Chasing Rent: a review of “This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy”
Adam McKay, who has left Will Farrell behind in order to write spritely comedies about economics and neo-fascist politics, has produced an eight-part series for Amazon, This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy. Despite what the title suggests, the series isn’t about Amazon. At least, not directly. It’s easy
to construct a case from the series that Amazon is an inevitable result of that giant beast.
The result will remind older readers of Michael Moore’s TV Nation. There’s a fair bit of humor and snark as life-changing and pervasive social phenomena are being discussed. Moore had a somewhat unfortunate habit of practicing “gotcha” interviews, which eventually led to few people wanting to appear before Moore’s cameras, TGBTITGE takes a more journalistic approach, encouraging interviewees who help to establish what point it is the episode hopes to make, and giving more adversarial figures time and courtesy with an eye to letting them hang themselves.
The series is presented by Kal Penn, the Kumar of “Harold and Kumar” fame, and a public outreach staffer for the Obama administration for those eight years. He’s perfect for a series that wants to take a light comedic approach to a subject that is complex and often depressing, delving deep into a field at its most dismal.
The result, however, is an uneven show, one that presents a pervasive and often deadly facet of our existence in a goofy and sometimes inane way.
The first episode, about global money laundering, leave the view shivering under his bedding, afraid to peep. Among other things, it thoroughly explains the behavior of America’s government over the past 40 years. The second, about rent-seeking, tries to see how many times the word ‘dick’ can be used in the episode. [Spoiler: 41]. While dicking around, the show does a hilarious sketch of a restaurant that has consortium control of the market the way airlines, cell phone companies, and cable TV do, and has changed the rules to effectively make a group of chains an effective monopoly, banning food trucks and startups. This is mixed with a horrifying example of an entire nation, Dubai (“Do Buy”) that has become a rent-seeking economy and has utterly stagnated despite fantastic amounts of wealth.
Yes, the series has flaws. The sophomoric humor detracts, leaving an impression that me dear old da’ would have described as “being far too clever by ‘arf.”
But there is a wealth of very important information in there and silliness aside, it does an excellent job of highlighting a major global problem. McKay has developed a fair bit of expertise on this following the excellent job he did making The Big Short and this year’s Vice. And despite pointless foreys into dildo-manufacturing plants and the like, it contains information about the economy that we all need to know.
Now on Amazon Prime.