 It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business. It's business. It's just business. It wasn't personal. It's just business. Always business. Never personal. This isn't personal, Vladimir. It's business. It's just business. It's just business. I'm really sorry for the road. It was just business. Business. Of course this is business. This whole hunting you down thing. That was just business. I don't care about the war. I'm a businessman, Mr. President. So let's talk business. Monster? No. Savvy business, man. Indeed. Sorry, kid. It's business. Mary's not a cop. Welcome to Out of Frame. Today, I want to talk about a question that I've been thinking about for a really, really long time. Why does Hollywood seem to hate the idea of business? Please understand. It was all business. It wasn't personal. It was all personal to me. If our opening montage wasn't clear enough, just think back to all the movies and TV shows you've ever watched and ask yourself, whenever you see a businessman wearing a pinstripe suit appear on screen, do you assume he's a good guy or a bad guy? My bet is that you see the businessman and automatically think of him as bad. And why wouldn't you? For decades, almost any businessman on screen has been some variation of Gordon Gekko, a greedy, rich slimeball who would toss their own grandmother off a cliff to make a buck. The evil businessman trope is at this point so well established in film and television that it's ridiculously predictable. Boring, even. The minute business guy shows up, you already know he's going to be a jerk. Bad cop, unfortunately, I'm going to have to leave you here to die. What? Sir, it's not personal. It's just business. Lord business. It's so common and so consistent that now writers can rely on our intrinsic dislike of businessmen to subvert expectations, like the character of Alistair Cray in Big Hero 6, who, spoilers, is introduced as a sleazy tech business guy, but turns out not to be the actual villain. Of course, in spite of ultimately doing nothing wrong and, in fact, offering our hero hero basically everything he ever wanted with no particular strings attached, Cray was still presented as a bad guy and a coward at the end of the movie. Listen to the kid, Callahan. Please let me go. I'll give you anything you want. The point is this view of business is overwhelming in popular culture and this is disconcerting to me for two major reasons. First, it's just not true. Business is not only not our society's greatest source of evil. It is the process by which all of our lives are constantly improved every day. Businessmen and women are your family, friends, neighbors and, well, your co-workers. They're not disproportionately murderers as law and order would suggest, nor are they inherently more greedy, less empathetic or kind than anyone else. They are everyone else. We all interact with people every day who go to work in order to support themselves and their families by hopefully producing some good or service that is valuable to other people. So to vilify business and business people as soulless destroyers is to vilify our friends and neighbors and to belittle their contributions to society. That brings me to the second major reason why Hollywood's portrayal of these people as uniquely prone to evil is troubling. What people see in every movie and TV show they watch affects the way they think. This second point seems to be one of the more controversial ones I make on Out of Frame, but it's got lots of scientific support. There's almost too much to say about this, but the stories we read, watch or hear affect our brains in powerful ways. The late Pulitzer Prize winning film critic, Roger Ebert, said that movies are like a machine that generates empathy. And the more we learn about how our brains work, the more we find out how true that idea really is. Research from neuroscientists like Paul J. Zach, author of The Moral Molecule, has shown that we experience a release of oxytocin, the neurochemical responsible for trust, empathy and social bonding when we engage with characters in a story. And the thing is, our brains really don't differentiate between stories that are real or fictional. So as a result, when we see a believable story that captures our attention, we cannot help but internalize aspects of that story into how we see the world. We frequently even see ourselves as part of the story, making it more personal in the process. This effect is called narrative transportation, and it causes us to simulate the emotions and even mimic the actions and ideas of the characters on screen. And the more we do this, the more it affects the way we think longer term. A 2013 study from Emory University's Center for Neural Policy showed that reading stories significantly changed research subjects' neural connectivity in the regions associated with story comprehension and the ability to understand different perspectives. And these effects were persistent for several days. Narrative transportation is also why a lot of people get concerned about sexuality and violence in film and television and try to keep their kids away from that kind of content. Exposure to fictional violence increases the child's likelihood of violent behavior in very similar ways as if they had experienced real violence themselves. The point is narrative transportation created by storytelling is the most effective means of getting people to understand and internalize behaviors, values and ideas and for getting those ideas to stick. It's probably why virtually all of the core moral lessons taught across cultures have always been transmitted via some form of dramatic storytelling. I believe that what's sort of going on is that we're as a race, we're kind of immortal, you know, I mean we reproduce individually, we don't, but you know we reproduce and we have children and they're sort of clones of ourselves. But the one thing that doesn't copy over, the one thing you can't reproduce is experience. Like it's a brand new clean slate, which is a good thing. And so it's like the human body is like the hardware and I feel like stories of the software that you sort of load into the new child. That was Star Wars Rogue One director Gareth Edwards and he's probably right. As a filmmaker myself, I know just how powerful the medium can be in terms of influencing the way people think. But in the immortal words of Ben Parker, It's great power comes great responsibility. So the question is this, what happens when we present business and business people as nothing but thieves and murderers in all the stories we're telling each other week after week? And what if we do that for 30 to 40 years? When kids and adults see evil businessman after a evil businessman on screen, they can't help but get the sense that all businessmen must be evil as well, even in real life. And it's not a big stretch to say that for a lot of people, this influences them to believe that the very idea of business, or at least capitalism, must actually create these kinds of villains. Although there's still fairly widespread support for entrepreneurship in general, a 2016 Harvard University survey of 18 to 29 year olds found that 51 percent of young Americans say they don't support capitalism. And according to Gallup from the same year, 55 percent of people in that age group said they had a positive view of socialism. Is any of this surprising when those are the values and ideas expressed in most of our popular culture for decades? And to be clear, this vilification of business wasn't always so dominant in entertainment and media. In one of my favorite scenes in movie history from Billy Wilder's film Sabrina, Humphrey Bogart's Linus Larrabee explains what business actually is to his playboy trust fund baby brother, David, played by William Holden. It's purely coincidental, of course, that people who never saw a dime before suddenly have a dollar and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their teeth fixed in their faces washed. What's wrong with the kind of a nerves that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds and movies on a Saturday night? Mr. Carter, will you send in the secretary? Now you make me feel like a heel. For Linus and most of the entrepreneurs I've had the pleasure of knowing over the years, business isn't really about making money and certainly not at the expense of other people. It's about creating something new and useful and bringing it to the world so that it can benefit other people. In Sabrina, Bogart uses a bit of sarcasm to make a point, but I won't. It's not purely coincidental that kids in the poorest parts of the world suddenly have dental care and shoes and time for going to the movies when their countries make it easier to do business. We've seen incredible reductions of poverty and child labor, along with massive improvements in social equality, public health and even environmental outcomes in places like India and China just in the last 30 years. And all of that has come as a result of opening up their economies to trade, reducing state control over their industries, allowing private citizens to form businesses and own property and basically adopting more economic freedom for everyone. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history or where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off is exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by free enterprises. But it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system. And what does reward virtue? You think the Communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you'll pardon me, do you think American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout? Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? You know, I think you're taking a lot of things for granted. And just tell me, where in the world do you find these angels who are going to organize society for us? Well, I don't even trust you to do that. I feel like I shouldn't have to say this, but before we move on, I want to be clear. Overall, business is good for society. Really good, unequivocally good. It's how we come together with our own unique skills and ideas and actually create new wealth. Yet, in spite of a massive amount of evidence to the contrary, according to a recent YouGov poll, 55 percent of Americans said they thought that capitalism makes poor people worse off. 65 percent believe that business people cheat to get ahead. And I mean, sure, some businesses do bad things and some business people are bad because, well, they're people. But they're not supervillains. The vast majority of people who start and manage businesses tend to work pretty hard trying to come up with ways to make other people's lives better. And when they fail, unless the government bails them out, they lose money and go out of business, which is exactly what we want to happen. On some level, we all must know this because we conduct business as both buyers and sellers all the time. And these experiences are overwhelmingly positive. Yet, our entertainment industry, which is ironically one of the biggest commercial businesses in the world, consistently presents capitalism and business as intrinsically bad. The question is, why? You know, for a second there, you really frightened me. Way back in 2009, I first read a fantastic paper by former University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein called Wall Street and Vine Hollywood's View of Business. And I've been thinking about it ever since. Ribstein's eighty five page analysis is deep and covers a wide range of variations on the evil businessman trope, using examples from movies like Aaron Brockovich, Civil Action and The Insider, where greedy companies cut corners on safety and poison the environment to movies like Mission Impossible to the fugitive and Michael Clayton, where drug companies cover up fake research and create diseases in order to settle the cure, to films like Wall Street, The Hudsucker Proxy and Pretty Woman, where the capitalists are just bad for no particular reason. The thing that becomes really apparent when you start thinking about this stuff is that examples of evil businessmen in media are truly endless. Just about the only time they're portrayed positively anymore is when they're smaller entrepreneurs being squashed by bigger companies with sociopathic executives. Ribstein offers a few plausible theories on why this persists, but he eventually settles on the idea that perhaps it's not business per se that screenwriters object to, but more the fact that they're beholden to capitalist money if they want to actually make their films. He suggests that artists grow resentful of the moneymen getting a say in their art. This is fairly persuasive in part because there are so many examples of this very storyline popping up in movies like Barton Fink, where the artist is literally put upon by greedy non-creative bean counters. But I think there's more to it than that, especially now. For one thing, we're well into the second or third generation of creators using these tropes. Kids raised on movies like Other People's Money, Robocop and Total Recall have grown into a new generation of adult writers. And the lessons imparted to them as children have shaped their world views. Plus, over the last 25 years alone, there's been a massive ideological shift towards the left at universities around the country and with it a palpable wave of Marcusian anti-capitalism. So it seems to me that there's probably a feedback loop in play where people already influenced by these anti-business films and TV shows go to college and find themselves immersed in another environment that's become seriously one-dimensional in its perspective. And then they come out of these programs as writers and filmmakers ready to continue the cycle. All of this is self-reinforcing, and thus we end up with decades of increasingly extreme anti-business movies. The fact is, there's not much any one person can do about this. But the reason I wanted to talk about it on Out of Frame is because I think it needs to be consciously understood. I want people to realize that this vilification is real, that it is pervasive, and that it can have a subtle yet powerful impact on the values and ideas our entire society accepts as true. And I want people to recognize that this is important. Division of labor, specialization, entrepreneurship and the exchange of goods and services inside a system where people are free to make their own choices is critical to the survival and well-being of our species. Business is not something we should take for granted or vilify. It's something we should celebrate. Hey everybody, thanks for watching. Fee has tons of articles talking about the importance of entrepreneurship and economic freedom, but I know some of you are going to have a lot to say about my praise of business and capitalism here. Feel free to leave a comment and start a conversation. I'll try to reply to some of the comments as they come in. In the meantime, check out fee.org slash shows for all of the other content we're producing at the Foundation for Economic Education. And don't forget to hit that bell icon, like this video if you liked it and subscribe to all of our social networks on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thanks for watching.