Back in the good old days, economists stuck to their lane: dull stuff like GDP, the All Ordinaries Index and so on. Actually, that never happened: even at the birth of the Dismal Science, Adam Smith couldn’t stay in his lane and kept drifting off into moral philosophy. Marx made up for his shit economic thinking by waving his hands and spouting a lot pseudo-intellectual drivel that continues to fascinate fellow pseuds more than a century and 100 million corpses later.
But the Freakonomics guys kicked the intellectual pretensions of economists into the stratosphere. Now, these all-purpose sages have decided that the world is just quivering with anticipation for their utterances on everything. Now matter how obviously and ludicrously wrong they are.
Take for instance, Hui Ren Tan and Tanyi Wang’s “McCarthyism, Media, and Political Repression: Evidence from Hollywood”.
“Beyond the accused, we find that the anti-communist crusade also had a chilling effect on film content, as non-accused filmmakers avoided progressive topics. The decline in progressive films, in turn, made society more conservative […]
To our knowledge, we are the first to show that the Hollywood witch-hunt not only ruined individual careers but also changed the types of films Americans were exposed to, reshaping their political preferences in the process.”
Two things are immediately apparent. First, these guys are giving Hollywood itself a run for how far they can shove their heads up their own arses.
Second: have they ever watched a Hollywood movie from the last 70 years?
In reality, of course, few topics have been written about at vaster length over the past three generations than mid-century movie industry politics. And, despite their lack of data science chops, much the same theses have been put forward by historians and film critics for my entire lifetime: The House Un-American Activities Committee inquests in 1947 and 1951 helped push the film industry, and perhaps the country, away from the left.
Yes, they wrote that with a straight face.
Ignoring the fact that Hollywood has been whining about how evil McCarthy was (conveniently ignoring that, for all his paranoia, Joe was pretty much right) for the last 70 years, while at the same time continually valorising legitimately commie stooges in its ranks, like Dalton Trumbo.
But an argument is worthless if its premises are false in the first place. So, it’s incumbent on the two economists to define a “progressive” film.
The most famous of their progressive examples turn out to be three Depression-era prewar movies: Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times, 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Preston Sturges’ 1941 comedy Sullivan’s Travels about a rich movie director who impersonates a hobo to get the background to film the socially conscious novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? Then, in more prosperous 1947, the concerns of progressive movies seemed to evolve from brokeness to wokeness with two films about anti-Semitism: Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire.
Meanwhile, on their list of “conservative benchmark films” is 1939’s very funny anti-Communist Ninotchka, in which Greta Garbo plays a stern Soviet commissar sent to Paris:
Buljanoff: How are things in Moscow?
Ninotchka: Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.
But how accurate are the characterisations of, say, The Grapes of Wrath?
John Steinbeck, who wrote the novel, is often regarded as a leftist. But, while he joined a communist writers group in the 1930s, in the ’50s he offered to spy for the CIA. Whether he did is unknown, but certainly the KGB suspected him and kept a close watch on him on a visit to Eastern Europe. While no fan of Joe McCarthy, Steinbeck was denounced by leftists in the ’60s for his sympathetic coverage of the US in Vietnam.
While the film starred leftist Henry Fonda, it was directed by staunch conservative John Ford.
Then there is the question of just how much Hollywood really influences peoples’ voting. For all their conceit of being thought leaders to the hoi polloi, the crashing and burning of one big budget woke Hollywood wankfest after another suggest otherwise.
Thus, I’m dubious about the authors’ contention that movies drove voting, rather than movies reflecting, with an erratic lag, broader cultural shifts. I was around in the early 1950s, but I can vividly recall Reagan’s 1980s, when a large fraction of movies were as liberal as in the 1970s, but a handful of conservative films like Top Gun turned out to be surprise hits.
For instance, Ghostbusters’ anti-EPA regulator scenes turned out to be sensations during the 1984 election season. Still, the inspiration for the movie was not state-of-the-art Reaganism, but Dan Aykroyd’s ancestral involvement with not-terribly-fashionable Spiritualism, going back to his great-grandfather trying to contact the dead through seances.
At the same time as America embraced pro-business Reaganism, Hollywood was busy make finger-wagging dreck like Wall Street and Bonfire of the Vanities.
It would make perfect sense if the late 1980s had produced a lot of movies about early-1980s products like Reebok and the IBM PC-XT.
But they didn’t.
And if Hollywood has ever ‘avoided’ progressive topics, Dalton Trumbo was a pro-business patriot.
