Oxstones Investment Club™November 15, 2010, 6:00 am
By NANCY FOLBRE
Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Need an escape from the sometimes demoralizing Dullsville of economics? Check out the new genre of online presentations offered by R.S.A., the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. These short talks, animated (seemingly in real time) with comic illustrations, might perk you up.
“The Crises of Capitalism,” built on a presentation by David Harvey, a Marxist geographer, is both entertaining and thought-provoking. If you want to view the material through a different political lens, a voice-over critique is posted on YouTube.
Another provocative animation helps a journalist, Daniel Pink, summarize new research on work motivation that challenges traditional carrot-and-stick models.
Apparently, “graphic recording,” in which a cartoonist improvises illustrations as you speak, is a hot new trend at certain conferences. The economist Justin Wolfers of Freakonomics loved his experience with it, and I dream of the possibility of being “scribed” by one of my favorite political cartoonists, Lloyd Dangle.
I’ve long been a fan of economics comics, which have a long history. In 1945, Look magazine published an illustrated version of Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” using memorably plain gray-tone images to make the case against increased government planning.
The Federal Reserve bank once issued many educational comic books. The most graphically adorable, in my opinion, is “The Story of Money,” clearly influenced by the old Classics Illustrated series (though not quite as beautiful). A picture of a hairy cave man accompanies the chilling question: What if there were no money?
Leftists have always been drawn to the popular-education potential of graphic art. The Mexican political cartoonist Ríus published “Marx for Beginners” in 1975, creating a style that broke away from the little-boxes approach of comics to develop a more fluid style with borrowed images and collage. I’m not the only one who can see a touch of Ríus in the “RSAnimate” productions.
Another antecedent is “The Story of Stuff,” a popular animation that provides a compelling critique of overconsumption. Whimsical illustrations materialize on screen behind the narrator, Annie Leonard, who manages to sound like the concerned soccer mom next door while offering a biting critique of the environmental impact of global capitalism.
Posted online in 2007, the presentation quickly went viral, especially among young people. Some critics (here’s one critique) describe it as a leftist indoctrination movie that “has caused 9-year-olds to fear that buying Legos will destroy the earth.”
Some of my other favorites include a comic version of the case for caregiver tax credits, “The Adventures of Carrie Giver,” and an explanation of the mortgage crisis, “Understanding the Crash,” illustrated by the edgy graphic artist Seth Tobocman.
Yoram Bauman, known as the Stand-Up Economist for his comedy routines, is the co-author of a “Cartoon Introduction to Economics,” which nicely explains why most economists still think about competitive markets the way regular people think about puppies.
Source:economix.blogs.nytimes.com
Tags: animations, capitalism, comic illustrations, comics, economics, Marxist critique, mortgage crisis, overconsumption, The Crises of Capitalism, The Story of Money, The Story of Stuff