Cafe Hayek

Tyler's Superman Question

Tyler Cowen reminds us that the new Superman movie will soon be released.  I'm very eager to see it -- as is my son, Thomas (who, by the way, celebrates his ninth birthday today).

Tyler asks:

Let's say we had an altruistic and incorruptible Superman, how should he allocate his efforts to improve the macroeconomy? .... Yes he should save the world from evil madmen, but fighting ordinary crime hardly appears worth his trouble.

A good question and a good point.  It reminds me of my favorite scene in Superman I (starring Christopher Reeve and Marlon Brando) -- a scene that was not released until it showed up in the DVD version of the movie, released in 2000.  I blogged on that scene here.

Protectionism Deserves an XXX Rating

The government of Bangladesh prohibits any films made outside of Bangladesh from being shown in theaters in that country.

Can you guess the consequences of such protectionism for what's called Dhallywood?  According to a report on NPR's program The World, these consequences do not include lots of creative energy springing forth in Bangladesh to produce outstanding films. The consequences instead include bad, formulaic, banal movies, each one very much like the others. The movies are so bad that theater owners have taken to inserting scenes of hardcore pornography into their screenings in order to attract audiences.

(To hear this report, click here, and then scroll down to -- and then click on -- "Dhallywood movie report.")

Tyler Cowen's In Praise of Commercial Culture explains why a protected movie industry is doomed to produce films that no one wants to see.

Munich

This commentary (rr) by Charles Krauthammer gives some of the reasons why I won't be seeing Spielberg's new movie Munich.

He could also have mentioned that killing murderers is not the same as murder.

How It's Made

One of my son's favorite television show (I proudly reveal!) is a show on the Science Channel called "How It's Made."  (I apologize: I can find no really good link to the show; the link here is just the Science Channel's scheduled airing of the show.)

Each half-hour segment features three or four explanations of how ordinary things are manufactured. Among the familiar items whose manufacture Thomas and I have learned about by watching this program are digital CDs, mozzarella cheese, sliced bread, pantyhose, and toothpicks.

Several things strike me about this program. Here’s one.

The level of automation is truly astonishing. Viewers of "How It’s Made" almost never see a human being. It’s almost all machines – computerized robots – doing the work. Even the most mundane of everyday items such as sliced bread and toothpicks are produced today with truly impressive advanced technology.

Watching "How It’s Made" last night brought to mind Adam Smith’s important insight that one advantage of the division of labor is that as tasks become more specialized they are more likely to become mechanized, thereby releasing scarce, precious human labor to do other valuable jobs.

We live truly in a world of wonders. The lowly toothpick – a splinter of birch wood – is the product of millions upon millions of dollars of investment and unmeasurable human creativity – and, of course, our happy propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,

Nickel and Dimed and Quartered

A friend of mine asked me the other day about Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's experience as a low wage worker trying to make ends meet.  She has a tough time.  It's not easy living on the minimum wage.  It's particularly hard to support a family of four on $10,000 a year.  My friend wanted to know how a classical liberal devoted to limited government would view the challenge of the working poor.  More

Trailer Art

I haven't seen Spiderman-2 but I have seen the trailer. The trailer is extraordinary. It's riveting. Can you imagine going back to say, 1950, and offering the trailer in a movie theater for people to watch? Not the movie, just the trailer. Would people pay to see that three minute experience? What would they think? I think they'd gasp in awe and disbelief and after they paid their three bucks (real money, three bucks back then), I think they'd line up to see it again, the way people do to watch a ten minute 3-D film at a Disney park. Check out the trailer for The Polar Express. Gorgeous. Check out the animation and the visuals and the integration with music. I don't celebrate Christmas, have no emotional connection to Santa and I still get goosebumps.

Through the wonder of the net I found the trailer for Roman Holiday (1953). Watch it or any trailer from that era. Will our grandchildren look at the trailer for The Polar Express or Spiderman-2 with the same bemused nostalgia of how primitive things once were? Hard to imagine but certainly true.

Inspired by The Day After Tomorrow

Roland Emmerich’s new film, The Day After Tomorrow, is being roundly panned by reviewers. See, for example, Stephen Hunter’s less than globally warm review in today’s Washington Post. This despite favorable reaction to the movie from Al Gore and various environmental groups – favorable reaction because the movie depicts colossal worldwide destruction and death brought on by violent weather and tidal waves allegedly sired by global warming.

Of course, the movie has no basis in fact or science. Even one of the movie’s admirers, Friends of the Earth Director Tony Juniper, concedes that “the depiction of the science is exaggerated and at times misleading.” However, this realization does not prevent Mr. Juniper from avowing that “the scale of the threat and the underlying politics are all too true.”

Suppose that a movie with exaggerations on a similar scale were made by a free-market enthusiast. That movie might contain some of the following scenes:

- A ten-cent increase in the federal minimum wage casts millions of blacks and Hispanics into permanent unemployment and despair; all of the unemployed women scrape up pennies by offering themselves as prostitutes, while all of the unemployed men swarm to the suburbs to rape soccer-moms and then riot so violently in the cities that the Empire State building, the U.S. Capitol, the Sears Tower, and the Bank of America building all crash violently to the ground, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including a kindly book-peddler specializing in works by and about Ayn Rand.

- The top bracket of the federal income tax is raised to 50%. The astonishingly stupid, ideologically driven soak-the-rich politicians and their freshly-graduated-from-Harvard aides blithely ignore warnings that tax revenue will plummet and, worse, that such a tax rate will impoverish the country; sure enough, within 48 hours, 80% of the workforce quits their jobs; a few lucky ones move to Ireland or New Zealand, while many of the rest scrape buy as prostitutes (male and female), others rape every Georgetown hostess, and all riot so violently that the Chrysler building, the Prudential Tower, the Gateway Arch, and Mount Rushmore all crash violently to the ground, killing tens of thousands more people, including a saintly professor of economics who studied under Milton Friedman.

- An unholy alliance between greedy but smart (and subsidized) big chemical manufacturers and utterly doltish but ideologically fevered environmentalists cajoles Uncle Sam into banning all research on genetically modifying crops in ways that make them naturally resistant to pests. With this research halted by government, pesticides produced by the heavily subsidized chemical companies (who are also protected from foreign competition) pour into the water supply, poisoning millions. Frightened out of their minds, young mothers take to the streets en masse, rioting so violently that the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, the Grand Old Opry, the Superdome, and the Seattle Space Needle all crash violently to the ground, killing tens of thousands, including a brilliant young researcher who was just hours away from discovering the cures for cancer, AIDS, and acne.
....
I’m confident that, should any such silly movie ever be made, no president of a market-oriented thinktank would say about it that “the depiction of the economics is exaggerated and at times misleading, but the scale of the threat and the underlying politics are all too true.”