Category: Film

My quick response on the Fed

by  Tyler Cowen in

I’ve been making my way to Toulouse and haven’t followed all of the details.  Scott Sumner has many good posts on the topic, and I would put it thus: the Fed probably decided to do the best it could within political constraints and a framework of more or less stable prices.  Which won’t do much good at all.  Keep in mind:

1. The median voter hates price inflation.  Don’t blame Bernanke.

2. Today price inflation will accelerate real wage erosion, or at least is perceived so, who wants to take credit for that?

3. Core CPI is already going up at a rate of two percent and 3.8 percent for the broader bundle, at least for the time being.  Voters don’t know or care what is embedded in the TIPS spread, etc.

4. Some of the “inflationists” ignored supply-side factors and bottlenecks and didn’t see this price pressure coming.  That has thrown their entire analysis into doubt, unjustly probably but nonetheless.  In any case it is no longer the simple story where Q goes up first and only later does P rise.

5. If Ron Suskind is to be believed, our President seems not to know the difference between TFP and per hour labor productivity; in his defense a lot of economists don’t quite get that either.

6. The GOPers now send Bernanke epistolary romances.

7. Some people on Twitter were taking about “striking down Old Ben and having him come back stronger,” but a) Obi-Wan plain, flat out died, b) Obi-Wan’s younger prodigy, Luke, was a failure who relied on his dad and wouldn’t at the key moment listen to Old Ben and stay on the Dagobah system to invest in additional human capital (instead he read Caplan on the signaling model), and c) they never even made the final three movies of the planned nine, so we don’t know how it turned out with the unwinding of the fiscal stimulus on the Ewok world.  People, next time get your facts straight!

Every now and then, you ought to conclude that what you see is what you get and that is because of the rules of the game.  When it comes to further monetary stimulus, I’m not sure there’s so much more to say.

Contagion

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Contagion, the Steven Soderberg film about a lethal virus that goes pandemic, succeeds well as a movie and very well as a warning. The movie is particularly good at explaining the science of contagion: how a virus can spread from hand to cup to lip, from Kowloon to Minneapolis to Calcutta, within a matter of days.

One of the few silver linings from the 9/11 and anthrax attacks is that we have invested some $50 billion in preparing for bio-terrorism. The headline project, Project Bioshield, was supposed to produce vaccines and treatments for anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, and plague but that has not gone well. An unintended consequence of greater fear of bio-terrorism, however, has been a significant improvement in our ability to deal with natural attacks. In Contagion a U.S. general asks Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the CDC whether they could be looking at a weaponized agent. Cheever responds:

Someone doesn’t has to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that.

That is exactly right. Fortunately, under the umbrella of bio-terrorism, we have invested in the public health system by building more bio-safety level 3 and 4 laboratories including the latest BSL3 at George Mason University, we have expanded the CDC and built up epidemic centers at the WHO and elsewhere and we have improved some local public health centers. Most importantly, a network of experts at the department of defense, the CDC, universities and private firms has been created. All of this has increased the speed at which we can respond to a natural or unnatural pandemic.

Avian flu virus, from 3DScience.com.

In 2009, as H1N1 was spreading rapidly, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency asked Professor Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, to sequence the virus. Working non-stop and updating other geneticists hourly, Lipkin and his team were able to sequence the virus in 31 hours. (Professor Ian Sussman, played in the movie by Elliott Gould, is based on Lipkin.) As the movie explains, however, sequencing a virus is only the first step to developing a drug or vaccine and the latter steps are more difficult and more filled with paperwork and delay. In the case of H1N1 it took months to even get going on animal studies, in part because of the massive amount of paperwork that is required to work on animals. (Contagion also hints at the problems of bureaucracy which are notably solved in the movie by bravely ignoring the law.)

It’s common to hear today that the dangers of avian flu were exaggerated. I think that is a mistake. Keep in mind that H1N1 infected 15 to 30 percent of the U.S. population (including one of my sons). Fortunately, the death rate for H1N1 was much lower than feared. In contrast, H5N1 has killed more than half the people who have contracted it. Fortunately, the transmission rate for H5N1 was much lower than feared.  In other words, we have been lucky not virtuous.

We are not wired to rationally prepare for small probability events, even when such events can be devastating on a world-wide scale. Contagion reminds us, visually and emotionally, that the most dangerous bird may be the black swan.

Movies about Christ or Christ-related themes

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Of Gods and Men.

2. Simon of the Desert.

3. The Last Temptation of Christ.

4. Apocalypto, and more here.

5. Black Narcissus (the most secular of the lot, and it’s about nuns).

6. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

7. Léon Morin, Priest, by Jean-Pierre Melville.

All of these movies are underwatched these days.  There is also Winter Light.

Ridley Scott to make another Bladerunner movie

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ridley Scott is returning to his roots, revisiting his definitive — and beloved — cyberpunk film “Blade Runner,” for Alcon Entertainment, TheWrap has confirmed.

Filmmakers have not yet revealed whether the movie will be a prequel or a sequel to the original movie, according a statement by Alcon, who secured the rights to “Blade Runner” for prequels, sequels and other projects last March.

Here is the link.

*Cowboys and Aliens*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Most critics didn’t like it, but here is one of the better reviews.  I found it original, deeply and subtly funny, and multi-dimensional in its aspirations.  Film buffs will enjoy the nods and homages to High Noon, Shaka Zulu, The Searchers, Raiders of the Lost Ark, James Bond, Ray Harryhausen, Aliens, and many other movies.   There is running commentary on the Bible, the history of Spanish colonialism, contemporary U.S. foreign policy, the development of the American Western, and there is even a poke at the gold standard.  Not for everyone (you might just think it’s stupid), but it far exceeded my expectations.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

by  Alex Tabarrok in

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, is a hallucinatory BBC documentary that hyperwarps across continents and through time to draw shadowy connections between Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, the “rise of the machines”, anarchism, the financial crisis and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Need, I add and much more!?) Incongruous images and a surreal soundtrack give it a Lynchian feel. Not your usual documentary. Evaluated as a whole, it’s madness but delicious madness.  Here is the first episode.

http://youtu.be/Uz2j3BhL47c

FYI, especially interesting in the first episode is Loren Carpenter’s Pong experiment.  You can read more about that here.

*Midnight in Paris*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I don’t want to over-recommend this movie — it is good not great — but it is certainly enjoyable to watch.  It works because Owen Wilson self-consciously imitating Woody Allen, down to his shuffle and shoulder shrugs, is so absurd that it deflates the rest of the film down to the appropriately non-pretentious level, whether intentionally or not.

More importantly, the movie serves up some conceptual social science.  It focuses on why we so commonly overrate the cultures of previous eras and see them as golden ages.  It also asks the following question: if we somehow managed to meet the cultural titans of previous eras, how many of them would come across as blowhard hacks, if only because their own subsequent work has made their personae obsolete?  Gertrude Stein and Man Ray are the most impressive characters in the movie, even though (perhaps because?) they are the least well known of the figures paraded across the screen.  Hemingway and Picasso sink like stones and the viewer suddenly realizes that Allen sees Hemingway as his foil figure on issues of bravery and death.  He cannot be allowed to look like anything but a blathering fool.  (My view is that artistic creativity is sufficiently g-loaded that none of these people would seem anything less than extraordinarily impressive.)

Once again, this movie is Woody Allen wondering what other people think about him.  Ultimately the point of view of the main character and the director/moviemaker are the same.  You cannot say that about Larry David and that is why these superficially similar figures are very different and ought never to collaborate.

Londenio’s four questions

by  Tyler Cowen in

This was his request:

1. How should I explore the German New Cinema (Herzog, Fassbinder, Wenders, etc.) ?

2. If I liked Benedict Anderson’s *Imagined Communities*, what should I read next?

3. Who is the Douglas Hofstadter of Economics?

4. What is the first non-personal question you would ask if you were to wake up from a 10-year-long coma?

Answers:

1. Herzog’s Nosferatu, Kaspar Hauser, und Little Dieter (German-language version only, and a very underrated movie) are my favorites from this tradition, which past Herzog I do not much admire or enjoy.  Not long ago I saw Herzog’s early documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?, 44 minutes on Netflix streaming, highly recommended, mostly it is footage of auctioneers talking really really fast, and percussively, to a partly Amish audience.

There is Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, but Fassbinder films I do not enjoy.  Try also the TV serial Heimat, which properly can be considered cinematic.

2. Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures, by me.

3. If you mix together Kenneth Boulding, G.L.S. Shackle, and Nassim Taleb, you might get an economics approximation of Hofstadter.

4. Are there major wars going on and how bad are they?

Tyrone’s top ten favorite movies

by  Tyler Cowen in

That was a request from Nick L.  My (longer) list is on my home page, scroll down a bit.  Tyrone of course is my long-lost brother and evil twin.  His list, in no particular order, is:

Pee Wee’s Big Adventure

Idiocracy

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Showgirls

Wild Things

Ella Enchanted

The Cable Guy, Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor

Booty Call

Flash Gordon

Pasolini’s Teorema

*Godzilla on My Mind*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is William Tsutsui and the subtitle is Fifty Years of the King of Monsters.  Excerpt:

Gojira (1984), echoing its predecessor of thirty years before, also aspired to a sober message, this time about the threat of nuclear brinksmanship and the dangeres of atomic energy in all its forms.  Drawing on public insecurity…the new Godzilla was intended as a cinematic wake-up call.  “We wanted to show how easily a [nuclear] accident could occur today,” Tanaka remarked, “but vivid images of nuclear war are taboo…Gojira (1984) is not particularly subtle in its sermonizing, depicting the monster gutting a Japanese nuclear power plant and scarfing down a Russian submarine….And as in the original Gojira, helpless, peaceful Japan, caught between the two Cold War goliaths, emerges as the innocent, morally superior victim.

Recommended.  The Godzilla movies, by the way, are recommended too.  Most of them are good and I am not just referring to the obvious choices here.