Barbie and the American Economy
The highest grossing movie of 2023 was Barbie. Worldwide box office receipts were 1.45 billion dollars, and this doesn’t include revenues from streaming rights, merchandise sales, and the soundtrack.1 If one excludes sequels, superhero franchises, and animated features, it ranks third all time (behind Avatar and Titanic). Adjusting for inflation drops it down a few notches as Gone with the Wind takes the top spot. But even so, it is among the most commercially successful films ever made.
Well over half of the film’s box office receipts—more than 810 million dollars—came from overseas ticket sales. That is, Barbie was a major American export.2 And it was hardly alone. Oppenheimer (released on the same day) had foreign ticket sales of 645 million, and there were dozens of other American films that attracted significant interest from audiences worldwide.
The composition of our exports tells us where we stand on the global technological frontier, because they compete with goods and services from every corner of the world. In addition, our exports (along with capital inflows from abroad) help us finance our imports and prevent our substantial trade deficits from being even larger.
Fifty years ago, the share of services in US exports was below one-fifth; it is now one-third and rising. Movies, music, software, education, finance, consulting, and travel are all increasingly important services that we sell on global markets, and that allow us to buy what others specialize in producing. Barbie was part of this nexus of transactions.
The film was also an artistic success, nominated for eight Academy Awards and nine Golden Globes. There were twelve Grammy nominations for its soundtrack and score. Its director, Greta Gerwig, is the only filmmaker in history to have earned best picture Oscar nominations for her first three solo features (the others being Lady Bird and Little Women). And she’s just 41 years old, with many more movies (perhaps including a sequel or two) to come.3
We tend to assign credit for accomplishments to those most visibly and obviously responsible for them. This is reflected in the sharp boundaries that define awards and accolades. One either does or does not win a Nobel Prize; there’s no middle ground or partial credit. Sometimes people with meaningful contributions get excluded, and at other times those with peripheral contributions get rewarded. For example, six Jamaican sprinters won gold medals for the 4x100 men’s relay at the Rio Olympics, one of whom was Usain Bolt and two of whom ran in earlier heats but not in the final. It’s safe to say that the contributions of the six were not all equal, though the medals received were identical.
At the level of specific accomplishments this makes sense—trying to quantify individual contributions to a team effort would be arbitrary, chaotic and contested. But when it comes to the performance of an economy, the tangential and unheralded contributions of those on the sidelines can matter a lot.
This was well understood by Steve Jobs, who dropped out of Reed College after six months and made the following remarks in a Stanford commencement address twenty years ago:
It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting… And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.
The point is that significant accomplishments by remarkable individuals are made with the assistance of scaffolding, much of which remains invisible. This doesn’t make the individuals any less remarkable, but it does mean that their success depends in part on the existence of institutions that provide the conditions for fortuitous discovery and serendipity. And as Jobs’ own example illustrates, one doesn’t have to be formally attached to the institutions to benefit.
That said, being formally attached usually doesn’t hurt. Greta Gerwig earned her undergraduate degree at Barnard College, majoring in English with a theater concentration. Can the college take any credit for her accomplishments, and hence for her contributions to the American economy? She certainly seems to think so, having described the experience as completely life-changing. In her (generous) telling, professors and peers gave her the confidence to try her hand at something that she had always assumed others would do better.
A number of remarkable writers have passed through Barnard’s storied English department and gone on to attain significant critical and commercial success. Among them are Zora Neale Hurston, Erica Jong, Ntozake Shange, Anna Quindlen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Natalie Angier, and Edwidge Danticat. I haven’t tallied the revenues from book sales and movie rights, but the scale of their contributions to economic activity are surely significant.
I mention all this because American higher education, itself a major export engine, is currently under relentless attack. Public confidence is down sharply across all major subgroups, regardless of party identification, education, age, or gender. In my view, it would be a mistake to brush this off as a product of hostile media coverage, though such coverage has certainly been plentiful. There are many legitimate reasons why people have lost trust in elite institutions, and the need to reflect on these and undertake substantive reforms is urgent. I have discussed many of these issues in earlier posts, as have others.
But in this post I have tried to keep the focus on what we already do well.4 I’ve taught at Barnard for the better part of my career. Several thousand students from across the University (including Columbia College and the Engineering School) have passed through my classes and gone on to live quietly productive lives. Economics majors tend not to enter professions that lead to celebrity status, although we do have one student who recorded a hit single before getting a law degree and joining Lucasfilm, and a couple of successful academic economists.
Defenses of American higher education in the face of recent attacks have tended to focus on groundbreaking scientific research. But teaching and mentorship also create enormous value, unlocking latent potential and opening up paths to professional success. This serves the direct beneficiaries, of course, but also contributes to our national competitiveness and prosperity in all kinds of indirect and intangible ways.
The official trailer has racked up 88 million views, and prominently features several product placements.
By way of comparison, this about one-twelfth of total revenue from foreign sales of US-assembled vehicles earned by Ford, our largest automobile manufacturer.
Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ridley Scott are still active in their eighties, as is Clint Eastwood at 94.
I understand, of course, that things of enormous value can be produced without generating any income for their creators. Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka, Thelonious Monk, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville all achieved iconic status posthumously. And in some cases it makes economic sense to make products freely available if usage can be multiplied without additional cost. I have spent a lot of time and effort developing interactive resources for teaching economic concepts that are available free of charge under a creative commons license, was an early contributor to the CORE project, and have published a freely available video playlist based on a mathematical methods course I once taught in Columbia’s doctoral program. The focus in this post has been on dollars and cents because that addresses most directly—for the broadest possible audience—the value of what American colleges do.
Excellent post. Many people don't see college as anything other than an intermediate step on a career path that leads to a job. We need to help people outside academics see the value of a liberal arts education. We need to show them the value of the general exploration of knowledge and problem solving in a meta sense. These are the things that the best colleges do best and they are under appreciated.