About

In 2004 when I began auditing economics courses I actually thought I’d learn something about globalization. Does it really help people in developing countries? What are its downsides? What I found in these courses was instead a difficult to understand presentation of the economy through graphic models. These models ignored what is most important to be able to understand economics: that “the economy” is political, and that it relies absolutely on nature. Most astoundingly this graphic modeling of the economic world ignores the effects of debt.

The filmed introductory course lectures were, I thought, research for a film about the personal and political: What does it mean to buy a shirt knowing it was probably made in a sweatshop? Why has the U.S. become so much more unequal over my lifetime? What I heard, saw, and read in the introductory courses wasn’t helping me to answer those questions. It was obscuring them. So, instead of a film about globalization and my own participation in the global economy, this film became about how economics is taught. How it doesn’t help us understand the world. How the orthodox teaching and its models make the forces of inequality and environmental destruction harder to comprehend.

My previous films were all concerned with this intersection of the personal and political. How is it I have so much and so many in the world have so little? Mainstream, orthodox economics trivializes this question, to absolve those who benefit most. The economists and others in the film who are critics of this mystifying dogma help us understand what’s going on.