What can cartoon alpacas teach Americans about income inequality? Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen hopes quite a bit. Allen joined forces with documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock ("Super Size Me," "One Direction: This is Us") for a new series of short films entitled, “We The Economy.” The goal of the series is to educate the American public on the basic principles of economics.
The 22 films debuted this week, covering a wide range of topics from globalization, taxes and China to GDP and income inequality. But these are not your typical economics tutorials. The films were directed by some of the biggest names in Hollywood (Adrien Grenier, Adam McKay), and they star some of the biggest names in comedy, (Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman and “The Daily Show’s” Rob Riggle).
The target audience is not economists and professors, but rather the average American who may not be aware of just what Gross Domestic Product measures and what it doesn’t.
Adam Davidson, Co-Host of “Planet Money” on NPR served as economic adviser on the series, and he says the goal was simple: to inform more Americans about economics. So he got together with Adam McKay, who directed the Will Farrell hits, “Anchorman,” “Anchorman 2,” “Talladega Nights” and “Step Brothers,” and his creative partner, Chris Henchy, to talk economics.
The result was a cartoon wrestling match called, “GDP Smackdown.”
“The three of us sat around a table and I laid out this economic idea that economists have been arguing for decades: How do you measure GDP? What is the measure of a good life? Is it just dollars and cents? Is it factory orders and tons of steel or is it something more ephemeral?"
While the film tackles it in a lighthearted way, the question is a serious one that economists have been unable to answer for a century. According to Davidson, many economists believe GDP is an insufficient measure.
“…if what we’re measuring is: How is a country doing overall, we have to measure things like freedom of opportunity,” he says. “We have to measure things like education, health, the environment.”
But how do you do that? McKay and Henchy decided to let wrestlers hash it out in the ring.
On the question of income inequality, McKay was inspired by his daughter’s “My Little Pony” cartoon, and created cartoon alpacas, voiced by Poehler and Silverman, for the film, “Unbelievably Sweet Alpacas.”
So can some sweet alpacas solve what President Obama has called the defining issue of our time? The filmmakers created what Davidson calls “a magical land where everything’s fair and everything’s equal,” and then threw a wrench in the works.
"I was able to basically write, I thought, a pretty good example of a left-wing and right-wing case of an argument over what causes income inequality," says Davidson. "And by putting it in the mouths of these sweet alpacas and getting Sarah Silverman, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph to voice them, it hopefully allows people who normally are not out there pursuing complex economic policy discussions to engage it in a sophisticated way, but a fun, easy-to-digest way."
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