Alger Hiss, 1950

Source: Public Domain

I considered writing about presidential politics, but the way things are going lately, by the time you read this on Wednesday, we may well be on to a whole new storyline I can’t anticipate.

So, I’m going to go off topic and reflect on a new paper by two economists about an early example of Cancel Culture, the 1947–1957 Red Scare in the movie industry, “McCarthyism, Media, and Political Repression: Evidence from Hollywood” by Hui Ren and Tan Tanyi Wang. It’s reflective of the rise of intellectual imperialism among economists:

Beyond the accused, we find that the anti-communist crusade also had a chilling effect on film content, as non-accused filmmakers avoided progressive topics. The decline in progressive films, in turn, made society more conservative.

The two economists congratulate themselves:

To our knowledge, we are the first to show that the Hollywood witch-hunt not only ruined individual careers but also changed the types of films Americans were exposed to, reshaping their political preferences in the process.

To make their case, the authors have assembled a vast trove of numbers from sources like the Internet Movie Database.

Yet, in reality, of course, few topics have been written about at vaster length over the past three generations than mid-century movie industry politics. And, despite their lack of data science chops, much the same theses have been put forward by historians and film critics for my entire lifetime: The House Un-American Activities Committee inquests in 1947 and 1951 helped push the film industry, and perhaps the country, away from the left.

But historians and critics aren’t economists, so they don’t count.

Academic economists used to write largely about dry topics like interest rates, but over the decades they’ve self-confidently shoved their way into more fun subjects that long were the province of now-woebegone academics like sociologists and cultural studies professors.

The economics profession has been doing better economically than other social sciences in recent years, in part because many elite colleges feel that offering a business administration major would make them look déclassé. So, students who intend upon business careers often find themselves majoring in economics, because, at least, economics is related to money. So, colleges still need teaching economists, even as undergrads flee the humanities and most of the social sciences to computer science.

And changes in technology have created more private industry jobs for economists with doctorates. When I majored in economics in 1980, professors put a fair amount of effort into explaining what microeconomic theory revealed about how to maximize profits in business. But when I went into the corporate world, I quickly discovered that businesses instead often ran on traditional simplistic rules of thumb. Why? Not because executives didn’t know anything about economics (like me, many had majored in the field), but because in 1982 they didn’t have the practical tools to collect data and change prices in real time.

Today, however, Amazon, having all the data in the world, employs something like 400 workers with PhDs in economics to figure out how best to manipulate prices.

For example, a few days ago, Amazon put the Kindle digital download version of my anthology Noticing (normally $29.95) on sale for $9.95. How long will it be at this price? Beats me. Amazon itself might not know. But I’d imagine that the algorithm that decides when to lower and raise prices was worked out by a bright microeconomist to maximize the wealth of Jeff Bezos.

The explosion in data availability has made the economics profession less theoretical and more empirical.

For instance, when I took financial economics in MBA school in 1981, my term paper was on whether the results of World Series games involving New York baseball teams drove the Dow Jones average up or down. If the Yankees won, did Wall Street traders feel more optimistic and thus bid up stocks?

Back then, I had to thumb through thick reference books and jot down a few hundred numbers with a pencil.

It was dull work.

(My finding: No, as the Efficient Market Hypothesis would predict, the outcome of World Series games had no detectable impact on New York Stock Exchange prices. But NYSE volume was down during daytime World Series games in New York, presumably because brokers were at the ballpark.)

Not surprisingly, back then, economists inclined toward the kind of theorizing you could do on a chalkboard. But now, economics grad students tend to be aces at finding and analyzing data.

For example, one of the most innovative economists of the 21st century is Harvard’s Raj Chetty, who has built amazing databases out of previously confidential numbers, such as your 1040 tax returns. Granted, Chetty is notably less than fecund in coming up with theoretical insights to explain his findings. But still, the data he has pulled together is extraordinary.

These changes in the field of economics have done a lot of good. But let me point out some tendencies of modern economists.

For one thing, the globalization of American economics has led to many of the most wizardly data analysts being Asians like Raj Chetty, Hui Ren, and Tan Tanyi Wang, clearly people with little intuitive feel for U.S. realities. America is a complicated place, so, despite all that is written about the USA, you can’t expect even 150-IQ foreigners to be adept at understanding it.

Another problem is that contemporary economists tend to be averse to giving examples from their data. For instance, in “McCarthyism, Media, and Political Repression,” the authors argue that the anti-Communist witch hunt led to fewer progressive films being made.

But what are progressive films, you might ask? Well, the authors have gone to great lengths to make up a list of “Benchmark Progressive Films” from Hollywood’s golden age. Yet they leave their list out of their main paper and relegate it to their data appendix, perhaps fearing that a list of movies would be too unprofessionally interesting.

The most famous of their progressive examples turn out to be three Depression-era prewar movies: Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times, 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Preston Sturges’ 1941 comedy Sullivan’s Travels about a rich movie director who impersonates a hobo to get the background to film the socially conscious novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? Then, in more prosperous 1947, the concerns of progressive movies seemed to evolve from brokeness to wokeness with two films about anti-Semitism: Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire.

Meanwhile, on their list of “conservative benchmark films” is 1939’s very funny anti-Communist Ninotchka, in which Greta Garbo plays a stern Soviet commissar sent to Paris:

Buljanoff: How are things in Moscow?

Ninotchka: Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.

I’m guessing cowriter Billy Wilder came up with that line.

Lists of movies are intriguing. But they tend to raise more questions than they answer. For example, what are the politics of Sturges fans the Coen Brothers? I’ve seen all 19 of their movies, but I still don’t know.

Hence, you could wind up arguing for hours about the exact political leanings of most of the best movies. For instance, The Grapes of Wrath was based on the novel by John Steinbeck and starred Henry Fonda, both left-of-center personalities, but it was directed by the conservative John Ford, who was so memorably portrayed recently by fellow conservative director David Lynch in liberal Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

A related unfortunate tendency of modern data-crunching economists is that they don’t like sorting their data and then presenting the tail ends for readers to inspect and opinionize about. Economists tend to assume that the cardinal sin is to notice outliers because they couldn’t possibly be representative of tendencies. So the authors don’t mention that screenwriter Lester Cole of the martyred 1947 Hollywood Ten admitted that all Ten had been Communist Party USA members at one point.

On the other hand, one mistake that economists, being not as politically correct as other social scientists, make less is to confuse correlation with causation.

Thus, I’m dubious about the authors’ contention that movies drove voting, rather than movies reflecting, with an erratic lag, broader cultural shifts. I was around in the early 1950s, but I can vividly recall Reagan’s 1980s, when a large fraction of movies were as liberal as in the 1970s, but a handful of conservative films like Top Gun turned out to be surprise hits.

For instance, Ghostbusters’ anti-EPA regulator scenes turned out to be sensations during the 1984 election season. Still, the inspiration for the movie was not state-of-the-art Reaganism, but Dan Aykroyd’s ancestral involvement with not-terribly-fashionable Spiritualism, going back to his great-grandfather trying to contact the dead through séances.

Although American culture turned around to be pro-business in the 1980s, the current spate of movies about great moments in corporate marketing like Air, Flamin’ Hot, and Tetris took several decades longer to come about.

It would make perfect sense if the late 1980s had produced a lot of movies about early-1980s products like Reebok and the IBM PC-XT.

But they didn’t.

Sometimes, that’s just the way things work out.