Saturday Movie Reviews

In the spirit of saving space and to lighten things up a bit after yesterday’s excessively baroque posts about economics, here are some haikus reviewing movies that I saw over the past few days:

Baby Geniuses
Babies with Kung Fu
Saying sexy one liners
Nothing’s creepier

Bangkok Dangerous
Boring action scenes
Thai cast shone despite Nic Cage
Middle of the road

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Intricate thriller
Philip Seymour Hoffman nude
Rushed resolution

Terror’s Advocate
Uneven pacing
No deep insights into man
Or the film’s subject

Some Additional Thoughts on NYT’s “Economic View”

These are all in reference to the post immediately below this one. I felt I should keep these separate from the main body of the post since they are more about the thesis of the article than its methodology.

-Two Republican administrations (Nixon & Ford) were hit pretty hard by 1973’s OPEC embargo. This would have seriously damaged (and did damage) the economy regardless of the party affiliation of the White House. There is something to be said for how each political philosophy might deal with the crisis, sure, but this undoubtedly affected the statistics for the GOP whereas the Democrats didn’t really, to my knowledge, have to deal with anything this onerous.  Indeed, there are actually several instances of GOP administrations getting hit with economic disasters that had little to do with their own economic policy.  A couple more examples, too: ‘68 Gold crisis, collapse of dotcoms both at the tail end of Dem administrations and beginning of GOP ones.

-Ike Eisenhower, in my view, is a different stripe of Republican than Reagan and those who succeeded him vis-a-vis the economy. He was not as aggressively anti-union as Reagan (although he did invoke Taft-Hartley) and the progressive tax was at its apex during his administration – 91% for the top bracket, believe it or not! The essence of Eisenhower was not to roll back the New Deal, but to preserve the “best aspects” of it. Hardly the kind of stuff you would expect from Reagan or George W.

-So the whole Democrat/Republican GNP growth thing might be a false dichotomy until 68 or 80. If you were to cut out the entire swathe up until 68 and attribute it to Democratic policy as this implies, that gives them an unfair advantage: the American manufacturing sector was still very strong at this point.

Again, though, the guy who wrote the book is definitely not an idiot and hopefully has addressed these points. I’m assuming his emphasis is on progressive taxation and welfare programs in a way that builds on Katznelson, for one.

New York Times’ “Economic View”

Interesting article in the NY Times today about relative economic growth under GOP & Democratic administrations since 1948. Well, really, it’s an article about a book on the subject. In any case, the long and the short of it is as follows:

-Real GNP growth under GOP Presidential Admins post-48 averages to 1.64, for Dems 2.78

-The difference, maintained for 8 years, results in 9.33% increase in income per person

-Under the GOP salaries for the 95th percentile slightly outpaced the rest while reverse was true under Dems; the overall GNP increase, however, netted them more money than they would have otherwise anyway

All fine and dandy, I guess. But the author (of the article), Alan Binder, does not explain what if any causal connections there are. Is it the boom and bust of the economy or was liberal economic policy responsible for the good times? He’s certainly implying the latter but doesn’t really expand on it. Also, at the risk of sounding like an economics dunce, the relationship between income inequality and the GNP doesn’t seem as self-evident as the article makes it out to be. I wasn’t exactly sure whether it was implicit that Dems were alleged to have simultaneously lowered income inequality AND beefed up the GDP, or if one caused the other (comments welcome in that respect). The book’s cause isn’t helped by the fact that it’s written by a political scientist (ugh) and not an economist, even if he is from Princeton. Say what you will about economists, Milton Friedman knew how to write and he knew how to argue – even if I disagree with most of his policy recommendations.

I suppose what bugs me most about the article is that it smacks of the kind of liberal triumphalism that so easily allows the right to portray the left as effete, out of touch elitists. I’m most definitely onboard with learning from history or at the very least being aware of it, but at best all that knowledge will give you is a somewhat accurate prediction of what could happen. Whether they be Marxists, Evangelicals, or proponents of Modernization Theory, I’m always wary of those who explicitly invoke history on their behalf in a vaguely deterministic manner, and there are shades of that in the article’s title, “Is History Siding with Obama’s Economic Plan?”

The thing is, by and large I agree with the liberal (that is, the American Left variety not the Adam Smith variety) prescription for the economy, but when it comes to other people arguing its merit I would like to see a little more hard evidence of its benefit. As humans we’re inclined to see causation in everything, often simply because they occur simultaneously or in chronological sequence (for the Nth modern echo of this, see this article from LiveScience about the still-widespread and erroneous perception that vaccines cause autism). I want to see some meat, dammit! This isn’t Michael Moore style bad faith editing and distortion by any means, but throw in some hard luck stories and continue to neglect the actual detailed explanations usually required and it won’t be that far from it. Maybe I’m just being a bitch and the book does completely deliver all that. I’ll probably flip through it at the Borders book store near me. I guess that makes this whole post all for naught?

Actually, no. That brings me in meandering fashion back to the first point: read the damn article.