The Liberal Order

Murray and Herrnstein on the Big Screen

I can't wait! I looks like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve has made it to the big screen. From Wikipedia (quoting FilmJerk.com):

"The film begins with a shot of Earth from space, as an announcer explains that the evolution of man, which so long relied on the process of natural selection to keep the population strong and intelligent, faltered when the smart people stopped breeding. This evolutionary change is shown in a split screen, as one yuppie couple talks about their decision to wait for the right time to have kids, while a white trash couple get hot and heavy on a couch. The right side of the screen splits into four smaller frames, as the white trash couple starts having kids, as the yuppie couple on their left, now slightly older, talk about their prosperity. More little screens pop up on the right, as the white trash couple realizes they can get more from welfare and more food stamps if they have more children. As time moves on, the right side increases exponentially, as the white trash younglings start to grow up and start multiplying like rabbits on their own. The right side becomes so crowded, it starts to push into the left side of the screen, until the yuppie woman, who by the time she is in her fifties is widowed and childless, is forced into oblivion by the ever growing generations of dumb-asses."

Movie Renting Habits of Americans

Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix's inventory, I ask, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day?

The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?

Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000. That's right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. "Americans' tastes are really broad," says Reed Hastings, Netflix's chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process.

Story here.

Lessons from ROTS

Clarence Page discusses the latest Star Wars film and the controversy over conservatives' complaints about Lucas's supposed anti-Bush message.

"If you're not with me, you're my enemy," declares Anakin Skywalker in the new "Star Wars" tale as he drifts over to the "dark side," morphing into the evil Lord Darth Vader and echoing Bush's warning, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Ouch.
 
His mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi, retorts, "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes." Double ouch.
 
Bad-guy Chancellor Palpatine exploits war fears to consolidate his power, suspend democratic rule and turn the Republic into a dictatorship. It's not hard to hear echoes here of Congress' rush to pass the Patriot Act that expanded government search and eavesdropping powers after the Sept. 11 attacks. Sen. Padme Amidala, played by Nathalie Portman, laments, "This is how liberty dies: with thundering applause." Triple ouch.

Oh man that was great! That last line was the best line of the whole movie.

Lucas is quoted as saying,

"The issue was: How does a democracy turn itself over to a dictator? Not how does a dictator take over, but how does a democracy and Senate give it away?"

His stand in favor of democracy is irrelevant. Democracy is not what sustains a free society; it's the protection of individual freedom and property rights. Democracy itself is oversold; economic freedoms at least can be acheived through a dictator and easily usurped via the democratic process. Pinochet, perhaps? Although he was a brutal dictator, there's no question that his instilling market reform by force has improved the living standards of the Chilean people. He defied and renounced democracy and improved freedoms, at least in the long run, while admittedly destroying them in the short run.

In the U.S., our free society has been sustained, at least partially, given separation of powers. This separation of powers actually constrains democracy. It's not democracy that gave us freedom. Let's hope that we can regain the diligence sufficient to constrain the democratic process from further encroachment and erosion of our freedoms.

That being said, I'm not a fan of sci-fi. This is the first and only of the six Lucas films that I actually saw in the theater. I didn't see either SW, ESB, or ROTJ until the early 90s when for some unexplained reason I purchased the trilogy from Price Club. I felt obligated for cultural reason and now regret that I wasted the $25. I wanted to leave ROTS with about 45 minutes left, but couldn't get it in me to leave and disturb the people behind me. If only I were more self-interested.

But here are some things that I thought about while waiting for the movie to end.

1. Anarcho-capitalism can't work. The result will always be a de facto government run by military dictatorship. There is a quaint but meaningless saying of libertarians (So, too, is the Nolan chart quaint, but meaningless. The libertarian political philosophy is great; we just haven't found a meaningful way to sell it to a larger audience. The blunders of statism--both on the left and the right--have helped, but these quaint but meaningless soundbites and toys don't help.) that if people are generally good we don't need a government, and if people are generally bad we don't dare have a government. But people are neither generally good nor bad, they have both good and bad tendencies--some more than others. Government is required to restrain these tendencies. No civilization has yet found a way to constrain government power, however.
2. Protection of individual freedoms is tenuous, and I'm always amazed at how willing people are to sell it out for false hopes and promises of security. Here are just a few stories on just one topic from just yesterday's news. 1, 2, 3, 4. And it's not as if information stored by the government is secure and safe from abuse. The Japanese court appears to protect individual privacy a bit more than American courts. (Subscription to WSJ required.) Here are a few cases filed to protect property rights violations by government.
3. Rule of law is essential for development and social stability.
4. That a culture of cooperation is essential for market economies to function. This is an unexplored area of economics, but the Social Change Project at Mercatus is one group making inroads. Hayek's evolutionary culture is the only explanation for the ubiquity of trust and trustworthiness we observe in successful market economies, which is lacking in poor societies.
5. That Dave Friedman is correct: American Graffiti is Lucas's only film worth watching.

The Economics of the Film Industry

Studios spend $20 million to $40 million on TV ads because their market research shows that those ads are what can draw a movie's crucial opening-weekend teenage audience. To do that, they typically blitz this audience, aiming to hit each viewer with between five to eight ads in the two weeks before a movie's opening. The studios also spend a great deal of money testing the ads on focus groups, some of whom are wired up to measure their nonverbal responses. If the ads fail to trigger the right response, the film usually "bombs" in the media's hyperbolic judgment. If the ads succeed, the film is rewarded with "boffo" box-office numbers.

Story here. Thanks to Newmark's Door for the link.

I have to agree with my wife's theory of movie advertising. When an ad is overplayed it's a pretty good indication that the focus groups that previewed the movie (not just the ad, which is what is described in the paragraph above) panned it. The blast of advertising is a move to increase audience interest prior to prospective viewers reading movie reviews that will inevitably trash the film.

1000 Best Movies

The New York Times also lists their reviewers' 1000 best movies of all time.

Star Wars

The original review of Star Wars published in the New York Times May 26, 1977. (Free registration required.)

Star Wars, which opened yesterday at the Astor Plaza, Orpheum, and other theaters, is the most elaborate, most expensive, most beautiful movie serial ever made. It's both an apotheosis of Flash Gordon serials and a witty critique that makes associations with a variety of literature that is nothing if not eclectic: Quo Vadis?, Buck Rogers, Ivanhoe, Superman, The Wizard of Oz, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Latest Effort

Another creative effort from the creators of South Park. (Registration required.)

Update: Please, I am neither Matt Stone nor Trey Parker. If you leave me comments I guarantee that they won't get them because I don't know them.