Coming to theatres today, Friday, March 11: BOOM BUST BOOM
Terry Jones, Bill Jones, and Ben Timlett’s crash course in world economics has been screening extensively in university and professional settings since last March.
MONTY PYTHON alumnus Terry Jones serves not only as one of this entertaining project’s directors, but also its cheeky host, a guide through economic history and human behavior that seeks to explain why we seem destined to repeat cycles of booms and busts when we really should know better. A surfeit of talking heads is invigorated through an expansive – or, perhaps for some viewers, excessive – use of animation, puppetry, graphics, and even a song or two. Rather than stick to the most recent financial crisis exclusively, the film demonstrates the importance of looking back in time to the various other instances where greed and arrogance led to devastating crashes, from Dutch tulip mania in 1627 to the stock market crash of 1929. The lessons learned from these historical episodes underscore a primary thesis – that economists, and the institutions that train them, have willfully turned a blind eye to history and to humanity’s tendency to irrational economic behavior, embracing a neoclassical model that has left them ill-prepared to recognize the impending dangers of the next bust until it happens once again.
what (not) to doc 