Issue 15, Spring 1998

William A. McEachern, Editor

Sci-Fi Government

In the Fall 1995 issue of The Teaching Economist, I talked about the economics of science fiction (prior issues are available on the Internet at http://www.swlearning.com/economics/mceachern/economist.html). I noted that government is usually portrayed in science fiction as incompetent or, worse yet, evil. For example, in Orwell's 1984 government is the "big brother" that is watching, and in Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil government creates bureaucratic torpor. Government agents try to dissect poor little E.T., they shoot down Starman (who was only responding to an invitation from Voyager), and in dozens of stories about UFOs, including X-Files (soon to be a movie), they try to suppress information about extraterrestrials.

But there has been a trend in the last couple of years, at least in some science fiction movies, toward a more benign and beneficial government. In Independence Day, the U.S. government, with the help of a brilliant but underemployed computer nerd (who works for a cable-TV company), takes on and defeats the space invaders. In the mostly-for-laughs Men in Black, government agents are depicted as very good at their job, which is to find and exterminate extraterrestrials who turn out to be much more ubiquitous than we common folk suspect. Perhaps the rise of government is best epitomized in The Postman, where the person who saves the day in a post-nuked nation is an accidental mail carrier. The movie is also about the marginal value of information in a non-wired world, a world not even connected by travelers since travel has become too dangerous. But the public didn't buy the postman-as-movie-hero idea, and the movie bombed. I guess Hollywood can scrap plans for The Taxman.

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