Econo-Manic Depression: A Crash Course About the Coming Crash
Green Highway Theater
Daniels’s Mamet-esque edge is apparent whenever he talks about the profit motive–which he does almost nonstop. It seems to be the only motive worth considering when trying to understand the world–or trying to envision a better one. Quoting his onetime mentor Professor Horatio Ishmael Hart (who fired Daniels for taking bribes from his students, even though he was simply obeying the directives of a free market), Daniels asserts that the chaos on the Titanic could have been averted if a profit-driven market had allocated places on the lifeboats. “To call 800 lifeboat seats for 2,200 passengers a ‘shortage’ is a gross misunderstanding of economic theory,” he says. On that cold North Atlantic night 86 years ago, the sensible solution would have been to allow the price of a seat on a lifeboat to rise until it equaled demand. Poof: no tragedy, just economic efficiency. Daniels sees no moral dilemma in a system that allows the rich to survive while the poor drown. “Fair? What’s fair? Some people in this country are so poor they don’t have to pay any income tax. Is that fair?”
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At base, it seems that Bernstein sees market economics as nothing but an elaborate scam, the kind of scam that sent the price of a single tulip to $5,000 in 17th-century Holland. Letting his Professor Daniels character drop briefly, he tells us that people paid that much for flowers only because they thought they could sell them for twice the price. In case anyone misses the parallel between 400-year-old tulips and our current stock market, which has increased in “value” tenfold in 15 years, he’s posted graphs around the theater and in the program showing the market’s historical tendency to plummet after a steep rise. Considering that Forbes magazine lauded the “heroic scale” of U.S. economic growth just four months before the 1929 crash, you can only hope that every economic forecaster in the country takes Bernstein’s course.
