Inequality for All (***1/4)

What An Inconvenient Truth was for Al Gore and global warming, this documentary by Jacob Kornbluth is for Robert Reich, labor secretary under Bill Clinton, and US income inequality. It’s similarly built around a lecture series, given by Reich to his students at University of California, Berkeley. (The movie also credits Reich’s book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, as a source.) Additional interview segments supplement the lecture, some with Reich, others with winners and losers in the new economy. And there is a little of Reich’s own story, from his early friendship with fellow Rhodes scholar Clinton to his childhood experiences being bullied because of his lack of height. Reich has incorporated his lack of stature into his act. When accepting his cabinet position, he said he had already known he was on Clinton’s “short list.”


Reich uses a plethora of statistics to show how wealth concentration has changed over time in the United States, frequently employing a suspension bridge to symbolize the changes. The peaks of the bridge represent the years 1928 and 2007, years preceding economic collapse — in each case, wealth disparities had reached new heights. He uses the statistics to correlate the current rich-get-richer trend to declines in union participation, the growth of the banking industry, and rising college tuition rates. Thus, although in his lecture he promises to challenge the assumptions of conservatives and liberals, most of his argument falls comfortably along liberal lines. Clips of Jon Stewart humorously making Reich’s points also reinforce that image.

Here the comparison with global warming is instructive. The worst effects of climate change are yet to come, so it is relatively easy to deny. But increasing income disparity over the last 30 years is nearly undeniable. Thus the argument becomes whether we should care. There is are fairness arguments in either direction, but primarily Reich is saying that income inequality is not merely unfair, but that it weakens the economy by making it more difficult for the middle class to thrive; since consumer spending is 70% of the economy, a middle class with no money to spend cannot buy the goods and services it generates. Besides Reich, the best spokesperson for this point of view is the Nick Hanauer, owner of a pillow company. Hanauer all but states that his eight-figure income is more than he deserves; he has so much that he doesn’t know what to do with it. Most of it is not use to create jobs, but invested in funds that he knows little about. Of course, those resistant to Reich’s argument might still claim that these funds create jobs indirectly, and while Reich may be correct in the long term about inequality hurting the economy — I think he is — in the short and medium term it is possible for the overall economy to grow even though those with below-median incomes get poorer. This I think the fairness argument needs to be made, too. Arguably, this is done indirectly. Hanauer and Warren Buffett, who appears briefly, are contrasted with other interviewees who are struggling to make ends meet in the new economy. Many of them work in the same kinds of jobs that were around in the 1970s, but the jobs now pay less in real dollars.

 

One thing Reich doesn’t tackle is the political movements behind these changes or the cultural landscape that may have lent public support to policies he deplores. About his onetime boss, Clinton, his take is basically, we did a lot, but not enough to reverse the long-term trends. By his own account, he was something like a broken record in bringing up the issue of inequality at every opportunity. Politics may explain why, in
that in the aftermath of the economic downturn little has been done to reverse inequality (the Affordable Care Act conceivably could help). No doubt this disappoints Reich, but his ideas have found some expression in the Occupy movement of 2011 and have at least received broader dissemination. the last third of the movie depicts the Occupy protesters and generally exhorts its audience to go forth and change things. It’s more general and less compelling than the first half of the film. But for someone who wants the facts about inequality, and Reich’s argument, in distilled form, this movie presents it clearly, and Reich is an engaging personality.

 

 

IMDb link

viewed 10/16/13 7:10 at Ritz 5 and posted 10/17; revised 10/19

Surviving Progress (**1/4)

This liberal feel-good (or feel-bad) documentary, adapted from a book by Ronald Wright, makes the case that our society is a kind of bubble that may soon burst. Specifically, Wright argues that modern humans have fallen into a “progress trap.” As with ancient hunters who became so adept at slaughtering mammoths that they killed off the source of their wealth, we have become so adept at exploiting natural resources that we are exceeding the capacity of Earth to regenerate them. He gives 1980 as the date when we began to do this on a global scale, although the film echoes people like Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, whose warnings of catastrophe began 40 years ago and proved, at least, premature. It’s not quite clear why 1980 is the key date, but perhaps it’s not coincidental that that’s when Ronald Reagan was elected. That’s also when the United States began to experience an increasing concentration of wealth that continues. The film implies, not entirely correctly, that this is a phenomenon everywhere. Economist Michael Hudson links wealth concentration to the fall of the Roman Empire and says “that’s what’s threatening to bring in the Dark Ages again.”

Only the fiercest anti-environmentalists would deny that the explosive growth in output and wasteful use of resources in the last decades brings challenges with it. But to declare, as the film does, that a phenomenon that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in Asia since 1980s is a “failed experiment” is at best premature and overstated. Geneticist David Suzuki broadly criticize economics, which is “not a science,” for ignoring pollution and other societal costs. “Economists call these externalities…that’s nuts.” However, plenty of economists, including Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, have written about the problems of externalities. Suzuki seems to disparage the profession for having created the very term. Repeatedly, the documentary argues by such assertion, rather than proof, wielding very little empirical data. A detour to Brazil provides some detail about deforestation, but, generally, I longed for more specificity.

To be fair, proving such a bold thesis is well beyond the purview of a feature-length documentary. Wright’s book, which I have not read, dwells more on past civilizations than our current one. Given that it’s far easier to explain the past than predict the future, perhaps the directors, Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, should have followed that path. Alternately, they might have deeply delved into some specific areas where the negative effects of human activity are undeniable. There’s a lot of talent on hand here—the talking heads include Jane Goodall, Stephen and Hawking, and authors Robert Wright and Margaret Atwood—and building a film around any one of them might have been better than giving each a few sound bites. One participant, writer-engineer Colin Beavan, actually made his own film about his and his wife’s experiment in nonconsumption. Though based on a gimmick, Beavan’s No Impact Man: The Documentary nonetheless seriously grapples with the idea of conservation in a more concrete (and entertaining) way.

The positives of the film include some nifty time-lapse simulations and the opening and closing segments, in which gorillas trying to solve a logic problem. (This sort of ties into the idea that our brains have not evolved too far beyond that of apes, so we’re lousy at anticipating long-term consequences.) But the most worthwhile portion of the documentary is the one about solutions, which includes the expected warnings (by Beavan and others) about the need to conserve but also interviews with geneticists, notably Craig Ventner, about the possibility of generating artificial organisms to repair damage or even improve upon human physiology. Like everything else here, it’s quite speculative, but since the turf is less familiar, also fascinating.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/12 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/12 and 5/25/12

Moneyball (***3/4)

Numbers don’t lie, people say, but that doesn’t mean everyone will believe them. Baseball is no doubt the sport whose traditions are most bound up in statistics—batting average, home runs, RBIs, ERA and so on—but perhaps also the one whose practices are most bound up by the dictates of tradition. Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, one of the most absorbing works of nonfiction I’ve read, Lewis told the story of how an unconventional general manager, Billy Beane, used the unconventional analysis of people like Bill James to help his team, the Oakland A’s, compete with teams with much larger payrolls. Along with books like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics, Lewis helped popularize the notion of applying economic perspectives to subjects traditionally thought outside the bounds of economics.

Like the book, this adaptation of Lewis’s book focuses on Beane (Brad Pitt), who in 2002 was facing the loss of three key players after a 102-win season in which his team had been beaten in the playoffs by a team (the New York Yankees) with triple the budget. Slightly fictionalizing the timeline, the movie has Beane then recruiting an Ivy League economist (Jonah Hill) who was working for a rival team. Applying the approach of James, who is not portrayed but is mentioned in the film, the two then go about transforming the team. Beane succeeds not so much because he is smarter than the competition, but because he is willing to try something new. Schooled in the principles of “sabremetrics,” the name coined to describe what James and his followers do, they look for players undervalued by other teams, but who can do the one thing valued above all: get on base, which leads to scoring, which leads to winning. The scouts resist like a creationist who think evolution takes away the mystery of life; to a sabremetrician, understanding the genetics of baseball game only makes its endlessly unpredictable outcomes that much more astonishing. They are, as Beane says, “card counters.”

The script, by Steve Zallian (Schindler’s List, Awakenings, American Gangster) and Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network), does a fine job of explaining the nontraditional approach, although I slightly lost track of Beane’s machinations in one scene where he slyly manipulates three fellow GMs at once. In understandably conveying lots of information, it reminded me of The Social Network. Yet compared to Sorkin’s usual work the pace is as unhurried as the ink-jet printer Beane uses in his modestly furnished office. There’s even a kind of wistfulness about him, or the version played by Pitt. As a character drama, this will appeal even to people who would, as does one character, mispronounce “Giambi,” the last name of a player Beane can’t afford. It’s both a unsentimental reminder that a professional sports player is, fundamentally, a commodity and a classic, true underdog story. Here the underdog is the outspent Beane, who had himself been a player but failed to live up to expectations. Unlike the old-school scouts and even the team manager, who talk about the value of intangibles, he knows that intangibles, unless quantifiable as runs, are a distraction. He purposely keeps his distance from the players, knowing that one day he may need to fire them. Hill, referred to as “Google Boy” by one of the old-school scouts, does a nice job of being the egghead intimidated by the jock, yet sure of his facts.


For baseball geeks, Moneyball the book is a must-read, explaining why, for example, stolen bases are overrated. But this, absorbing in a different way, made me do something the book couldn’t: become, for two hours, an Oakland A’s fan.

IMDB link

viewed 10/16/11, 4:05 pm at Riverview and reviewed 10/16/11

The Edukators (***3/4)

This German philosophical thriller is about self-styled radicals who break into people’s houses, rearrange the furniture, and scrawl “Your days of plenty are numbered” on the wall. (The best known is Daniel Brühl of Good Bye Lenin! and the English Ladies in Lavender.) Naturally, things go seriously awry for the college-age “educators,” and a love triangle also complicates things. While showing obvious sympathy for the lefty trio, this unusual, smartly crafted suspense drama doesn’t turn them into heroes either. Unlike so many thrillers, the outcome isn’t certain, and it will leave you thinking about what fate these self-styled anti-capitalists deserve.

IMDb link

reviewed 4/23/05; viewed 4/13/05 (screened at Philadelphia Film Festival preceding theatrical release)