordinated elections for most of the 19th century and it was a real battle to get all the states kind of electing. And at that point, the idea for reasons that really just aren't as relevant anywhere, like the idea that we could

get ourselves coordinated after having been so uncoordinated was so appealing and so obviously going to be useful that maybe, you know, we locked ourselves in a little bit. But we could imagine it's still coordinated, but nationwide, you have a week in which to cast your vote. And, you know, there's already issues with election day being a weekday 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? Yes, absolutely. We should other countries have election day as a national holiday. So, you know, at least some traditional forms of public sphere, labor don't interfere. we should be thinking about, you know, 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. Yeah, I'm enough of an ideal theorist that I like to imagine what we should do as well as what we can do. So, you know, that's it. I'm right there with you. And yes, we should be doing, we should be changing that. We shall be probably getting rid of the Senate, which is a disaster. I'm on board with that also.

But the voting day, election day conversation brings up what I think is to me kind of the most fascinating part of your book and your work, which is standing in line at election day, like 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. Yeah. So there's, I think, two things embedded in your question. First is that we don't all experience impositioned 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, you know, 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, like, you 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. It's just different types of schedules. And then the other element of your question is this standing in line, which is like a different temporal issue, the idea that we often either need to be. Or not 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, you know, we're total like crazy people in lines or predictable crazy people. There are ways you can predict how people will behave in lines,

but it's not always good news. Well, I mean, let's go more into that because I think the whole theory of queuing and waiting in lines and first come for a serve is, again, just like time itself, an underappreciated thing. It's all around us, but we don't interrogate it very, much. I mean, what's the political theory of queuing?

Okay. So I, you know, find that I find queuing interesting partly because, like, I'm the person who's really upset in a line when somebody, um, cuts the line or when I think, like, I just have no control over that part of my personality. And I'm not even like the good person who thinks there's reasonable excuses for cutting in front of me. So total like, you know, bad actor here. Um, but. 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 nativists. Because any nativist argument is, I was here first or this people, we were here first.

We have claimed to this. And you newcomers, 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, 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 mine. I got here first. That's the basis also for intellectual property, which we talked about informally. Intellectual property is 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. So, okay. So I get the move being made here because I am in favor of, if I'm standing in line at McDonald's, whoever is in line first gets served first.

But what you're saying is that this is a principle that we could sort of lively spread across all sorts of very different contexts and use it to basically justify what otherwise we would think of as unjust behavior or inequities of some sort. 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 want to stay the McDonald's cure, then one thing you can do is say to the nativists, you actually were not here first. Well, yes.

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, right? Like, 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're 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's being served at McDonald's, particularly during Russia, or actually is scarce. There's just not enough people. behind the counter to get to everybody at the same time. And then you just want to say, like, okay, we have to do some kind of ordering here and is first come first served the best. And I guess I would say if somebody rushes up in a moment of low blood sugar, let's say like I have a type one diabetic in my family, they should not have to apply the rule of first come first served. And and like 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 we need to kind of not be rigid unless there's absolutely no unless a lottery would be fine too like if it doesn't matter what order we get things then first come first serve is probably going to be fine but do remember just one coda 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 is 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 want to be careful putting ourselves into cues or driving in traffic in Los Angeles

and things like that things I will not do okay but I don't want to 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 got to 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. 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 going to have to wait and this is how long you're going to have to wait. And here's why. And then there are circumstances like taxes in which the government's like here's a 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. 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 for 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. So, you know, A classic example is the crack cocaine versus powder cocaine disparities and penalties from like the early 90s, which was clearly a facially neutral, you know, 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 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, you know, 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 are 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. 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, taxes in particular are, I don't think there's an intentional, intentional thing going on there. It's now being exploited by like into it.

Is that right? Yeah, turbotax. They're exploiting it. But like 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. 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, like, mad at Verizon that I've had to call them six times to get my bill corrected. So also private entities as well. Well, I have read on the internet, so it must be true, but I mean, 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 reading my in my in my seeing things on Twitter research is

that companies like H&R Block and other tax preparation companies lobby to not let the government do people's taxes. I have no idea whether that's true or not. I fully believe this is true because I also read it on the internet. If two of us read it on the internet, it must be true. But also because I've seen people like describe the lobbying money that's gone into this. But, you know, that was there for them to exploit. Like, there wasn't always a turbotax.

Turbo tax 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 in turbotaxis profiting. But, like, the problem is that the state made this decision and has made taxes burdensome. And I, you know, we could do away with that. We could also, you know, the state is also, 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 color in the United States. But very often you're going to have to deal with the consequences of a misdemeanor by going somewhere, right?

And you may be to 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 like your fault because the misdemeanor clearly is something you did. You definitely were not charged with a misdemeanor falsely. That would never happen in this country. Like, you know, but, you know, there were wasting people's time too. And the consequences are much, much worse than they are for me who like just is struggling to, you know, 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. 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. And basically, if you have a lot of money, you can get things done that costs a lot of other people time, right? And that's kind of, I don't want to put words into your mouth, but, you know, 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 poorer, which is not anything we could imagine

justifying from some principled position. It's just how things work in society and you put up with it. Yeah. I mean, so this is really interesting and there's a philosopher named Michael Sandell who's talked about this. He's written a book called What Money Can't Buy. I'm 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. I do.

So I haven't experienced it. I do. We're at real Democrats here in New Jersey. everybody waits, unless you've got like a helicopter to bring you 15 miles. But like, you know, the argument is that he makes is that there's certain democratic goods that you just should not be able to buy access to. And essentially, if you can pay a line standard a wait to talk to your congressman, then you've really bypassed the whole idea. And like he also says it about, I don't know, this is his own affection, but baseball tickets. You're like, this is a national pastime. You should have to wait in

for your tickets. 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. Right. So he's like, yes, you should have to wait in line. And he doesn't, because he doesn't want affluent people to buy their way, by their access. But, you know, affluent people may have time, but they don't want to spend it that way. But lots and lots of people who aren't affluent, you know, don't have time. And so we'll end up disadvantaged either way. So an economist like 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, like having to get to, um, downtown to city hall, like 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. And am I remembering correctly, I think, from your book, that it's kind of obvious that there are wealth-based disparities in how much time it takes to do certain things. And probably just as obvious that there are, racial disparities. But I think there was something weird about how wealthy black people required a huge amount of time to get a mortgage or do other things, much more than you would expect from their socioeconomic class. Yeah. So this is actually, you saw this elsewhere. There's this

guy, wonderful public administration scholar at the University of Albany, Stephen Holt, who like 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 longstanding disparities in 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 like 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 like money isn't the only source of power in society, and race is a really important factor in distributing power in the United States. Another one where we can imagine what the utopia will look like, but it's going to 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 going to out you, because you said on Twitter, that your next book is going to be called Why Nothing Works. Or at least you were thinking about that.

I wasn't committed to the project until I saw how many people were willing to pre-order my book and then I got dollar signs in my eyes. Well, I know that, you know, 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. You know, our TV sets, our computers, you and I have to struggle to get this recording done in ways that seem unnecessary, right? Like, of course, something like light bulbs will burn out 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 works? Is this the malaise of modernity or is this just the nature of the universe? I don't think it's the nature of the universe. I really believe that we have. not valued our time. Like we, you know, that there's nobody whose responsibility it is to value our time. It is, it is just not on the agenda in the same way that SNAP benefits or abortion access are. And both of those, you know, 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, you know, something that shouldn't 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, you know, temporal commitment. You know, people would like to choose. when they're pregnant. And that entails protecting the ways in which that happens. So I don't think like 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, you know, are you pro-life or are you in favor of a woman's right to choose? But like 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, you know, it's super cheap and efficient to outsource customer service if you don't care about people's time. And nobody's compelling Verizon to care about my time. In contrast, I had two flights canceled.

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 traveler's bill of rights at a certain point, the amount of time you've been on 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. Yeah. So in some sense, a lot of this, I don't want to trivialize it, but a lot of this is about consciousness phrasing, like letting people know that time really is valuable and being,

not feeling, you know, cheap just to say, wait, you know, that that actually matters. The time that I'm spending on the phone or in line or traveling to someplace I don't want to be because I need to do something. Like, that should really be valued. Yeah. And we know it when it's happening to us. It's interaging, right? But like, we don't, if, you know, that has to translate into some kind of political rights to something. And that hasn't happened. In my book, the big picture, I emphasize the fact that the typical, the average, not everyone's, but the average human lifespan is 3 billion heartbeats, which is not a lot of heartbeats, right? Like, it's a big number, but it's not an infinite number, and that's very, very finite. And people wasting my heartbeats is something that I have a right to be upset about.

Absolutely, yeah. 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 in the Mindscape podcast. This was great. Thank you for having me. It was such a pleasurable discussion to have with you.