It was reported that one of the special guests at the recent President Obama’s State of the Union address was Warren Buffett’s secretary. The symbolism and literal message were missed and perhaps even lost entirely, at least judging from the predicable partisan counter-response of an interviewee on NPR who claimed that there was nothing on the economy in President Obama’s speech. To place things in perspective, Mr. Warren Edward Buffett thinks that there is something wrong with a system where he, the billionaire, pays less in taxes relative to his secretary. President Obama’s economic program and recovery medicine for the country insist that millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes “relative” to the rest (in the “99%”—by popular parlance—class) of the country.
One therefore hopes that the crux of the President’s economic package and prescription, which is based on focusing on manufacturing and production, is not also lost. It’s happened before: that same message was threaded into the Hollywood Film, “Pretty Woman” wherein it was, unfortunately, simply lost.
Pretty Woman, directed by Garry Marshall, written by J.F Lawton and produced by Arnon Milchan was released in 1990 as a romantic comedy, was acclaimed, reviewed, professionally critiqued and judged as such, and was well relished by an adoring public thus: another successful Cinderella story, perhaps in the example of “My Fair Lady.”
So while the moviegoers were charmed by Julia Roberts who plays Vivian Carter, a prostitute who stole the heart of millionaire business mogul in town for one week of serious “corporate raiding”, Edward Clark (played by Richard Gere), and by the ensuing romance, one hardly remembers these lines from the film:
Vivian: (So) what do you do, Edward?
Edward: I buy companies.... that are in financial difficulty...
Vivian: That means you are buying them for a bargain?
Edward: At a bargain…the company I am buying this week I am buying at a bargain price of one billion dollars.
Vivian: One billion dollars?
Vivian: So, you don't actually have a billion dollars, ha?
Edward: No, I get some of it from banks and investors—not an easy thing to do.
Vivian: And you don't make anything?
Edward: No.
Vivian: And you don't build anything?
Edward: No.
You don’t make anything. You don’t build anything. And you are a millionaire-billionaire! A rhetoric by a lowly and unsophisticated street girl, or sheer guru-like wisdom, regardless of source, it sure struck something inside Edward, and it wasn’t a romance-chord.
There is a school of thought in this country which believes strongly that, just because individuals can become stupendously wealthy like Edward Lewis in this movie, an entire nation and its economy can function that way, be based on or rely on that modus operandus: build nothing, make nothing. This school calls this operation “creating wealth.” In reality, all it is doing is indeed creating wealth—for just a tiny minority. No country can survive economically without a significantly strong manufacturing and production work ethic and base. For example, the great Roman Empire flourished while it was building and manufacturing great things, some of which we are still marveled by today. Its decline, it can be argued, coincided with the decline of its building, producing and manufacturing prowess, even while it continued to boast extremely wealthy individuals, to the very end.
In Pretty Woman we are told how Edward gets his wealth…
Vivian: So, what do you do with the companies once you buy them?
Edward: I sell'em.
Vivian: You sell them?
Edward: Well, I don't sell the whole company, I break it up in pieces and I then sell that off—it's worth more than the whole...
Vivian: So, it's sort of like…emm...stealing cars and selling'em for parts.
Edward: Yah;... sort of, but legal…
Vivian: Mmhmm.
How easy it is to miss this lesson, yet it should actually be difficult not to see that Pretty Woman is about Economics. The plot has Edward Clark breezing into town. His routine, put together by his well remunerated business attorney, Mr. Philip Stuckey, in a well-rehearsed and proven successful system, would take just one week to execute. The plan is to acquire, dismantle and then sell off feisty old man Mr. Morse’s company and assets, a company which builds big things like “ships the size of big cities” and had been doing so for decades, as Mr. Morse’s grandson pointed out to Edward, reminding him that “…Men like my grandfather made this country…”; (and great, too! one might add) and that’s the way it was done: by building and making things. All that Edward and Stuckey saw of Mr. Morse’s build-it-big company was “endless real estate possibilities” and the wealth to be had and shared between them. Vivian was an accident, and the ensuing romance which sucks in the audience merely incidental.
But Vivian did get to Edward in this area (also); she jogged his memory and or tickled his conscience. Listen to this conversation between Edward and his attorney, Phil Stuckey, made wealthy by Edward’s successes:
Edward: You know what I used to love when I was a kid, Phil?
Phil(Stuckey): What?
Edward: Blocks. Building blocks. Erector sets.
Phil (impatient and exasperated): What's the point?
Edward: We don't build anything Phil. We don't make anything.
Phil: We make money, Edward!
“We make money…”
What a contrast! Pretty Woman is really comparing two economic systems as different as night from day. Edward, on the way to his epiphany, did not even bother to respond to Philip Stuckey to remind him that “we don’t really make money”; but “we screw people for money”, his very own explanation of this economic practice in an earlier conversation with Vivian.
This thread of the film ends, much to the rage and irritation of Stuckey, with Edward the erstwhile predator-extraordinaire having a private session with his erstwhile hapless prey, Mr. Morse and offering to work together, to save Mr. Morse’s company, so to go on to build things like Destroyers for the Navy, the immediate project at hand. A sweetly surprised but elated Mr. Morse happily announced: “Mr. [Edward] Lewis and I are going to build ships together...great big ships.”
But, this was not the ending that moviegoers and critiques saw. Nor did this “economic storyline” seem to feature in the overall value of the film, looking at the reviews. Pretty Woman’s “pretty economics” of building something, making something, lost out to the predictable dreamful Cinderella ending.
The place of manufacturing, building, producing or making something, as the cornerstone of a sound economical principle and practice, cannot be forgotten if America is to remain strong and vibrant as a successful nation. President Obama’s message and focus is right on. Manufacturing or building or production of course creates jobs; employed denizens drive the economy and make it strong and resilient, afforded the rewards that decent or in many cases, lucrative, earnings make possible. Manufacturing also creates services in a mutual support relationship, thereby spinning out industries such as banking, insurance, mercantilism, construction, trade and professional guilds, transportation, education, even healthcare—industries which take on a life of their own in a multiplier-array and multiplier-effect, enough to forget their umbilical cord to manufacturing. There is, of course an undeniable unbreakable embrace between Manufacturing, inventing and creativity.
Making something—building something—takes us all the way back to what makes us a unique species: the recognition, fashioning and use of tools. Initially a matter of evolutionary survival, we came to love our tools and use them—with a sense of wonder and pride—to extend our species, expand our horizon and constantly reinvent ourselves as a species. That’s what building and making something entail. Manufacturing harnesses and harvests everything about tools like nothing else does; rising to the exulted role of not just a mega tool, but essentially, a “Meta-Tool”—the tool to tool our tools. It also hooks on to the second element of our species’ uniqueness and success: Sociality. Manufacturing calls us together to contribute our individual builds towards a common build in the cooperative effort and mien which only a successful and fulfilled “social-ized” group can be characterized by. To build something is human. To make something is human tradition and culture. To manufacture something is not just in human nature: it is human nature itself. An economics system built as such is economics based squarely on human essence.
Today, we live in the reality of bruising and even humbling economic times, financial uncertainty a constant companion. Were that this message—build it, make it—is not lost in the din of election-year politics, and in the anxieties of a dynamical recession-recovery. It should be recalled that once, during WWII, the US built her way out of a recession into economic victory. Let’s do that again. We really can.
Let us return this country to the tradition of building and making [big] things together: manufacturing. That’s “pretty economics.”
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