This sounds like the crappiest movie in the world. The characters are: first grade teacher (at a private school, not one of those public school losers), a biographer of George Bernard Shaw, a social worker, and a non-profit service lawyer.

Who are these awful little people? The teacher should be teaching art and science, but “is better known for his musical adaptations.” Uh-huh.

No machinists. No IT techs. No insurance agents. Just soft little people in soft little jobs; the only thing post-modern Hollywood knows. Oh, and hey: the box office was soft, too. Odd, that.

Harry "Keynes" Potter and the Mindless Automatons

Via The American Magazine, Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims won the Nobel prize in economics:

The state of the economy was set by the intersection of aggregate demand and aggregate supply curves. An adept policy maker could, by pulling the right levers and twisting the right knobs, shift these curves and thereby set the economy on the proper course. Implicitly, to such a policy mastermind, the economy was populated with individuals who acted in reliable, predictable ways.

Some are accusing Sargent and Sims of finally recognizing that people aren't rational. This is not what they mean: the old Keynesian model did not utilize rational actors, but robots who acted according to simplified models without self-correcting behavior. In fact, some people are ahead of the curve, predicting the economists, and some people, well, some few people never learn. People are not perfectly rational, but neither are they mindless automatons.

Obama's marginal counter-revolution

But why should we worry about them? Imagine for a moment that Buffett’s sentiments are fairly common and that even 19 out of 20 employers would just pay the higher taxes and only one would throw in the towel. What does it matter if there were only one tax-sensitive outlier in the bunch? That would be a mere 5 percent; should it really drive the whole conversation?

Why, yes… yes it should.