Economist Writing Every Day

I did go see the Barbie movie (last month I had to put up someone else’s blog about it). Kate McKinnon and the Birkenstock choice is my favorite part. You can catch part of that scene in the middle of the trailer.

Here is America Ferrera’s monologue:

It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.

You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood…

Movies and Money

The Barbie movie is doing well commercially. So many other special projects, such as the all-female remake of Ghostbusters, flopped at the box office. Barbie and Taylor Swift concert tickets were serving as the primary examples of spending in “Hot Profit Summer“. Congratulations to Greta Gerwig on a huge success.

Barbie has unresolved existential angst, universe portals, mother-daughter conflicts and fight scenes. To that extent, Barbie reminds me of Everything Everywhere All At Once. The big commercial successes within the same decade often share key components. Earlier I wrote about how Frozen and The Queen’s Gambit are similar.

It’s the Barbie doll who quotes John Locke in Toy Story 3. The Toy Story movies are funny and deep, and they are also great for kids.

Barbie is Fun

One could write a very serious post about the Barbie movie and the portrayal of female reality. Instead, let’s acknowledge that the movie is fun, just like American life generally. No one needs Kate McKinnon (to survive). We get to watch her on TV because the world is rich now. Not only has child mortality fallen because of economic development, but life has gotten more fun.

I noted this when I reviewed the movie Austenland. The film shows that when an American woman goes to a Regency-era simulation she gets bored.

… afternoons spent on needlepoint projects were not so much painful as boring to the heroine. Boring. Matt Ridley tells us in The Rational Optimist that life in pre-modern England was more miserable than we imagine in terms of health outcomes. An underrated feature of modernity is how much more interesting the world is now that we can read widely and travel and tweet. If you were rich enough to escape endless manual labor in 1810, your options for leisure time were still very limited.

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/02/27/in-defense-of-austenland-2013/

Is Work Fun?

John Maynard Keynes predicted that future people would only work for 15 hours per week. Why, then, did the Barbie dolls (who don’t need money) talk so much about careers? President Barbie and Doctor Barbie seem happy.

Do we keep working past 15 hours a week because it is fun? (Tyler says it is in Big Business.)

Would it be accurate to say that professionals spend less than 15 hours a week on tasks that they truly hate? Maybe striding down a clean hallway to a meeting with coffee in hand is what we like to do? Or is that a strictly American phenomenon?

Interestingly, the human mom character (America Ferrera) does not love her job. She is not President or a Doctor. Would she prefer to be unemployed?

I want to know if the career barbies sell, but I could not find the data. The Guinness Book of World Records indicates that the best-selling Barbie is “Totally Hair Barbie”.

Further reading: If you are interested in patriarchy (the topic of discussion in the Barbie movie), then follow along with Alice Evans. One of her recent posts is “Why are Gender Pay Gaps so Large in Japan and South Korea?“

Lastly, Jeremy’s EWED post on “Barbie Dolls and Women’s Wages” got picked up by Reason magazine as “Barbie Girls Now Live in a Much Wealthier Barbie World” They conclude, “Life in modern America might not be as fantastic as living in Barbie Land. But it sure beats the America of the past.”