In my new column for the Financial Times, I try to restate the case for reforming Social Security:

Barack Obama has upset a lot of Democrats by bringing social security back into presidential politics. Paul Krugman of The New York Times is leading the charge. In Mr Krugman’s view, following the administration’s clumsy and aborted effort to reform the system – Democrats would say destroy it – leaving well alone makes best political sense. Mr Obama, sounding like a fiscal conservative, warns that retiring baby boomers are pushing the programme into the red and something must be done. He is, says Mr Krugman, being played for a fool.

Mr Obama’s fix, other things equal, ought to appeal to Democrats. He wants to raise or even abolish the upper earnings limit for the social security tax, at present just under $100,000. This would add six percentage points to the top marginal tax rate, even before you add in the promised unwinding of the Bush administration’s tax cuts. In a televised Democratic candidates debate, Hillary Clinton distanced herself from this “trillion dollar” tax increase on the “middle class”. Mr Obama underlined his point by saying that only the richest 7 per cent of taxpayers would be affected, and that is not the middle class.

We will see how this plays out. Democrats who would generally be in favour of unwinding the Bush tax cuts, abolishing the earnings ceiling on the social security tax and finding a few other ways to raise taxes on the rich, are mainly concerned to keep reform of social security off the agenda. It does not need fixing, they say, it is not broken. Any deviation from that gives Republicans an opening to renew their assault on one of America’s finest social-policy achievements. Why go there?

You can read the whole column here.

She did well in Thursday night’s debate, winning by a mile I’d say, partly because it was evidently a pro-Clinton crowd. Her bad performance in Philadelphia is, for the moment anyway, expunged. Her best (if not new) one-liner was to say, in reply to a question about her campaign’s playing of the gender card, that she was being attacked not because she was a woman but because she was ahead. Good stuff, and it drew cheers. (The biggest of the night, I think, except for the refusal to countenance merit pay for teachers. Avoiding that is apparently a top priority in Las Vegas, along with prompt withdrawal from Iraq.) She looked relaxed and once more in charge.

Obama at one point had the crowd laughing at him, and at another Edwards was actually booed. The laughs came when Obama–incredibly–made a complete mess of the question that threw Hillary in the previous debate. The candidates were asked whether they were in favour of driver’s licences for illegal immigrants, yes or no. In the previous debate Hillary waffled this way and that and in the end refused to answer. She was punished for that in the debate and then again by the media: how like her to squirm and evade. In this debate, she simply said she was not in favour: one word, "No." So Obama decided to fill the vacuum by failing to answer the question, at length, three or four times–just like Hillary last time. Remarkable. Asked yet again, "are you in favour?" his answer was: "Yes. [Pause.] But…", at which part of the crowd cracked up. So much for "Clear Answers To Tough Questions", which I think was supposed to be his theme for the evening. (Incidentally, Kucinich had a novel view on the subject of illegal immigrants: there is no such thing. We must all say "undocumented workers" instead. Problem solved.)

Richardson gave the best answer to the driver’s licence question. He said he was in favour of granting them, had done so as governor of New Mexico, and explained why. His reasons seemed quite sensible, albeit politically unsellable. On a different question Richardson slit his other wrist, and gave an answer that was the worst of the night on every measure. "Which comes first, national security, or human rights [in Pakistan]?" He himself had prompted the question, I think by getting a bit muddled in an earlier answer. Wolf Blitzer pounced, demanding clarification, and instead of correcting himself, Richardson dug himself in. Human rights come first, national security second. I think I heard one person clapping. I almost joined in out of sympathy. Imagine taking that position into the general election. Well, no need, obviously.

What turned the crowd against Edwards was his answer on the "gender card" question. There’s nothing personal about my attacks on Hillary, he said, before going on to accuse her of representing all that was most foul about the Washington political scene. He might have carried a different crowd, I expect, but not this one. They did not like it. Hillary hit back by accusing him of playing the Republicans’ game. Applause.

Also notable: Hillary scored points against both Obama and Edwards on health care. She pointed out that Obama’s plan, unlike hers, does not provide fully universal coverage. Obama replied that hers does not either, since her individual mandate is not really enforceable. That was true but he was hesitant and ineffective. Hillary’s plan at least sets out to be universal. And in case Obama might be planning to adjust his policy, she also managed to remind the audience that back in 2004, Edwards had not been for universal coverage–but she said she was pleased he had changed his mind and now agreed with her.

I don’t know whether these debates matter. They shouldn’t. The whole circus is ridiculous. But if they do, Hillary won. A sympathetic audience makes all the difference–but still, it was an impressive performance.

An excellent briefing on where things stand from John Williams of the San Francisco Fed. (Thanks, once again, to Mark Thoma at Economist’s View.)

• The housing slump has deepened further.  Sales of existing homes fell 8 percent in September and are down 19 percent over the past 12 months.  New-home sales rebounded in September, but are still down 23 percent over the past year. Inventories of new and existing homes for sale are at high levels, putting downward pressure on house prices and building.                                       
• House prices in ten metropolitan areas fell on average about 5 percent in the 12 months through August, according to the Case-Shiller Index.  Futures contracts on this index imply investors expect house prices in these cities to decline about 8 percent over the next 12 months.
• With demand soft and supply plentiful, housing starts plummeted 10 percent in September, bringing the year-over-year decline to over 30 percent. Housing permits likewise are in a deep descent, falling 7 percent in September and down 26 percent over the past year.                  
• Despite the bad news in the housing market and the turmoil in financial markets, consumers continued to spend in September.  More recent data, however, suggest consumers may be tightening their grips on their pocketbooks.  Sales of motor vehicles ticked down in October.  Readings of consumer confidence and sentiment have moved down considerably over the past few months. Moreover, the recent surge in energy prices should damp consumption in coming months. 

Be sure to open the charts (pdf) and look at the housing data. Scary. (Especially if the peak in prices marks your entry into the market–as in my case, to the month. Bear that in mind when I next dare to make a  prediction.) 

The Aspen Institute’s Initiative on Financial Security is trying to build support for new policies to promote saving for those on low or moderate incomes. At a roundtable today the possibilities were discussed with a range of interested parties, including finance-industry types and Congressional staffers. (You can download a copy of the group’s recent report, "Savings for Life", here.)

One idea is "child accounts", similar to those launched in Britain in 2005. At birth, each child would be given a $500 investment certificate. Deposited with a participating financial institution, the investment would grow tax-free. Friends and family could add up to $2,000 a year, and the children of low-income families would get matching contributions of up to $1,000 a year from the government. Fees and expenses would be capped. At 18, the account could be drawn down for any purpose. The hope would be to teach the habit of thrift, and to equip young adults with a modest but useful capital sum at a time when they are likely to need it.

Hillary Clinton has advocated an idea along these lines, but now appears to have backed away from it. That seems a pity. Her plan called for a much bigger initial public outlay: $5,000 per child and no mention of subsequent saving. Apparently it was too expensive to command  political support. (According to a telephone poll after she floated the idea, 60% of voters opposed it and only 27% were in favour.) Britain’s plan was dismissed in some quarters, I recall, as empty-gesture politics–as a gimmick. But because it was seen as a modest proposal it was enacted without arousing much opposition. Already the idea seems quite well-entrenched and appears to be working as intended. I can imagine this little scheme being looked back on as the most important thing New Labour did. There is something to be said for reform by stealth. 

Ben Bernanke gave the Cato Institute a handsome anniversary gift for their 25th annual monetary conference this morning. He used the occasion to announce new procedures for  disseminating information about Fed policy. Starting with the release of the October 30th FOMC minutes (due on November 20th) the Fed will provide "a fuller discussion of the projections", projections for a slightly different set of  variables (add PCE inflation, subtract nominal GDP), an outlook that extends three years instead of just two, and a quarterly publication schedule instead of semi-annual. Read the text of Bernanke’s talk here.

It is all in the interests of fuller disclosure. Bernanke has often emphasised the benefits of  providing more information about the Fed’s thinking–a point on which he and Alan Greenspan (champion of turgid opacity) do not see quite eye to eye–and, for related reasons, has long been on record as preferring an explicit inflation-target regime. The new procedures are not that, by a long way, though they could be construed as a step in that direction. In any event, good for Bernanke.

One questioner asked whether the new releases would include a "fan chart" of the Fed’s inflation forecast, like the one produced by the Bank of England. Bernanke said there would be a chart that looked like that, but that it would be a quite different thing.  The Bank publishes a single consensus forecast, with confidence bands around it. The Fed will publish a range of forecasts based on the individual projections of FOMC members–so the chart will indeed look like the Bank’s fan–together with an indication of central tendency. Not the same thing at all. An oddity, to my mind, of the Fed’s approach is that  each FOMC member makes  his inflation forecast on the basis of his own assumption about what "appropriate monetary policy" would be. I’d say it is debatable whether folding this extra variable into the mix adds to or subtracts from the information content of the release. The answer, I suppose, will depend on how much extra detail the promised "fuller discussion" goes into.

Another questioner asked why the Fed was dropping nominal GDP as an indicator–the question I would have asked had I been able to squeeze into the auditorium rather than settling for more space in an overflow room. I learned more of my macro than I should admit from devoted reading of Sir Samuel Brittan in the FT, and so I have a sentimental as well as intellectual attachment to nominal GDP. Out of habit, when I look at an economic forecast, it is still the number I check first. The questioner, Mickey Levy of Bank of America, pointed out (very much in the spirit of Sir Samuel) that dropping nominal GDP might encourage commentators to believe that monetary policy can independently influence real and nominal quantities  (ie, output and inflation), whereas in the short run it acts on both simultaneously, and this is a key constraint on the Fed’s ability to steer the economy. Bernanke said the Fed would wait to see if people missed the nominal GDP number. So far as he was concerned, it didn’t add much to what the Fed would be releasing. Humph, I thought.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial writers are impressed by a new study on income mobility:

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.

I would call this a case of being prematurely stunned. Studies of this kind always and everywhere show people rising out of lower quintiles and dropping out of higher ones: this pattern merely reflects the ebb and flow of income during the course of a typical career. Students or the unemployed in the lowest quintile subsequently get jobs; the highest-earners subsequently retire. By themselves these numbers tell you very little about the life-chances of people who are born poor compared with the life-chances of people who are born rich (mobilty) or for that matter about the gap between rich and poor (inequality).

Changes over time in the ratios tell you more. The WSJ notes that the study finds no great change in relative income mobility over the past ten years. But, concentrating on mobility, international comparisons are what you need to test the view that the United States really is the land of opportunity, as compared with other places. What do those comparisons say? Thank you for asking:

Most researchers now give America much lower marks than they used to for intergenerational economic mobility—the ease with which successive generations move up or down relative to their parents. As flaws in early postwar studies have been addressed, estimates of mobility have fallen. Before the 1990s, researchers tended to put the correlation between parents’ incomes and their children’s at around 20 percent, implying a high degree of mobility between generations. (Zero would imply no connection at all; a correlation of 100 percent would imply that parents’ incomes entirely determined the incomes of their children.) In the 1990s, using better data and techniques, experts tended to put that figure at about 40 percent. Recent estimates run as high as 60 percent. The finding is not that mobility has fallen since World War II—the studies point to no clear trend. It is that as methods of measuring mobility have improved, the result, across a span of recent decades, has gotten worse. The earlier view that postwar America was an economically mobile society is less and less borne out. Perhaps it was once (before data became available to track such things accurately); but it isn’t now.

More telling, maybe, is the international comparison. America stands lower in the ranking of income mobility than most of the countries whose data allow the comparison, scoring worse than Canada, all of the Scandinavian countries, and possibly even Germany and Britain (the data are imperfect, and different studies give slightly different results).

Strikingly, the research suggests that mobility within America’s middle-income bands is similar to that in many other countries. The stickiness is at the top and the bottom. According to one much-cited study, for instance, more than 40 percent of American boys born into the poorest fifth of the population stay there; the figure for Britain is 30 percent, for Denmark just 25 percent. In America, more than in other advanced economies, poor children stay poor. Other data show that in America, more than in, say, Britain, rich children stay rich as well.

You can read the rest of my recent Atlantic Monthly column on the subject here (subscription required).

Great news. ‘Happiness research" might be having an effect on policy in just a few more decades, according to the New York Times. Instead of pursuing happiness, we will be entitled to it, and guided to it by wiser minds. 

The era of laissez-faire happiness might be coming to an end. Some prominent economists and psychologists are looking into ways to measure happiness to draw it into the public policy realm. Thirty years from now, reducing unhappiness could become another target of policy, like cutting poverty… [I]f the object of public policy is to maximize society’s well-being, more attention should be placed on fostering social interactions and less on accumulating wealth. If growing incomes are not increasing happiness, perhaps we should tax incomes more to force us to devote less time and energy to the endeavor and focus instead on the more satisfying pursuit of leisure.

Thirty years gives me plenty of time to collect my own thoughts on the subject, assuming that’s OK with the authorities. Meanwhile, Martin Wolf’s take on the subject gives me a warm contented feeling. Why strive to say it any better? Spare me another intellectual arms race and all the negative externalities that go with it.

Where, then, does this new line of analysis take us? Personally, I find its philosophical and scientific underpinnings far from persuasive. But even if one goes along with it, the implications for policy seem far more ambiguous than social democrats believe. The findings are an assault on modernity itself, not just the forms of modernity the left dislikes.

I also see little here to undermine core principles of classical liberalism: people should be largely free to make their own choices, mindful of their obligations to others, except where those choices are harmful; gross domestic product should not be the overriding objective of policy; a big effort should be made to eliminate extreme poverty from the world; and the state should focus on remedying harms, while avoiding adding to them. But governments cannot make us happy. Happiness is something we have to pursue - and perhaps never find - for ourselves.

A student at Columbia defends the character of American academia as the outcome of a ruthless market process in which excellence prevails (link via Economist’s View):

In reality, conservatives ought to appreciate academia, because it’s a vicious market system. Professors have absurdly specific training in tiny career fields. A guy who spends years writing a dissertation on the importance of beads to indigenous tribes in Brazil really wants the world’s other bead expert to fail. If he doesn’t get tenure, there’s a good chance he won’t find a decent job anywhere else ever. He doesn’t care whether bead-man number two is a Republican; he could be left of Castro and the first guy would still spend days writing scathing articles blasting his shoddy bead analysis.

Similarly, Columbia isn’t going to refuse to hire a conservative who has done prominent work, because rich people like prominence, and we at Columbia need rich people to send us their progeny. You could argue that conservative professors have a more difficult time becoming prominent, but if most professors are liberal, then a conservative doing convincing research or writing influential journal articles would probably just be more conspicuous. You might also argue that the liberal environment at Columbia makes conservatives less inclined to work here, but that just sounds like a way of saying that conservatives are pansies who can’t handle disagreement, which seems unfair to me.

A counter-reading from Stuart Taylor:

Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats.

They are also ruthless in blocking appointment of professors whose views they don’t like; are eager to censor such views; and in many cases are determined to push their own political views on students, who have few reality checks in their course material and are often too innocent of the world to understand when they are being fed fatuous tripe.

Delaware students have been not only inculcated with the lunatic view that all white Americans are racists (and that "REVERSE RACISM" is a "term … created and used by white people to deny their white privilege") but also:

* Told to confess their "privilege" or lament their "oppression";

* Informed that "white culture is a melting pot of greed, guys, guns, and god";

* Required to "recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society" and "recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression" (whatever that means);

* Instructed to purge male residents’ "resistance to educational efforts" and "concepts of traditional male identity";

* Challenged to "change their daily habits and consumer mentality" for the sake of "sustainability";

* Pushed to display on their dorm doors politically approved decorations proclaiming support for (e.g.) "social equity" (whatever that means);

* Subjected to other "treatments" designed to alter their beliefs and behaviors and inculcate university-approved views on politics, sexuality, moral philosophy, and more;

* Ordered to attend residence-hall training sessions and submit to one-on-one sessions with RAs, who filed reports to their superiors about individual students’ "level of change or acceptance" of the thought-reform program.

One such report, for example, classified a young woman as one of the "worst" students in the residence life education program for saying that she was tired of having "diversity shoved down her throat" and responding "none of your damn business" when asked "when did you discover your sexual identity?"

I don’t know if that’s a market process, but it certainly sounds pretty ruthless.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn has written a new piece on health reform, recognising and then questioning what he calls the best argument against universal coverage–the risk that it would suppress medical innovation. Cohn writes:

More than a decade ago, Michael Kinsley, the journalist and former editor of this magazine, developed Parkinson’s disease–a degenerative condition that impairs motor and speech  control, producing tremors, rigidity, and eventually severe disability. While the standard regimen of medications helped, he knew that his symptoms were bound to get steadily worse with time. He needed something better–something innovative–before the disease really progressed. In 2006, he got it at the famed Cleveland Clinic in Ohio

The treatment Mike received is called Deep Brain Stimulation, or DBS for short. It began with a physician–one of the world’s top Parkinson’s specialists–drilling two holes in his head, into which were implanted two thin electrodes made of titanium. The electrodes were attached to wires, which the physician threaded behind the internal portions of Mike’s ear, down his neck, and eventually into his chest cavity, where they were connected to a pair of tiny battery-powered controllers. After the surgery, the doctor activated the controllers using a remote device, unleashing a steady pulse of small electrical shocks that ran across the wires, through the electrodes, and–finally–to the part of the brain that regulates movement. DBS doesn’t cure Parkinson’s, but it has been shown to control the symptoms for extended periods of time. And that’s what happened for Mike (who is also, full disclosure, a friend).

DBS represents the cutting edge of Parkinson’s treatment; the Food and Drug Administration approved it only ten years ago. It is also very costly. Medtronic, a company that makes the electrodes, says the whole procedure costs between $50,000 and $60,000. And, because the treatment’s main effect is to suppress and delay the onset of symptoms, rather than cure the disease, Mike started wondering whether a system of universal health insurance would pay for it–and, if so, in which cases.

I thought it was an excellent article, but needlessly confusing about the distinction between universal coverage and single-payer. The idea that universal coverage might threaten innovation arises out of that confusion.

Universal coverage, in its own right, poses no threat to innovation  or to the availability of expensive and exotic treatments for people who can afford to pay. America can achieve universal coverage by filling gaps in  its existing system–in much the way that the Democratic presidential candidates are now suggesting, and as Mitt Romney did as governor of Massachusetts. Reforms like this pose no threat to the incentives that drive medical innovation in the US. The trade-off between universal coverage in its own right and innovation is a straw man.

What might pose a threat to innovation, depending on the details, is new attempts at cost-control. A highly centralised single-payer system like Britain’s or Canada’s presses down on costs partly by denying expensive or otherwise cost-ineffective treatments (in the judgement of the system’s administrators) to patients, and by other forms of rationing. Trade-offs between economy on one side and innovation and access on the other inevitably start to bite. The results may be better or worse  for citizens as a whole–but once you start to curb costs from the top down, the trade-offs are inescapable.

Centralised single-payer systems are apt to be uniform-access systems as well, since they are politically directed. (Canada’s private health-care system has been regulated out of existence; Britain’s is quite small.) So curbing access to expensive new treatments for the majority becomes curbing access for (almost) everybody. But the key thing is, you don’t need single-payer to achieve universal coverage. Cohn frequently uses those terms as if they are interchangeable–which is hard to understand, now that all the Democratic candidates are in fact proposing universal coverage not based on single-payer.

All of the reform plans now on the table for the US are multi-payer systems–hence unequal-access systems. The rich will be able to buy better insurance and treatments that are not covered even by the best insurance. The Mike Kinsleys of this world (Mike is a friend of mine, too, by the way) will still be able to buy the best, newest, most sophisticated and most speculative treatments. There is the spur for innovation. And universal coverage does nothing to put it in jeopardy. Single-payer–together with the principle of equal access to medical technology–might indeed put it in jeopardy, in its effort to curb costs. But no Democratic candidate is suggesting such a thing.

This is not to say that controlling costs doesn’t matter, of course. It matters very much. But it is cost-control that may jeopardise innovation, not universal coverage.

I loved this column by the ever-stimulating George Will, comparing "American Gangster" and "The Godfather":

In spite of its self-conscious coldbloodedness, the "Godfather" movie is sentimental. Its picture of Don Corleone judiciously administering the common law of gangsterdom is about as accurate a portrayal of organized crime as Sir Walter Scott’s "Ivanhoe" is an accurate portrayal of the unwashed brutes who made the Middle Ages a good epoch not to have lived in.

"American Gangster," like "The Godfather," invites viewers to admire business acumen for its own sake — when Lucas was brought down, the government seized assets worth $250 million — and entices viewers into the moral vertigo of forgetting the human carnage among users of the high-quality heroin that Lucas’s organizational skills enabled him to sell cheap. But the movie, to its credit, repeatedly and abruptly halts its manipulation of viewers by roughly yanking them back to the reality of suppurating needle sores.

In "The Godfather," the visible victims were, so to speak, all in the family; they were criminals who had chosen their line of work because they liked it. In "American Gangster," the visible victims include the crying infant on the filthy mattress, next to the mother who has nodded off on a heroin high.

The labored and familiar facets of "American Gangster" — facile cynicism about commercial practices and "family values" — echo "The Godfather." The realism of "American Gangster," which is the more mature movie, is its own.

It is hard for me to see any movie compared favourably with "The Godfather", but I was glad to have the column remind me of the epigraph from Mario Puzo’s novel (hat-tip to Balzac): "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." I have an ongoing beef with Hollywood and with popular culture in general for the way it sees commerce as kind of lightly regulated criminality. Mafia, General Electric…what’s the difference, really?

Here is a piece I did for The Atlantic on the subject:

Seen a movie lately? Watched television or read a newspaper? The culture that speaks to Americans, and hence to the Western world, radiates suspicion of free enterprise—cordial and restrained, as a rule, but dubious nonetheless. Yes, the system does work, says this culture, and there appears to be no alternative. But what a shame this is, it continues, because capitalism rewards our worst and most selfish instincts. “Greed is good” may stock the shelves, but is somewhat less than inspiring.

Popular culture understands that the market economy creates material prosperity, albeit for some more than others. It seeks out and worships business celebrities. But at the same time it sees the system as spiritually—and politically—corrupting. As viewed from Hollywood, workers are usually downtrodden, bosses are usually grasping, consumers are usually gulled, and shadowy global finance is always calling the geopolitical shots. We manage to prosper, most of us, but this system of ours is not very noble.

What is most striking, so far as the movies’ treatment of capitalism goes, is not the hostility of films whose main purpose is actually to indict corporate wickedness (Wall Street, Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Insider, The Constant Gardener, and so forth). It is the idea of routine, reckless corporate immorality—maintained as though this premise were inoffensive, uncontroversial, and hardly worthy of comment—that drives movies whose principal interest lies elsewhere, whether in the human drama of contemporary geopolitics (Syriana, to cite a recent instance), knockabout comedy (Fun with Dick & Jane), children’s fantasy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), star-crossed romance (In Good Company), or, classically, in some dystopian near or distant future (Alien, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Robocop, and many others).

The point is not that such movies, or the culture more generally, argue that capitalism is evil. Just the opposite: it is that they so often merely assume, innocently and expecting to arouse no skepticism, that capitalism is evil.

And another, if you want more, that I did for National Journal:

I have long been intrigued by the way films deal with capitalism in general and with Big Business in particular. For the past few decades I have been collecting movies that cast Big Business in a good light. Strictly speaking, I should say, I don’t yet have an actual collection, because in 30 years I haven’t been able to find one. (If you know of an instance, I’d love to hear from you. There might be a prize.)

In the meantime, what I have culled from the countless movies I have seen that innocently and unthinkingly cast private enterprise in a bad light are a few dozen that do this in a fresh or comically incompetent way. And my newest award in that category goes to Man of the Year.

The film’s plot twist relies on the fact that a private company has just been granted a national monopoly to install and operate electronic voting machines. It turns out that the programming (or something) is broken, and that the vote counts are all skewed. A sweet blonde working for the company discovers this — the wrong man is going to be elected! — and alerts her superiors. She naively expects them to correct the fault. (Obviously, she doesn’t see many movies.) Instead, they wage a campaign of intimidation, reckless physical assault, and forcible injection of narcotics (if this weren’t a comedy, there would presumably have been torture) to fuddle her brain and shut her up. All in a day’s work for the head office. In case this should seem at all far-fetched, a character in a dark suit radiating sinister intelligence (Jeff Goldblum) lays out the irresistible corporate logic behind this self-evidently suicidal cover-up. As far as market forces are concerned, it all makes sense — and what else matters really?

The search for a movie that quietly regards business as an honorable undertaking goes on. This blog is open for nominations.