The Brunch Table

Justina and I took advantage of the holiday to go through our video collection and get rid of all the old VHS tapes that we’d never watch again. VHS really has a horrible bulk-to-quality ratio! However, I did unearth a few gems that I thought I’d lost.

First up, Tayna tretey planety, a Russian animated sci-fi movie from the early 80’s. It has a wonderfully psychedelic synth soundtrack, and the visual style is foreign, somewhat weary and depressed. My copy is dubbed in French since it was taped off of Radio-Canada in the late 80s, but there are apparently several budget English-dubbed DVD releases of varying quality.

Next, Earth*Star Voyager. This was shown as a two-part Disney Sunday movie in the late 80’s, though it was apparently shot as a pilot for a full series that never happened. In the end, it’s pretty laughable (in the late 21st century of this film, they still use the dorky 80’s computer font on all their signage and UIs), but in that era the sci-fi pickings were pretty slim, so I have some fond childhood memories of this. Seems I’m not alone–it’s at least popular enough to warrant torrents of fan-made DVD versions (since Disney will likely never bother to release this on video).

Speaking of Disney, I’ve recently come across some great Ward Kimball animations from Disney’s earlier TV shows:

This segment from Mars & Beyond is mostly an excuse to create wonderfully whimsical creature animations.

Magic Highway USA has been making the blog rounds lately, and it’s easy to see why. It alternates between sensible and prescient predictions (in-dash GPS) and loopy petrocolonial fever dreams (electric hovercars driving by the sphinx in air-conditioned glass highway tubes!), set to a swinging jazz soundtrack. If you like the style, Paleo-Future has rounded up a great set of publicity stills from the collection of Kevin Kidney.

So it looks like the New York Times has embraced the idea that the World Bank/IMF causes severe economic damage to poor countries. These institutions offer loans in exchange for the broad adoption of Reagan-style laissez-faire policies, which have a lousy overall track record when it comes to creating wealth. As a result, borrower countries typically end up in worse financial shape than when they started.

This was considered an unacceptably radical position just a few years ago, when Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz advanced it in his great book Globalization and Its Discontents. (There’s even a photo of burning fire on the cover.)

Stiglitz’s argument is simple: countries borrowing money are not that different from people borrowing money–in each case, there’s “good debt” and “bad debt.” Poor countries are poor because their economies can’t generate enough wealth for enough people. And the quickest cure for that is usually infrastructure, defined as whatever increases the overall wealth-generating capacity of the economy. Tap water, roads, reliable electricity, and vaccinations are common examples: that’s good debt. Problem is, infrastructure investment is precisely what laissez-faire ideology forbids. Therefore, whatever a country ends up spending a World Bank/IMF loan on, it’s unlikely to increase the country’s ability to create wealth, which means it’s going to be very difficult to pay back the loan: that’s bad debt.

Keynesian economics, first adopted by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and now used by most of the world’s rich countries (the U.S. prominently excepted), argues the exact opposite. Build the infrastructure first, Keynesian doctrine says, even if you have to go into debt, and wealth creation will follow. Now, Keynesianism was orthodoxy in the U.S. from 1932 up till the Reagan era. Even Nixon, Depression kid that he was, stuck to the basic principles–to an extent that’s hard to believe today.

It didn’t quite sink in for me until I saw a UPA Cold War propaganda short at this year’s Ottawa Festival, trumpeting the capitalist virtues of advertising–and realising that the Voice-of-God narrator was talking about Keynesian capitalism. I can’t find a link–shame, the UPA educational shorts are graphic-design marvels–but i took notes:

“In a feudal society, income distribution is a pyramid.” [Xylophone scale.]

“In an industrial society, income distribution is a diamond.” [Balloon-stretch sound.]

That’s a graphical representation of the Keynesian middle class, pumping their increased disposable income into the economy.

“The New Deal gave every two American consumers the buying power of three.” [Timpani drum.]

Surreal.