Jasper Smith

Mel Gibson has perhaps rightly acquired a reputation as something of a crazy person, but if he’s a bit mad, it’s perhaps justifiable to call him a mad “genius.” For the fact is, Apocalypto is an astonishing film. No time for a particulary long review at the moment, but I will say that if, like me, one of the best parts of watching movies is that you get to be transported to another world, you’ll simply love this film. Gibson has meticulously recreated an exotic, now-lost to history otherworld: that of the early 15th century Mayan civilization. And he’s done so with an incredible degree of verisimilitude. The film is utterly harrowing to watch at times, and yet I found I couldn’t move my eyes from the screen. The last half hour or so of Apocalypto is a tad more predicable and formulaic than the first hundred or so minutes (it almost reminds one of something out of the Rambo series), but the overall effort from Mr. Gibson is so well done, so riveting, so suspensful, and so, well, elegant, you’ll barely notice this shortcoming.

Apocalypto is not for the faint-of-heart, nor is it suitable for children (due to scenes of extreme — albeit non-gratuitous — violence). All in all, a very entertaining work. Very dark at times, but not wholly bleak in its vision. It even manages to impart a relevant message — an apocalypic warning, if you will — to our modern age.

Yglesias takes Tyler Cowen to task for invoking the specre of Hitler and the Nazis to make an argument against Keynesian stimulus:

When a country produces more HDTVs, more people have HDTVs and living standards go up. When a country produces more tanks and military explosives, none of the tanks or military explosives go into private hands (we hope!) so living standards are unchanged. But producing HDTVs doesn’t increase your ability to conquer France, whereas tanks and explosives are useful for conquering France. Hitler’s policy objective was to prepare for conquering France. And his policies worked quite well (though Ernest May reminds us not to neglect the importance of French intelligence failures), they just served Nazi objectives. But I don’t see why Hitler couldn’t have spent the money on something else. If we use fiscal policy to raise measured GDP primarily through building tanks, we’ll have higher GDP and more tanks. But if we use fiscal policy to raise measured GDP primarily through repairing existing roads and building new mass transit and high-speed rail lines, then we’ll have higher GDP, better roads, and more mass transit and HSR systems. It seems to me that living standards would therefore be higher.

Right. I doubt living standards increased for most Americans during the war years, but nonetheless GDP was rapidly expanding. The economic growth was sufficiently robust (explosive, really) to finally jolt the country out of depression. Once the war was over, living standards could resume their ascent, as money for guns was channeled into money for butter.

We don’t have the luxury at the present time to agonize over slumping living standards. The task is to save the economy, and avoid deflation. Once things have returned to normal — a non-deflationary economy characterized by growth — we can hopefully get back to increasing living standards. Personally I expect that, for a while at least, such increases will be modest, given the need to increase savings over the long term, pay back debt (ie higher taxes) and put the economy on a long-term, sustainable path. Still, “modest” need not mean “none.” Ideally, we can increase savings and (modestly) increase consumption over the long term by limiting growth in consumption to a number slightly lower than GDP growth.

Of course, we can (and should!) also try and extract some gains in this regard for the vast majority of the population by tackling the income inequality issue.