Last night’s session at the Austrian Scholars Conference was nothing short of magical. After a full day of presentations on new research, and a fascinating and well-delivered talk by Caroline Baum of Bloomberg, John Papola, maker of the Hayek-Keynes rap, presented his video and then gave a talk about how it was made.
All the technical details were fascinating. We learned about the creative process and how the music came to be written. We learned about the paths not taken and why they chose what they did. We heard about how John personally drove to Barnes and Nobel to pick up the copy of the General Theory that makes an appearance in the first scene. We heard about the marvelous 16-hour stretch of filming.
There were moments when John brought down the house. For example, he jokingly spoke about the affinity between libertarianism and rap. There is the belief in gun rights. And drug freedom. People laughed uproariously about that. But then he went one better: he said that after all the rap community is on the gold standard.
Mostly, however, I must say that what I found inspiring about John’s talk was its freshness in overall philosophy. Several points stood out to me. He spoke about the need to put aside whatever factionalism exists within the Austro-libertarian community, about which he knows and cares nothing, in order to focus on the larger goal of educating for liberty.
He drove home the point that we live in a new world in which information is spread in unpredictable ways, and how the old command-and-control model of learning is evaporating. That means that we must be willing to take new risks and use every means possible to get the word out in every format. It means that the state is at a major disadvantage here but so is any institution that is unwilling to evolve and progress.
I also appreciated his interesting point about how important it is to assume that your audience is smart. Never talk down to them. Don’t take cheap shots. Always be fair. Never think of yourself as rallying a tribe but rather think of recruiting others into the smart set. It was striking here how much he sounds like a combination of Nock and Mises, and yet he is experimenting with this model in new and surprising ways.
He is a very young man and he was speaking before a community that included some much older and well-established scholars. And yet everyone present was really inspired, and learned from him. After all, he was repeating old wisdom but repackaging it in a lovely way. It was especially touching to hear Roger Garrison’s comments on the video and the talk. Here we had the meeting between the older generation and the young one, the established scholar and the artist in new meeting. Somehow it all seemed to work. The mood after John finished was nothing short of exuberant.
We were all honored to have him here. It is probably the last thing he imagined doing two years ago but he served a crucially important role at this conference in his comportment, craft, and even philosophical pedagogy. We are all in his debt.
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Nice post Jeff. In case you were not aware, last night during the talk you were beaming like an 8-year-old on Christmas morning…
You were totally right about this video and its significance. For whatever reason I totally missed it when I first saw it; I thought non-Austrians would think it was geeky and dismiss it.
Now of course I feel like Dick Clark after he advised Bobby Darin not to record “Mack the Knife.” (I believe I haven’t botched that anecdote.)
I wish I had been there. I was so impressed by the video that I put a French translation up on my Youtube channel the next week (http://www.youtube.com/user/artslibres). Then I noticed the same day another French translation was put up on another site. The other translation had one interesting “improvement” despite being in other places a bit rushed (http://nicomaque.blogspot.com/2010/02/hayek-vs-keynes-la-traduction-francaise.html). Instead of the line “it’s the animal spirit” they translated “it’s the psychology”, which I think – with all due respect to Papola ” truly added a dimension to the clarity of the whole standpoint of Keynesians.
just listened to it, it was awesome.
Artisan, I was so impressed by the video that I went and did the spanish subtitles, just to find out that someone else beat me by 12 hours. Its a great video. I can not wait until the video of his talk is uploaded to the Mises Institute Youtube channel.
Btw, someone could upload to Youtube the Jekyll Island meeting so we can watch it while we wait for this. How does it feel to be rock stars and have people from all over the world waiting to watch your talks?
The talk was awesome, I think it really solidified the fact that Papola has become my professional role model at this point. I am not much of a scholar or a writer, but producing multimedia is my forte, I hope to have an impact like this sometime in the future.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t need to buy Prices and Production.” LOL.
Every person who I have shown the video to that wasn’t already an Austrian didn’t understand the video worth one lick. It does not NOT communicate the idea clearly, and big ideas should be expressed clearly, not in a lyrical rhyme. I liked his original idea of a short sitcom, better. I don’t say that the video is bad, it does have some fun visual jabs, but the song itself does not seem to work as well as I would hope.
This video won’t make an austrian out of a socialist sure but I don’t think that matters though. To whom understands it, it is a great inspiration, because someone puts it in such a nice concise remarkable unexpected way. Art is very challenging. The fact that almost one million people watched it is due to that content, not just the aesthetic.
I thought the insight that came to John and that he shared during his presentation and which Jeffrey Tucker points to specifically in his commentary is very, very profound. It is not surpising that he discovered and knows its inherent validity since he learned intimately about Austrian economics from Ron Paul. John says to speak to others assuming they are intelligent. That is what Ron Paul does and that is the sign of the times.
We are on the cusp of an ideological change. We are leaving the Dark Ages of economics and people are enlightened or enlightened by economic truth. Economic truth is the science that will stop the barbarism of Keynesianism and empiricism.
That is why it is so profound what John contributed to the conference. We all know this already but now we have palpable evidence in addition to the growing response to the clarion call of Ron Paul.
Every one of us Austrio-libertarian, Hayek-lovin, Tom Woods-quotin lovers of liberty has a close friend or two that we discuss economic/financial matters with on a regular basis.
I was in NYC recently, visiting a close friend (a CFO type) who sorta agrees with our way of ‘Austrian’ thinking, but still insists more government regulation is needed. He loved the video! I caught him really digging it, and re-watching it when he thought I wasn’t nearby. It spawned many conversations between us (that can’t be had over the phone or email) that lasted for several Sam Adams…well into the early hours. I asked him “Did you catch that part about…” and countered with “What did he mean by…”.
The silly video was a springboard…in our case for two people to grow/refine their understanding of economics. I guarantee you my buddy was impressed with my level of understanding of economics (thanks to the Mises Institute, lewrockwell.com, Tom Woods, Ron Paul, Gary North, Michael Rozeff, etc…and said as much. Presto! We have another Austrian disciple.
I don’t say that the video is bad, it does have some fun visual jabs, but the song itself does not seem to work as well as I would hope.
I caught him really digging it, and re-watching it when he thought I wasn’t nearby. It spawned many conversations between us (that can’t be had over the phone or email) that lasted for several Sam Adams…
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