Friday, May 10, 2013

Strong start, weak finish

I was excited to when I stumbled across the BBC's Masters of Money miniseries that presented a trio of one-hour documentaries on economists John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Marx, all available free online. Sadly, that enjoyment turned to annoyance and resentment when I watched the series and it unraveled from educational material into a slanted, ill-informed personal opinion piece.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first piece on John Maynard Keynes, which I felt was a celebration of his ideas wrapped in a detailed biography of his personal life. Keynes is a great subject and it's a shame his legacy hasn't soaked into the broader culture the way Albert Einstein's visage has extended beyond physics.

I anticipated a similar treatment of Friedrich Hayek, but never received it. Instead, I saw Hayek treated as a flawed extension of Keynes, the way Ptolemy would be presented in a documentary on Copernicus. What irked me the most is how they were shown as bitter rivals when in fact Keynes and Hayek became good friends despite being the leaders of opposing camps.

Host Stephanie Flanders really went off the deep end with the third piece on Karl Marx, who she gave way more credit than deserved. Flanders is hard to take seriously when she endorses Marx's criticism of capitalism. She does not endorse socialism or communism and the piece made a great point of showing that Marx never adequately fleshed those ideas out - something that irks the hollow-headed Stalinists of our generation. As Brad DeLong said, Marx's real contribution to economics was presenting the best arguments for modern mainstream economists to combat, not for advancing any sort of alternative.

The series constantly flouts The Open University tie in on the BBC website which promised several cartoon shorts on basic economic concepts. I thought most of them were garbled and visually ugly. Worse of all, the short on comparative advantage makes the cliche outsider argument that the concept is outdated and irrelevant, something Paul Krugman demonstrated has been happening for ages as a form of intellectual hipsterism.

1 comment:

  1. The short on the comparative advantage also didn't explain how it works - which is surprising because Krugman is right: You can easily explain the basics of the argument in a few minutes. It's one of the few big ideas which can be expressed so easily.

    (Personally I like introducing the comparative advantage with Matt Ridley's caveman example, because it shows why exchange and specialization work even on an individual level - thus you can explain the concept to protectionists without making them angry or upset.)