Author Archives: Larry Franz

High Crimes, Not Misdemeanors

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The January 6th committee has concluded that the defeated former president committed four serious crimes: obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements to the federal government, and aiding or inciting an insurrection.

From Charles Pierce for Esquire:

That last word should toll like an undertaker’s bell through the rest of American history, the way it tolled for Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis. It should toll the way it tolled for Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth. It should toll deeply and profoundly, and it should echo forever.

A president of the United States has been more than credibly accused by a bipartisan select committee of the Congress of inciting an insurrection against the United States—which is to say, against you and me and every one of our fellow citizens. It should toll loudly enough to drown out any talk of polls and elections, and god knows it should drown out any attempt to minimize its significance or, worse, any attempt to equate what the former president did with anything that may or may not have been done by a Democratic politician. The committee’s criminal referrals are unprecedented in our history because the former president’s actions on January 6 were unprecedented in our history.

The Department of Justice should now act accordingly.

One Woman on Women

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Men and women are alike and different. Some are more alike and some are more different than others. That’s my 2 cents before quoting from “On Women”, an article the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg wrote for Mercurio magazine in 1948 (The NY Review of Books has the whole thing and more behind a mini-paywall):

…. women have the bad habit, now and then, of falling into a well, of letting themselves be gripped by a terrible melancholy and drown in it, and then floundering to get back to the surface—this is the real trouble with women. Women are often embarrassed that they have this problem and pretend they have no cares at all and are free and full of energy, and they walk with bold steps down the street with large hats and beautiful dresses and painted lips and a contemptuous and strong-willed air about them. But I’ve never met a woman without soon discovering in her something painful and pitiful that doesn’t exist in men—a constant danger of falling into a deep, dark well, a danger that comes precisely from the female temperament or maybe from an age-old condition of subjugation and servitude that won’t be so easy to overcome….

I’ve met a lot of women, calm women and women who are not calm, but the calm women also fall into the well: they all fall into the well now and then. I’ve met women who think they are very ugly and women who think they are very beautiful, women who travel and women who can’t, women who, now and then, have a headache and women who never have a headache, women who wash their necks and women who don’t wash their necks, women who have a large number of white linen handkerchiefs and women who never have a handkerchief or, if they do, they lose it, women who wear hats and women who don’t wear hats, women who worry they are too fat and women who worry they are too thin, women who toil all day long in a field and women who break wood over their knee and light the fire and make polenta and rock the baby and nurse him and women who are bored to death and take a class in the history of religion and women who are bored to death and take the dog for a walk and women who are bored to death and torment whoever is at hand, their husbands or children or the maid, and women who go out in the morning their hands purple with cold and a little scarf around their necks and women who go out in the morning swaying their hips and looking at their reflection in shop windows and women who’ve lost their jobs and sit on a bench in the garden at the station to eat a sandwich and women who’ve been dumped by a man and sit on a bench in the garden at the station and dab a little powder on their faces.

I’ve met so many women I am now certain I’ll soon discover in each of them something to commiserate—a large or small concern, kept more or less secret: the tendency to fall into the well and find in it the possibility of boundless suffering that men don’t know….

PS: I also posted this on Post.News, a new site that may replace might end up being “Twitter for Reasonable People”. You have to apply to open an account. There’s a waiting list but when I applied, the wait wasn’t very long.

Understanding How We Got Here, or How a Defunct Economist Would Make Us Slaves

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As Christmas approaches, why not spend a few minutes reading about the little-known economist who did so much to burden America and other countries with a brand of economics and politics that would have warmed Scrooge’s cold, cold heart? Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking wrote about him in 2018:

Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if [Buchanan] were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains…

Buchanan … started out as a conventional public finance economist. But he grew frustrated by the way in which economic theorists ignored the political process. He began working on a description of power that started out as a critique of how institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s and ‘60s… Buchanan, MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens and the poor?

In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed…

His view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.

Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.

The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them… MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.

In 1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his theories… MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back against the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate America’s public schools… She notes that he took care to use economic and political precepts, rather than overtly racial arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave cover to racists who knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the country….

[Buchanan] focused on how democracy constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude of voters. [MacClean] argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.

Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal….

In nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated that he needed a “gravy train,” and with backers like Charles Koch and conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard. Money, Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of influence began to widen….

MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the ‘70s… Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in [Buchanan’s] work. [MacClean] writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to [conservative economist] Milton Friedman and his “[University of]Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”

With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.

MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s [center] at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters [at] corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could push economic ideas to the public through media, promote new curricula for economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.

… MacLean recounts that Buchanan … focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go too…

Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain….The economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.” The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.

To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that [law professor] Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”

MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it inflicted on [Chile], a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochet government …has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet.

The dictator’s human rights abuses and pillage of the country’s resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe,” the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty….

[MacClean] observes that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those, even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.

MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric…, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger”…

Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, rights-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done.

Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes. MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what the emerging oligarchy will look like… There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed for legislation that would allow the governor to take control of communities facing emergency and put unelected managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city’s water supply to a polluted river…Tens of thousands of children were exposed to lead…

Economist Tyler Cowen has provided an economic justification for this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to get clean water, private companies should take over and make people pay for it. “This includes giving them the right to cut off people who don’t—or can’t—pay their bills”…

Research like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan’s may finally begin to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs’ State Policy Network and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the … media hardly notices, like pumping money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.

“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as [Buchanan] called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”

Unquote.

For the record, quoting John Maynard Keynes:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

Especially if billionaires are spreading the scribbler’s ideas.

Guarding the Gates

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We old people remember (and can’t stop talking about) the golden age when there were only three TV networks in America and the only question at 7pm (6pm Central) was whether to watch the national news on CBS (Cronkite), NBC (Huntley & Brinkley) or ABC (somebody else). Then, in 1975, PBS added a fourth possibility (MacNeil & Lehrer). We were so well-informed! And un-confused!

The age isn’t so golden today. Lawyer and journalist Asha Rangappa has some thoughts on the matter, with which I don’t totally agree:

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones filed for bankruptcy on Friday, after being ordered to pay over $1.5 billion to several parents of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut who had sued him for defamation. On his radio program and website, Jones had repeatedly accused the parents of being “crisis actors” who were lying about their children dying and claimed the entire event was a “false flag” operation. The lawsuits and the awards demonstrate that increasingly, the court system may be the only institution left that can adequately police the line between truth and lies — which is not a good sign for our democracy.

She then shows a diagram with three categories: a Sphere of Consensus containing things about which all reasonable people agree; a Sphere of Controversy that contains ideas about which reasonable people can disagree and which can be reasonably debated; and a Sphere of Deviance, where ideas like Jones’s “crisis actors” resides. They’re the deviant ideas that aren’t worthy of debate. In other words, Crazy Town.

As [NYU professor Jay] Rosen has observed, traditionally journalists have defined and guarded the boundaries of these spheres — they were the gatekeepers of what was newsworthy, what deserved “two sides” coverage, and what was not given a platform. He notes that journalists were able to maintain this role because viewers and readers were, as he calls them, “atomized” — that is, disconnected from each other and vertically connected to sources of information….

The emergence of the internet and social media [preceded by the arrival of cable TV], [erased] this atomization, allowing views and readers to connect horizontally — which means that these spheres are no longer determined by journalists. Since people are no longer a captive audience and can share information among and with each other, they can redefine what can enter into the spheres of consensus and legitimate controversy.

This, of course, has benefits. Consider, for example, Black Lives Matter, which brought attention to a pervasive pattern of police brutality against Black Americans. The ability to share videos across social media platforms shined a spotlight on a side of America that had largely been excluded by traditional media and of which many Americans were unaware. The same could be said for the #MeToo movement, which allowed victims of sexual harassment and misconduct to connect with each other and bring to light an issue which had, in some instances, been rejected from coverage by major news networks. Things that may have been (wrongly) relegated to the “sphere of deviance” in the traditional model have found a place in today’s information space, democratizing the voices that can be heard and bringing these issues into the sphere of controversy, if not consensus.

As Rosen notes, however, there is a dark side to this horizontal connection. There are now no gatekeepers at all, so the divisions between the three spheres aren’t just blurred, they basically don’t exist. Just look at the last week — it’s 2022 and Kanye West has a platform to profess his admiration for Hitler (incidentally, on Alex Jones’ show). What was once unquestionably in the sphere of deviance has (apparently) become a topic of debate. From the other direction, concepts that used to be unquestioned — like basic science and epidemiology — are now challenged or dismissed entirely. If I had to draw a diagram of where we are today, it would be just one big sphere of controversy.

Here, Rangappa is exaggerating. It’s more accurate to say the Sphere of Consensus has shrunk. There are residents of Crazy Town who think the 2020 election was stolen, but most of them accept that Joe Biden is living in the White House (only some of them are convinced the white-haired guy is an impostor).

Which is where Alex Jones comes in. Jones helped spread the Pizzagate theory — this was the rumor that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex trafficking ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor … — and, more recently, the “Stop the Steal” disinformation campaign…. The only gatekeepers who might restrain him are social media platforms [and cable networks] if they choose to self police. Even then, their efforts might slow down the spread of his conspiracy theories, but wouldn’t stop the millions of readers who visit his website each month from consuming his “news” directly.

Enter the courts. The judicial system is one of the few … institutions left where truth actually matters, and can be enforced. We saw this most clearly in the dozens of lawsuits … filed after the 2020 election alleging widespread voter fraud — sixty three cases were dismissed, mainly for lack of proof. This is because in a courtroom, we have rules about truth. Facts have to exist in order to be presented as evidence. Judges determine what issues are in dispute, and what is irrelevant. Juries can’t make up their own evidence; they have to weigh and evaluate what is presented to them. In a defamation case, the only defense is to demonstrate that your statements true — and even Jones had to concede on the witness stand that Sandy Hook was real.

These are welcome outcomes, but leaving courts to arbitrate what is true and what is not is not a great development for democracy overall. For one thing, most of the disinformation narratives we must contend with won’t end up being litigated, leaving them to cause chaos and harm, as Jones has. More importantly, an increase in litigation is a symptom of deterioration of social trust, a key indicator of societal health. Robert Putnam [in his book Bowling Alone] notes that when a society has a high level of generalized trust — basically, when we follow the Golden Rule and act in ways that benefit our collective self interest, like behaving honestly — it is healthier and more efficient….As he writes:

“When each of us can relax her guard a little, what economists term ‘transaction costs’ — the costs of the everyday business of life, as well as the costs of commercial transaction — are reduced. This is no doubt why, as economists have recently discovered, trusting communities, all other things being equal, have a measurable economic advantage. The almost imperceptible background stress of daily ‘transaction costs’ — from worrying about whether you got the right change back from the clerk to double-checking that you locked the car door — may also help explain why students of public health find that life expectancy itself is enhanced in more trustful communities. A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life.”

When that generalized trust breaks down, it is replaced by “cool trust” — formal rules and enforcement mechanisms that force people to uphold their civic and social obligations to society. Putnam continues:

“[O]ne alternative to generalized reciprocity and socially embedded honesty is the rule of law — formal contracts, courts, litigation, adjudication, and enforcement by the state. Thus, if the lubricant of thin trust is evaporating from society, we might expect to find a greater reliance on the law as a basis of cooperation. If the handshake is no longer binding and reassuring, perhaps the notarized contract, the deposition, and the subpoena will work almost as well.”

Having courts police our basic obligations to each other — like telling the truth about actual events — is a good stopgap, but isn’t sustainable for a healthy democracy. We need to have mechanisms outside the judicial system to resurrect some boundaries between agreed upon facts, legitimate controversies, and ideas that are not worthy of debate. Until we can recalibrate those three spheres, perhaps the only people who will make out ahead are the lawyers.

Unquote.

I’ll add that journalists and the legal system aren’t the only gatekeepers. We’re all responsible for pushing back on crazy ideas when we encounter them in public or private life. In particular, politicians and everybody else who has a public platform should act as gatekeepers, doing what they can to keep a lid on the insanity. The same applies to corporations and wealthy individuals. With power comes responsibility.

Three Weeks of Time and an Unknown Amount of Space

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It’s been more than three weeks since I graced the internet with a post on this blog. That could be the longest time I’ve ever stayed away. The relatively encouraging results of last month’s election may have left me with the feeling that I should leave well enough alone. Plus, the urge to share thoughts — mine or somebody else’s — can come and go.

But to get going: There’s something that bothers me about time travel. When a fictional character travels through time, they always land standing up or sitting down in a relatively comfortable location. Arnold, for example, landed in an alley, naked, the first time we saw him. Time travelers never end up a mile deep in the earth’s crust or a million miles out in space.

One problem here is that the surface of the earth in the distant past or future is nowhere near wherever the time machine is. The earth, not a perfect sphere, is revolving on its axis and revolving around the sun; the sun and the rest of the solar system is going around the galaxy; the galaxy is moving quickly away from other galaxies as the universe expands. That means calculating the location of the traveler’s destination in space, not just in time, must be quite a challenge. A tiny mistake and Arnold lands six feet under or in the wrong solar system. Naked.

This detail concerning time travel came to mind because I’ve been skimming a TV series that makes use of time travel (in a surprising way) and because I read something that actually seems worth sharing.

Sean Carroll, famous physicist and now the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins, has a new book out called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time and Motion. It’s the first volume in a planned trilogy that is supposed to make the fundamental equations of physics understandable to those of us who got through high school math (which may be a problem for me, since trigonometry convinced me to avoid calculus).

Quanta magazine an article adapted from Prof. Carroll’s book that helped me think about space and time differently. Maybe it will have the same effect on you. The article isn’t very long, so you might want to visit Quanta (it’s free). If not, here are selections that mainly leave out some historical background and may (or may not) clarify a few of Carroll’s remarks:

… In relativity, it’s no longer true that space and time have separate, objective meanings. What really exists is space-time, and slicing it up into space and time is merely a useful human convention.

One of the major reasons why relativity has a reputation for being difficult to understand is that our intuitions train us to think of space and time as separate things. We experience objects as having extent in “space,” and that seems like a pretty objective fact. Ultimately it suffices for us because we generally travel through space at velocities far lower than the speed of light, so pre-relativistic physics works.

But this mismatch between intuition and theory makes the leap to a space-time perspective somewhat intimidating. What’s worse, presentations of relativity often take a bottom-up approach — they start with our everyday conceptions of space and time and alter them in the new context of relativity.

We’re going to be a little different. Our route into special relativity might be thought of as top-down, taking the idea of a unified space-time seriously from the get-go and seeing what that implies. We’ll have to stretch our brains a bit, but the result will be a much deeper understanding of the relativistic perspective on our universe….

Einstein’s contribution in 1905 was to point out that [to] better understand the laws of physics … all we had to do was accept a completely new conception of space and time. (OK, that’s a lot, but it turned out to be totally worth it.)

Einstein’s theory came to be known as the special theory of relativity, or simply special relativity. [Einstein] argued for new ways of thinking about length and duration. He explained the special role of the speed of light by positing that there is an absolute speed limit in the universe — a speed at which light just happens to travel when moving through empty space — and that everyone would measure that speed to be the same, no matter how they were moving. To make that work out, he had to alter our conventional notions of time and space.

But he didn’t go quite so far as to advocate joining space and time into a single unified space-time. That step was left to his former university professor, Hermann Minkowski…. Once you have the idea of thinking of space-time as a unified four-dimensional continuum, you can start asking questions about its shape. Is space-time flat or curved, static or dynamic, finite or infinite? Minkowski space-time is flat, static and infinite.

Einstein worked for a decade to understand how the force of gravity could be incorporated into his theory. His eventual breakthrough was to realize that space-time could be dynamic and curved, and that the effects of that curvature are what you and I experience as “gravity”. The fruits of this inspiration are what we now call general relativity.

So special relativity is the theory of a fixed, flat space-time, without gravity; general relativity is the theory of dynamic, curved space-time, in which curvature gives rise to gravity….

We should be willing to let go of our pre-relativity fondness for the separateness of space and time, and allow them to dissolve into the unified arena of space-time. The best way to get there is to think even more carefully about what we mean by “time”. And the best way to do that is to hark back, once again, to how we think about space.

Consider two locations in space, such as your home and your favorite restaurant. What is the distance between them?

Well, that depends… There is the distance “as the crow flies”, if we could imagine taking a perfectly straight-line path between the two points. But there is also the distance you would travel on a real-world journey … avoiding buildings and other obstacles along the way. The route you take is always going to be longer than the distance as the crow flies, since a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

Now consider two events in space-time. In the technical jargon of relativity theory, an “event” is just a single point in the universe, specified by locations in both space and time. One event, call it A, might be “at home at 6 p.m.” and event B might be “at the restaurant at 7 p.m.” 

… We can ask ourselves, just as we did for the spatial distance between home and restaurant, how much time elapses between these two events…. If one event is at 6 p.m. and the other is at 7 p.m., there is one hour between them, right?

Not so fast, says Einstein. In an antiquated, Newtonian conception of the world, sure. Time is absolute and universal, and if the time between two events is one hour, that’s all there is to be said.

Relativity tells a different story. Now there are two distinct notions of what is meant by “time”. One notion of time is as a coordinate on space-time. Space-time is a four-dimensional continuum, and if we want to specify locations within it, it’s convenient to attach a number called “the time” to every point within it. That’s generally what we have in mind when we think of “6 p.m.” and “7 p.m.” Those are … labels that help us locate events….

But, says relativity, just as the distance as the crow flies is generally different from the distance you actually travel between two points in space, the duration of time you experience [on the journey between A and B] generally won’t be the same as the [one-hour difference between the universal coordinate times, A and B]. You experience an amount of time that can be measured by a clock that you carry with you on the journey. This is the proper time along the path. And the duration measured by a clock, just like the distance traveled as measured by the odometer on your car, will depend on the path you take.

That’s one aspect of what it means to say that “time is relative”. We can think both about a common time in terms of a [space-time coordinate] and about a personal time that we individually experience [or measure] along our path. And time is like space — those two notions need not coincide.

By a “straight path” in space-time, we mean both a straight line in space and a constant velocity of travel … with no acceleration. Fix two events in space-time — two locations in space and corresponding moments in time. A traveler could make the journey between them in a straight line at constant velocity … or they could zip back and forth. The back-and-forth route will always involve more spatial distance, but less proper time elapsed, than the straight version [i.e. a clock along for the ride will run more slowly on the back-and-forth route — really?].

Why is it like that? Because physics says so. Or, if you prefer, because that’s the way the universe is. Maybe we will eventually uncover some deeper reason why it had to be this way, but in our current state of knowledge it’s one of the bedrock assumptions upon which we build physics, not a conclusion we derive from deeper principles. Straight lines in space are the shortest possible distance; straight paths in space-time are the longest possible time. It might seem counterintuitive that paths of greater distance take less proper time. That’s OK. If it were intuitive, you wouldn’t have needed to be Einstein to come up with the idea.