 Episode number 15 of what sex got to do with it, and we are here with my favorite 84-year-old great-grandmother, this just then from James Webb, the entire galaxy, yeah. So, in Chapter 14, it's called, Tangled Up in Economics and Evolution, as we usually start, why that title? For two reasons, one, that my interest in economics actually began with my interest in biology and evolution, and also Darwin was always Tangled Up in Economics and Evolution, the theory of natural selection, both he and Alfred Russel Wallace based it, claim that they came up with the idea of how evolution proceeded by reading Thomas Malthus on the Principles of Population, and Malthus was an English cleric who is considered an early economist, and I think that Malthus introduced what I call the Malthusian flaw into that theory of natural selection, but of course in our discussions and in my book, I'm more concerned about some of what I think the oversights that Darwin did with his theory of sexual selection, but evolution and economics have always been linked, the theories of the two, and my particular approach to them have always been Tangled Up. Gotcha, so early on in this chapter, you talk about one of the things that we sometimes do is oversell some of our actions, and you talked about foregoing the use of single-use plastic water bottles, and you said, well, sometimes people think that, and they do that, and that's enough, but we need to make it clear to people that that's not enough, and I found the curious, because I mean, you had written this book, I mean, you've been writing it for a while, and I mean, it was published by the time we had Tangled Meeting here in Arlington, but did you happen to know that we passed a single-use water bottle ban at Tangled? Yes, and I'm very glad to hear that, and it's important, but it's not enough. I have a relative who recently traveled out of state and was just astonished at how casually everybody was about plastic single-use water bottles. She said, wow, in Arlington people are drinking out of glass or putting water in a glass and drinking it, so the trouble is, and I was talking to you before we started filming about the thing that really drove me to write this book, I know you tease me about being 84, and that's not something that I would have thought of myself doing at age 84, but a few years ago I became just so appalled by what I call the coming climate apocalypse and our ability to kind of ignore it and not see it and not see how or behavior and who we vote for and all those things, so I'm really glad, you know, I wrote this because I think I have an idea that would help us develop policies that would address both climate change and inequality, so that was my driving thing. I thought before I die I don't want fame, I don't want fortune, but I would like to make, contribute an idea that I think could be very helpful in addressing climate change. That was my motivation, but it starts with evolution and the way we evolved and how our species' specific behaviors, particularly our economic behavior, are so dramatically different from that of other species and I have said to people, I'm not sure I said it in the book, because my ideas have kept evolving since I've written the book, you know, just discussions with you, I think, oh that gives me an idea, so I get another idea, but I really think that art, we need to identify what our species' specific behavior is and figure ways to rise above it, we're the only species that has an economic system, that's because we're the only species that needs one. That's interesting, so this is another chapter where there's just so much to discuss, I'm going to be bouncing around, and you let me to the end, or towards the end of this chapter where you say that we are the only species mean that will essentially exhaust its supply, you know, and I'm thinking though, but is that really the case? I mean it seems like other species mean, you sometimes get increased indecent population because I mean the species will consume more of its prey, means so that there's not enough of its prey around for other, and so then there's a crash, and then the prey, you know, kind of rebounds. You know, I think some of that, I don't think that happens as often, I think because of this anchor bias, which is something I learned of just in the last few months, and I've really internalized it, which is just the great degree of difficulty of giving up the first thing you ever believed about a topic, and I think it's so ingrained to think evolution is selection at the edges of survival when we're running out of resources, and in fact it's very, very difficult to document death rate control of populations, most species adjust their litter size, their nest size, whatever, react to what's going on in the environment around them because our desires are symbolically developed. We are the species, we have infinite desires, and we impose them on a finite planet. Other species needs their so-called economic behavior, which is just the control of resources they need for themselves in their offspring. Those are pretty consistent from one individual to another because they defend their resources by their own bodies. Humans have just, you know, we make up deeds, we have all this, so symbolically we control far more than we need, and so we are the species with infinite desires that we impose on a finite planet. Well, we head into the home stretch here, and you start in providing some solutions to the issues that we've been discussing along, and one of these solutions, in fact the main one involves around Commonwealth rents and remittances, so I'm going to ask you to explain and take as much time as you want to explain what you mean by Commonwealth rent, and then, like I said, there was one aspect that involved remittances that I thought was very interesting. Well, what I call Commonwealth rent or what economists call rent your income, and that's income that you collect by controlling the resource that others need, and I argue that the commons in nature, the things that any animal needs to survive, ought to be available to all of us, and that anyone who takes more than they need, and by so doing excludes others, should pay the economic rent that accrues to them as a result of controlling that resource. So maybe a little, I don't think I've made myself clear on that. Ask me some questions. Well, no, so I get that. So I guess the question is then, how do you value what it is that is in excess of what they need? How do you quantify that value in order to assess me, the rent that they have to pay? Well, and I just had a colleague email me something about this the other day. The economist who's influenced me is an economist who wrote around the same time Darwin was writing, an American economist, Henry George, was very, very popular at this time, and his ideas are just sort of summed up and dismissed as, oh yeah, Henry George land value tax, because he proposed that he was concerned about inequality, and the way to keep, he wondered, his book was titled Progress in Poverty, and he wondered, why, wherever there's incredible progress, does poverty increase? And it's because some people are controlling more of the resources, the more power you get, the more you can control resources that others need, and they could force down wages by doing that. Because like, say, in a country where there's lots of land available cheaply, and you can just go to the margins and get land, then wages don't get forced down, because people can go directly to the land. So the sort of the catch-all phrase is you pay for what you take, not for what you make. Henry George would have eliminated all taxes on income, on everything, except the natural resources that you control. He referred to it as land, and at the time he wrote, 150 years ago, land was the major economic factor, but in his book Progress in Poverty, he was very clear to point out, but when he used the word land, because he was very precise with his definitions, he meant all naturally occurring waters. The gifts, what he called the gifts of nature, what the Green Movement now calls the commons. The commons, they belonged to all of us. None of us created it with our own labor. It's a gift of nature, and you have to share it equitably with not just humans, but I think with all species. The natural world is a gift that should be shared equally, but because of the unique way our symbolic abilities that we can control more than we can actually use forever, or our children ever into the future, our grandchildren, great, great, great, I mean, great sums of wealth, and we see growing inequality all the time. I started to say a colleague had written to me yesterday, and I said, I'd heard him speak about water use, and I thought his, because that's his expert, is water use, and I thought he was talking in Detroit, where there was water shortages, and they were saying, well, charge for water, and then people will use it more responsibly, and he said, yes, but there's a certain amount of water you need for life, and you can't charge people for that. You have to exempt from charges, you figure out what the amount is that's needed to sustain life, and provide water to wash and clean, and exempt that from water charges. And I was asking him about it, and he said, well, with land, with the property tax, you could have like a homestead exemption for the, because everybody needs land to stand on, or to earn a living, to have a shop, whatever, and whatever that amount of land is, you give the owner, the deed holder, a homestead exemption for the reasonable amount of control, but you don't let someone control hundreds of acres, which they're not even using, which then creates a land scarcity. It's what drives up housing costs, it's why we have unaffordable housing. So that's kind of the, but it's hard to implement, and again, I get into this in the last chapter, but we'll jump around a little, the next to last chapter, I think I may talk about it, because we have to get the money out of politics. Yeah, okay, we'll come to that later. So it's hard to implement when lobbyists are writing the rules. Right, and so what it's interesting too, is that you say that remittances would be a part of it in the beginning, because it would be regressive, I mean, and so right now we have so much inequality, I mean, that the regressive nature of the economic rent would hurt the poor, because essentially the charges are going to get passed on, because with any tax or fee, it always gets passed down to the person who can't pass it any further. So the rent that would be collected by the government, presumably, would then be remitted to people based on their need, until the needs are more balanced. Now the purists, and at heart I would like to be a purist, but the system is already so inequitable that I can't be, but if this had been the design from the start, then everybody, just by virtue of being born, would get an equal share of it could be a citizen's dividend, but and I think until we've corrected for some of the gross inequities, then those resource rents ought to go to the people who've suffered the most, the people at the bottom can't afford housing, can't afford education, can't afford health care. So, you know, we have an earned income tax credit, that kind of thing, it can be done. So the economic rent is based on property, whatever it is, it can be clean water, clear air, like someone who's polluting the air, a corporation that's polluting the air, they're taking more than their share of the breathable air, but as it stands now, we don't sufficiently charge for them. I kind of sum it up, that big corporations who are doing a lot of the polluting, they privatize the profits and they socialize the costs, they pass on the cost or what economists refer to as the externalities associated. My question wasn't around the nature of property, I was just kind of hung up in and getting the question out. It's really based on, the question is really about the, if it's based on what they own but they're not using, would this system that you propose decrease the desire to own the property, but now that they don't own it, it's like, I guess the question is, there is an own property, but that own property is owned by the government, right? There's some, there's not as much as there used to be. I mean, when I first moved to Arlington, I walked from the Heights down to the center, down Mass Ave, and I looked at all what I consider underutilized land and I thought, oh wow, the property tax system in Arlington needs to be updated. There's so much underutilized, I've had so many people in government tell me, well, we don't have any buildable sites in Arlington, oh yes we do, but people are withholding them from use until the value of the property goes high enough and then they'll be motivated to sell it, hopefully to someone who will build homes or put some kind of a business on it that would create jobs, but the increase in land value is not created by the landholder. The increase in land value in a town like Arlington is created by all the citizens who pay their taxes by the town with things like a CMI, you know, all these wonderful resources. We have excellent schools, public parks, fabulous library, all the wonderful things we have in Arlington are paid for by the people who pay their taxes in Arlington, but the benefit of that investment in the infrastructure is received by landowners who aren't necessarily doing anything with their land but withholding it from use and that investment will drive up the value of that land. When they sell the land, the increase in value was created by everybody else, but the owner, the seller, the person who's been holding that land for 40, 50, 60 years sometimes in a family, they take the increase and privatize it. But the gain was social gain, the gain was the result of social investment and so when the property sells, but the way to correct for that is to just make sure you accurately assess land values. An accurate assessment of land values corrects for that, can stimulate new growth, can stimulate the development of housing, which, you know, we don't have enough affordable housing in Arlington, we just don't. Yeah, pretty much anywhere in Massachusetts and you can even almost say in the country, and I misspoke too because I was really not saying that there's unowned property, there's no unowned property, it's more that there isn't any, all the non-private property is owned by the government. Yes, a lot of it is and in some states and in some communities, the government that's like has owned land that it's collected because the people who originally owned it had failed to pay their taxes and so forth, then the land had been seen. Some of those communities are building affordable housing and so forth, or making that land available to people who want to do that. So if the government owns a lot of the property, meaning that is underutilized, then how would this economic rent apply to it? Well, I'm not sure I fully accept your premise that the government owns a lot of the unoccupied land. I think a lot of, or underutilized, not unoccupied, underutilized land. I think underutilized land is largely owned by individuals or by corporations. I mean, some of our big corporations like McDonald's, a lot of their value is in the land they own. So even if the government isn't the holder of most or even a significant amount of underutilized land, meaning would the government have to pay any economic rent for any land that it owns that's not utilized? Oh, that's an interesting thought. That's a good question. I haven't thought that through, Lynn. I ideally would like to see them make it available for affordable housing, that's what, or for people who want to start businesses and don't have the wherewithal to start a business to commune. I mean, talk about reparations. The black population in this country, the descendants of enslaved people at least, vast disparity in the wealth, and that's because they haven't gotten to own real estate for sometimes by design, in fact, most often by design. And so to me, a good place to start reparations would be to give people who've been deprived of the right to own land, that land to start a business or build a home. So I think the government could begin reparations or a reparations program with that, that, you know, someone who's been denied. But I have to think more about it, but that's a good question. I mean, so all of these are really asked from the point of view of curiosity, meaning not really trying to tear down your argument. No, you're not tearing. In fact, I think I've told you between sessions, the thing I love about these kinds of discussions is the sharing of ideas. And often I'll go home and think more about something you ask me and then I'll get an idea. Oh, I think there would be a way to deal with that. So this is a learning experience for me. And a pro-government person. So to me, I mean, if the government has something and it can help affect a solution, it's like to be really good. That's what I was asking is like, well, the government has this underutilized land and you're doing this economic rent. It's like, what can we do? No, I'm not in favor, for example, though. I love our national park systems. I love park systems in general. Greenspace is wonderful for us. One of the fabulous things about Arlington, the amount of green space in parks that we have in Arlington. So I would not want the government to develop those because they're a resource that's made available to the public. So I don't have to own a Canadian national park in order to enjoy everything that it offers. So that's a good use of government on land. I'm not in favor of the government selling drilling rights on national land, granting grazing rights or timbering rights. I think they're a small group is benefiting from something that belongs to all of us. And often, like for example, the grazing rights, I think the going rate is much less than it would be on something other than nationally owned land. So that comes down to the assessment issue, right? Well, yes. Well, of course, I don't know. But I don't think that national parks, we're not assessing the land value there. But some groups have benefited from what the government owns in a way that others have not. But you say the key, though, to making the system work that you propose for economic rent or commonwealth rent is to make sure that the land, as defined in the property as defined, is assessed properly. Yes, land assessed properly. And also, but since, you know, I'm really talking about the commons in nature, all naturally occurring resources, we've assessed the cost of cleanup for a corporation that's dumped in polluted waters or polluted our air. We know how to do that. We can figure the cost. So in a way, that's, you know, figuring the cost of the damage they've done and charge them for it. They have to pay for it. You know, that they use something that was not theirs. You know, we can, land is easy to give title to. If you could give title to air, imagine if people monopolized air in the same way that they monopolized land. And even water. I mean, some water is being monopolized and privatized now. I'm not in favor of the privatization of any naturally occurring resource. In terms of the preventing, so you say that you can assess, for instance, by determining what it would cost to clean up. Do you think we can price the economic rent in such a way as to prevent damage? Ideally, yes. But not damage that we have seen already. I mean, so that we know how much that damage costs, but kind of possible damage that we know. Well, I think if people knew that they were going to have to pay, for example, a carbon tax is a perfect example of this. I'm a big favorite fan of carbon taxes. And I think when manufacturers realize they're going to have to pay carbon tax, pay for the amount of carbon they're releasing into the atmosphere, they then devise ways to release less. If they know they're going to be charged, then they damage less. And so I think that that's what we need to institute. But as you know, we'll get to it later. But as long as we have money in politics. We'll get to it now and we might have to carry it over into the next episode because I got a little confused and I thought it was in the next chapter. It was actually in this chapter where you talk about getting the money out of politics. Do you have evidence of how democracies was public financing fair better than those that? No, I don't. But I really don't. But I am horrified by the fact that paid lobbyists write a lot of our laws. I'm just horrified by that. And the representatives that they write them for get them voted on and very often because of campaign finance donations, it enriches the politician who's getting a law enacted that was written by one of the polluters. And again, in my earlier chapter on the human brain, the brain is so good at rationalization. We are so good at telling ourselves, well, I'm really doing this for the common good. We all are. I'm good at it myself. I do it myself. I'm aware that all people do it and so I work hard at not doing it myself. But I look at someone like Joe Manchin who benefits tremendously from the fossil fuel industry, from coal particularly, and yet his blocking of some of the climate legislation, he bases on other things. He bases on he's worried about inflation. I don't think he's a dishonest man. I think he believes that. But when you look at it objectively, he's benefiting tremendously. Personally, his personal wealth and his family's personal wealth is benefiting by his blocking climate legislation. And so that's, you know, as long as citizens united, is that what made corporations people and they get to donate? I mean, as long as those, as long as we allow those laws to stand, it's very difficult, but not impossible. I think part of it is just raising awareness, raising awareness. But, you know, the very people that we want to vote in policy that would eliminate those practices are people who've been elected through huge campaign finance donations. So I really would like to see the public funding of all elections in this country. And in order to get that voted in, you're going to have to have some people who've benefited from the system the way it is now to go against their own self-interest and to make sure that... Well, limited self-interest. I mean, the bigger self-interest could very well make them want to do that. It all depends on how you define self-interest. Yeah, okay. Yeah, you talked about that before in terms of... You know, and so we're going to pick up on this a little bit, me, when we get to chapter 15, which is called Bountiful World. It's a relatively short chapter, so I think we'll be able to come back to this important topic. So thank you very much. I mean, and as I said, we'll be back with episode 16.