Homer Simpson Says Communism Works in Theory
From The Simpsons
Categories:
Run time: 0:36
Clip Description: Homer offers the most common thing anyone says about communism – that it works in theory – and the joke is that he has no theory in mind at all.
Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for the difference between an economic system as a model and as an implemented set of institutions, and for the incentive problems that separate the two: the free-rider problem, the soft budget constraint, and the information problem Hayek raised about central planning. It also opens the methodological point that comparing an idealised version of one system with the observed record of another is the commonest error students make.
Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this to open a session on comparative economic systems, and then require the comparison to be made like for like. The clip is funny precisely because it names a move students are about to make, which makes it easier to ask them not to.
Discussion Questions
- “In theory” is doing all the work in the joke. It is also a serious methodological position: a theory can be internally coherent, generate testable predictions, and still fail every test we put to it. What is the difference between a theory that is wrong and a theory that is untestable, and which is the more damaging charge against central planning?
- The Mises and Hayek objection was not moral but informational: without prices, planners have no way to learn the relative scarcity of anything, and no way to discover it other than by failing. State that argument in your own words in three sentences, then give the strongest reply a defender of planning could make — the modern version usually turns on computation and data.
- Every state that has called itself communist has also been authoritarian. Is that a necessary connection, or a historical accident of where these revolutions happened to occur? The question is genuinely live; give the strongest argument on each side before you say which you find more persuasive.
Assignment
Take one economy that moved from central planning to markets after 1989 — Poland, Estonia, Russia, Vietnam and China all work, and they went about it in strikingly different ways. Using the EBRD transition indicators and the Penn World Table, chart output for the decade either side of the change. In two pages, describe the shape of the curve and explain the depth and duration of the dip your case experienced relative to one other country. The hard part is separating the effect of the reform strategy — shock therapy against gradualism — from everything else happening at the same moment, above all the collapse of the trading bloc that all of these countries had been inside.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.