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Screen Films about Inequality? A Capital Idea

Two docs to watch online now, including Piketty’s latest and ‘Free Lunch Society.’

Dorothy Woodend 1 May 2020TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend is culture editor of The Tyee. Reach her here.

Now that we’re deep in uncharted pandemic territory, not only in terms of economics but also social behaviours and cultural shifts, it’s time to entertain some new ideas.

Here are a few being kicked around:

End Big Oil!

Take drugs!

Eat more french fries!

Aliens exist!

Free money!

That last one’s been around for a while but has come surging back with renewed relevance with one-half of the world’s population now in danger of losing their jobs.

With the idea of a guaranteed basic income entering into the zeitgeist once again, the Vancity Theatre is offering two films to screen online — Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Free Lunch Society — that take apart the current economic system, excising ideas that no longer serve as well as offering up new directions and possibilities.

What’s most interesting about these films is the pale green species of hope that they invoke. Money is, after all, just something that we all collectively agreed upon, and like any human system it can be altered and adapted to fit changing circumstances.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century takes French economist Thomas Piketty’s massive 2013 book on inequality as a leaping-off place to examine the better part of the last few centuries, tracing the rise and fall of class, power and filthy old lucre.

After selling more than three million copies after its initial release, catapulting Piketty into the realm of celebrity economists (a surprisingly small field), Capital spawned a few sequels, the most recent being Capital and Ideology. Piketty is front and centre in the documentary, murmuring in French about the nature of capital and labour and setting hearts and mind aflutter.

As a primer on how to make economics fun and entertaining, director Justin Pemberton does a terrific job of assembling information and ideas. Capital is so slickly packaged that you barely notice the fact that you’re knee deep in boring old financial matters. It’s a rollicking ride over the last century, punctuated with pop hits and movie clips to illustrate Piketty’s ideas.

The narrative gallops along, collecting major events like baseball trading cards — the Industrial Revolution, a couple of world wars, the Great Depression, the social upheaval of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s — all moving in lockstep with economic shifts. Some of the information covered in the film isn’t particularly revelatory. That the French Revolution didn’t exactly work to plan or that the Second World War kicked the U.S. economy into a golden age isn’t surprising. But taken collectively a pattern begins to emerge.

The wealthy, it seems, will always safeguard their assets, sitting atop the masses, supported by systems legal, social and otherwise, maintaining that this is the natural order of things. Rich on top, poor on the bottom, and a comfortable slice of middle class in between.

One of the most fascinating snippets falls in the middle of the film, with psychologist Paul Piff explaining an experiment undertaken at the University of California at Irvine, where an assortment of ordinary people paired up to play Monopoly. A random coin toss determined which players would be rich and which would be poor. The wealthier players were given twice the amount of money and allowed to move around the board twice as quickly. The “rich” players quickly became loud, self-aggrandizing and intolerant of the poorer players. But the kicker came after the game, when the participants were asked to what they owed their success. Every single rich player (without fail) attributed their wins to their skill rather than the random luck of a coin toss.

Much like that Monopoly game, nothing about our economic order is natural or permanent. It’s as much created, orchestrated and manipulated as any carnival barker’s contest. As the experts in the documentary make clear, although world events have an enormous impact on the rise and fall of political systems and ideologies, in the end the game is rigged.

But the global pandemic is leading us to revisit this notion.

The necessity of addressing the growing chasm of inequality has reached a critical new place. Without rigorous regulation and effective systems of redistribution, economic equality may ultimately prove as deadly as COVID-19.

As Piketty says, without social mobility, you end up with full-blown revolution. Seems we’ve come full circle, back to the era of aristocrats wearing fancy outfits in huge estates, while the ordinary people risk their lives for minimum wage jobs. What Piketty calls the “reproduction of social hierarchies” has fostered dangerous levels of resentment: all it needs is a match to set fire to the bone-dry tinder, and you have an epic conflagration. Ka-boom, class war.

With billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk maintaining that we’re all in this together, asking their employees to keep on working, donate their sick days and give to COVID causes, all the while collecting more money than is possible to even conceive of, a match has been lit.

With workers forced to make an impossible choice between their jobs or their lives, not only in the medical industry but also grocery stores clerks and delivery people, a massive strike is happening now.

What if there was another way?

Trailer for Free Lunch Society.

Free Lunch Society makes the argument that guaranteed basic income is not only practical and rational but also within our grasp.

Released in 2017, director Christian Tod’s thoughtful documentary assembles a curious cast: billionaires, economists, politicians and the citizens of Dauphin, Manitoba, to talk about the impact that guaranteed income can have on society.

Free Lunch covers similar ground to Capital but takes as its subject different experiments with guaranteed basic income around the globe, including the U.S., Canada, Switzerland and Namibia. That last one was a bit of surprise, but it also makes the case, most directly, that giving people every month doesn’t stop them from working; in fact, productivity and economic spinoffs more than doubled people’s average incomes.

Zephania Kameeta, Namibian minister of poverty eradication and social welfare, provides one of the most eloquent and gracious examples of what freedom from economic fear can do. In a small village in Namibia, citizens were provided with a basic income. Some people bought sewing machines and started small businesses. Overall average earnings almost doubled. Revenue from self-employment quadrupled. As Kameeta says, “The idea that if you give money to people, you make people lazy is simply not true.” In fact, it makes life much better for the majority of folk.

In Canada, experiments with guaranteed income took place in the small town of Dauphin, Manitoba. From 1974 to 1978, a group of ordinary Canadians were given free money every month. Dubbed “Mincome,” the program was discontinued under the Conservative government and the results shelved and never fully analysed.

The most interesting part of the story is freedom from fear. With the basics covered (food and shelter), people were free to think bigger, to stop dreaming about doing something different and actually do it. There’s something positively giddy-making and incredibly poignant about this.

When the director asks the experts and analysts what they would have done differently with their lives if money weren’t an issue, the answers are surprisingly sweet. Be an explorer, a senator, make art, think up new ideas. Even when people win the lottery they don’t actually stop working, and in some cases they work even harder, learning new skills, setting up new businesses and helping others.

In an interview with the CBC, economist Evelyn Forget offered useful perspective on the Mincome experiment. “Most people seem [to] recognize that the current system is not working, we need to make changes, and we’d like to talk about some of those big ideas,” she said.

Maybe time has finally come to have these conversations. When everything that was once bedrock has turned to sand, and seemingly unchangeable permanent parts of the world have up and floated away, it’s probably a good time to build a new boat and set sail for a new world.


To stream these two films for a small fee and help support VIFF through the pandemic, visit VIFF at Home here.  [Tyee]

Read more: Local Economy, Film

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