The Economic Lesson in Ghostbusters Everyone Missed
The Economic Lesson in Ghostbusters Everyone Missed
"The meddling bureaucrat is given one last chance to avoid causing a catastrophe when the utility man tells him maybe they should listen to the people who, you know, actually designed the system." ~Jon Miltimore
Ghostbusters and the Use of Knowledge in Society
The utility man does as he’s told—and of course all hell breaks loose. But notice who actually made the decision.
It wasn’t the scientists who built the ghost storage facility. It wasn’t the utility worker, who at least had some knowledge of power systems. It was the government bureaucrat who knew absolutely nothing about the system.
That's not a lesson. That's fiction. Walter Peck is the bad guy because the movie needed a bad guy to release the ghost and create mayhem. Making him a pompous bureaucrat was just a convenient caricature.
In the real world, ghosts don't exist, and healthy skepticism is in fact in the public's best interest. If some actual wackos built a "ghost contaiment unit" in the basement of a derilict fire house and went around New York "catching ghosts," it would be prudent to assume that they were charletains putting on light shows for dupes. In the real world, Walter Peck would be a hero who stopped the dangerous con men.
In the era of fake news, violent election demialism, and the rise of christofascists, I think reality could use a few more Walter Pecks.
Lol! Do you know which community you are in?
Truth is true anywhere.
Well, yeah.
It's a Reagan era movie.
Of course they'll use the fallacy that only private industry can deal with an issue that was created specifically for the point of the movie.
If they chose something that was real, they'd find out that private industry is only effective when they have a public industry forcing them to compete on efficiency, rather than just fleecing the market.