I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last week and turned on Turner Movie Classics (TCM). Playing at the time was the 1954 movie Brigadoon. I’d heard about it but never seen it. It’s about 2 guys on a hunting trip to Scotland who discover a place in mid-18th century Scotland in which people live as if it’s the mid-18th century. But it exists in the mid 20th century. One of the characters, played by Gene Kelly, falls in love with one of the residents of the town, Brigadoon. She’s a gorgeous woman played by Cyd Charisse.
I know it’s fantasy in the obvious sense. But there’s another sense in which it’s fantasy, a sense known to anyone who knows much about the last 3 centuries of economic history.
I caught only the last 20 minutes but in that time, we see Cyd Charisse dressed in a beautiful dress and looking beautiful as if she’s out of a 1950 issue of Vogue.
See the problem?
If the village really were mid-18th century, she wouldn’t look like that. She wouldn’t have beautiful clothing and she would probably have rotten teeth, just to name two.
I once wanted to write something for a think tank in which I gave prominence to the “hockey stick,” the graph that shows GDP per capita in the modern world from 1000 A.D. to today. The person at the think tank told me that the vast majority of their readers know about the hockey stick. My guess is that there’s at least a sizable minority that doesn’t.
Go ahead and have your fantasy about Brigadoon, but realize that if you were the character played by Gene Kelly, the actual Brigadoon would not be attractive and you almost certainly wouldn’t be attracted to the woman he fell in love with.
Here’s Don Boudreaux laying it out in more detail in a 5-minute video.
The pic above is of Cyd Charisse.
READER COMMENTS
Richard W Fulmer
May 28 2024 at 11:35am
Look around at the things in your life that are working well and getting better, and at those things that don’t work so well and are getting worse. Homes, cars, computers, TVs, smartphones, food are pretty good and are constantly improving. Education, healthcare, electricity production and distribution, monetary policy (e.g., inflation), and traffic are bad and getting worse. What’s the difference between these two sets of things? The first set is largely controlled by the free market, the second is largely controlled by the government.
Both sets are dominated by wealthy elites. We all benefit from the genius and energy of the elites who provide market goods. I like the fact that their wealth and skills are focused on making my life better – at providing products and services of steadily increasing quality at steadily falling prices. Elites who succeed in making our lives better get rich, and that’s great.
I didn’t invent telephones, lightbulbs, cars, aircraft, TVs, or computers but I benefit from the genius of those who did. And however much the inventors got, the world benefitted far more. Nobel Prize winning economist William Nordhaus estimated (“Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement”) that innovators’ share of the total social value of their innovations is only about 2.2%.
The talents of the elites in government, however, are focused on increasing their power at our expense. A regulation that limits what I can do increases some bureaucrat’s power over me and reduces my power to control my own life.
Logically, we should want to expand the set of things that are working – that is, the things that the market handles. And we should want to reduce the things that aren’t working – those things that the government handles.
Unfortunately, we’re going in the opposite direction. Politicians promise, and voters too often demand, what government is unable to provide. Government can be reasonably expected to deliver Adam Smith’s formula for prosperity: “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” But government can’t heal the planet, right history’s wrongs, provide equal outcomes, prevent all injustice abroad, or ameliorate all pain. When it tries to do what it cannot, it will fail to do what it can.
Unsurprisingly, Americans are unhappy that politicians are failing to deliver on their promises. Maybe part of the problem is that we’re demanding what they can’t deliver. If we don’t like what elites are doing with their power, maybe we should stop giving them more.
David Henderson
May 28 2024 at 1:35pm
Nicely said, Richard.
Here’s what I wrote in “The Joy of Capitalism,” Chapter 8 of my 2001 book, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey:
The quality of almost everything we get is higher than it was 30 or 40 years ago. The only things I can think of that have gotten worse are our protection from crime and the quality of education our children receive in schools. Each of these, interestingly, is provided by the government.
Dylan
May 28 2024 at 2:17pm
Respectfully, I think this might be a reflection of your biases more than a reflection of the state of the world. Everything you mention has likely gotten better on some dimensions and worse on others. On the dimensions I care about, most of the products you mention that the free market provide have gotten worse. There’s less control, less ability to tinker or repair, more monitoring of your use, etc. I fully allow, that these might not be the relevant metrics for you…but they are widely enough shared that their is even a term created (that I can not repeat here) that roughly means that all of these products have been getting worse over time.
On the other hand, things like education, healthcare, and even electricity production and distribution all seem to have gotten better for me personally. I used to have 2-3 power outages a year, with at least one lasting hours or days. I haven’t had one now in close to 20 years, and that is through two hurricanes and countless other disasters. Healthcare we seem to have made tremendous strides on in the last decade or so, including cures for diseases that were thought to be incurable. AI is likely to be the biggest transformation to education in hundreds of years. Even traffic in NYC looks likely to get better soon thanks to government intervention in the form of congestion pricing (assuming no further delays).
I largely share your bias towards the free market and away from government intervention (I’m on this site after all), but I think it is important to realize that preference shades our views and preferences in ways that are not universal.
Richard W Fulmer
May 28 2024 at 4:57pm
When I was a kid, telephones had only one function: make and receive phone calls. We weren’t allowed to tinker with them because the phone company owned them. Also, we were on a party line, so monitoring was a bit of a problem.
My first car was a used 1973 Ford Pinto that required a lot of tinkering (crawling underneath it to replace the starter wasn’t fun). It died after about a 100,000 miles, which was very good for its time. I recently sold a 2006 sedan that had 225,000 miles on it, which is not at all unusual. It was still running strong, but my wife and I wanted something a bit newer. But, yeah, I wouldn’t have even tried to replace the car’s starter. On the other hand, the car was so reliable that the starter never went out and, other than replacement of oil and other fluids, it needed little maintenance of any kind.
Airplanes don’t fall out of the sky as much as they did when I was a kid, though I admit that it takes a lot more knowledge to work on a newer plane.
The computer that I worked with on my first job out of school was a DEC PDP 12. It was six feet tall, six feet wide, two feet deep and had 4K of memory. There was, however, plenty of opportunity to tinker with it.
Our old TV also required a lot of tinkering, but we had to pay a TV repairman to do that. Vacuum tubes went out frequently, and the picture wasn’t very sharp. Fortunately, it was a black-and-white, so the picture was a lot clearer than were the color TVs of its time.
I’m glad that you’re satisfied with the government services you’re receiving. Many Americans are having quite different experiences, though. If nothing else, the prices of things like hospital and healthcare services, college tuition, and childcare have risen much faster than goods less impacted by government regulations:
Consumer Price Inflation, by Type of Good or Service (2000-2022) – Visual Capitalist
Don Boudreaux
May 28 2024 at 11:57am
Nice post, David.
In his History of England, Thomas Babington Macaulay describes a 17th-century dwelling in the Scotland’s highlands:
Macaulay, The History of England, Vol. 3 (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., n.d. [1848]) p. 279.
Although conditions might have improved by the 18th century – Scotland’s lowlands did enjoy remarkable economic growth in that century – conditions in the highlands in the 18th century were surely much closer to what Macaulay’s relates about the 17th century than they were to what is depicted in Brigadoon.
Don
Richard W Fulmer
May 28 2024 at 12:52pm
In 1987, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay titled, “The Great Relearning.” It began as follows:
Today’s Progressives share the hippies’ rejection of all norms, customs, and concessions to reality as evidence of an oppressive society. Perhaps we are due for another “great relearning.”
Laurentian
May 29 2024 at 5:40am
This is the whole classical liberal “all traditions, customs and social norms have to be challenged but this will in no way cause the return of barbarism” thing again isn’t it? Paine, Mill and Spencer were guilty of it.
And why is that the greatest opponents of laissez faire economics happen to wealthy educated urbanites rather than poor uneducated farmers?
Richard W Fulmer
May 29 2024 at 8:41am
Under a system of classical liberalism, people are free to make their own choices, but they must also take responsibility for those choices and reap the consequences, good or bad. The problem isn’t with classical liberalism, it’s with a paternalistic government that sees its role as ameliorating all pain, which eliminates the feedback loops through which we learn and creates moral hazard.
The free-market system is one of profits and losses. Businesses that fail to turn scarce resources into goods and services that people want and are willing to buy should be allowed to go out of business and not subsidized.
Similarly, the more government shifts the consequences of self-destructive actions (such as dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock, and drug and alcohol abuse) onto the backs of others, the more the incidence of such behavior will rise. At the same time, as the rewards for hard work, perseverance, and integrity fall, such virtues can be expected to fade.
John Maynard Keynes taught what a lot of politicians wanted to hear: government spending – through which politicians gain power – is good for the economy. In addition, his “multiplier” implied that we become wealthier through consumption than through saving and investing. Try telling a farmer that he will be better off if he eats his seed corn.
David Henderson
May 28 2024 at 1:29pm
Wow! Thanks, Don.
Mactoul
May 28 2024 at 9:47pm
Grain fit for horses?
An English joke actually. Dr Johnson defines oat as the grain eaten by horses in England but by people in Scotland.
Incidentally, oat is popular breakfast in America right now.
The highlanders on oat meal had perfect teeth as found by the American dentist Western Price in 1930.
Laurentian
May 29 2024 at 2:20pm
Macaulay was an Imperialist. Interesting that advocates of Modernity in the past are always guilty of “reactionary” views that were common at the time. So he does not fit Modern Modernity.
Also Macaulay is not well remembered today. Again like all advocates of Modernity he loses his luster when times change. Ironic.
Mark Barbieri
May 28 2024 at 4:46pm
I was in rural Wisconsin last weekend at a museum on local history. It was fascinating to read about the lives of the farmers there 150 years ago. It’s easy to idealize rural country living, but it was clearly a very, very hard life full of work and hardship and with your social life limited to interacting with the relatively small number of families that lived nearby.
BTW, my wife hates Brigadoon. She’s bitter because it took a huge part of the budget set aside for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers because the studio had low expectations for that movie and high expectations for a Gene Kelly blockbuster. Seven Brides was still great, but it could have been much better (maybe not having birds fly into a painted backdrop!) if it’s budget hadn’t been slashed.
David Henderson
May 29 2024 at 12:16am
Interesting.
Mactoul
May 28 2024 at 9:41pm
It is a fantasy that people had rotten teeth in pre- industrial period. Rotten teeth are more correlated with sugary foods which were only available to the rich in 18c.
Read Nutrition and physical degeneration by the American dentist Western Price who travelled all over the world in 1930s taking pictures of teeth of primitives that were still consuming their traditional diet.
David Henderson
May 29 2024 at 12:16am
Thanks. I had no idea, as you could tell.
Craig
May 29 2024 at 9:04am
Hockey stick? Yes. But let’s hope humanity doesn’t take a slapshot to extinction.
Adam Wildavsky
Jun 1 2024 at 10:12am
Typo? I think the first “18th” should be “20th”.
Comments are closed.