One of the very important intellectual transformations of our times is the breakdown of academic distinctions. First, various important businesses involved in what we call culture were introduced into the university to rationalize and thus dignify them: journalism, marketing, the writing of novels, the making of movies and TV series, and even ideological indoctrination, agitation, and organization. Thus, we found ourselves saddled with a media-academic industrial complex, though not one blessed with great new novelists or journalists. The new status of these industries is impressive, a consolation for the mediocrity of their results, a problem for democracy long foreseen by Tocqueville.

Next, through a combination of political and technological transformations, this complex broke down academic rigor and birthed something like a new collegiate class which staffs the public media of communications, so that professionalism has been repudiated and today it’s almost impossible to distinguish news, opinion, social science, storytelling, policy making or advocacy, propaganda, and advertising or branding. This further created an opposition between producers and consumers of media, which we now call the culture wars. 

This is an unprecedented predicament in America, and one that was not predicted by any influential figure. Nor do we now have an authoritative diagnosis, much less a practical remedy for it. We are, to speak plainly, deluged and confused by the stuff we read, hear, and see on the portable screens without which we cannot go through the day. Is this a culture, is it technology, is it manipulation, is it surveillance? Sometimes, it is called progress. Accordingly, we now need cultural criticism to figure out what’s happening in America.

Cultural Criticism

The man from whom I learned most by way of criticism of pop culture in the spirit of love of freedom and concern for the happiness of the American people is the late Paul Cantor. He was equally conversant in culture and economics (he studied with Ludwig von Mises), and integrated the two in his thought through political philosophy (he studied with Harvey Mansfield). Cantor’s work inspired many people who now imitate him, as we can see from the first scholarly project in his spirit to appear since his death: Show and Biz, edited by Maria Blanco and Alberto Mingardi, published by Bloomsbury Academic. It is dedicated to the memory of Paul Cantor and includes one of his last essays, on Shark Tank. 

According to its subtitle, the collection is a study of “The Market Economy in TV Series and Popular Culture” in the twenty-first century. As TV became the prestige medium, talent and money moved into that industry, vying for the attention of the ambitious, but gullible or self-important collegiate classes. Show and Biz accordingly includes chapters on the more talked about, award-winning series of recent years: Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, David Milch’s Deadwood, and David Simon’s The Wire. Yet it does not focus on prestige drama alone, it also includes analysis of some popular, long-running sitcoms like Parks and Recreations. The volume is capped off with an analysis of a movie, Snowpiercer, by Bong Joon-ho, one of the few prestigious directors to make the troubles threatening to overwhelm the bourgeoisie his theme.

Cantor pioneered the use of non-Marxist economics in the analysis of pop culture. His approach combined the brilliance of using Austrian economics, “the marginal revolution in economics,” with something obvious, but long neglected—storytelling in our commercial regime is very much concerned with commerce at one level or another and it would be good to try to understand the society on its own terms. Show and Biz’s various contributors try to live up to Cantor’s demand that the science of economics be brought down from the heights of academia and compelled to account for the habits and beliefs of ordinary people in their pursuit of happiness.

This raises two very important questions, one about the relationship between culture and economics, and the other about the relationship between science and society. Consider the word producer, which is a term of art both in economics and in entertainment. The producer of economics goods has to please consumers, but so does the producer of TV shows or movies have to please his audience. At its crassest, the business mentality therefore can reduce art to “content.” But at its noblest, it can serve culture above all, because only artistic productions are concerned by their nature with business and everything involved in it. Production in the sense of entertainment is self-aware production, it is our reflection on our commercial society of producers and consumers, and ultimately on human nature and nature as such, even going beyond the boundaries of economic science. In their introduction, Blanco and Mingardi point to this issue:

A key feature of successful producers, whatever the good or service they produce, is that they are able to find out what their consumers like, to tinker with their product so that it better suits their prospective viewers’ preferences, to present products in a way that arouses interest in their audience. All of this suggests a peculiar connection of producers to their culture. This entire entrepreneurial process is interpretative, and interpretation necessarily occurs through a cultural lens. Being immersed in a culture, therefore, allows the entrepreneur to make accurate interpretations.

Market Rationalism

The problem economists must face then is why culture and business are sworn enemies, why we are so restless in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, and what science can understand and improve about our society. Most of the cultural productions surveyed in Show and Biz are openly inimical to “neo-liberalism” or capitalism as such in rather moralistic ways. Perhaps it’s best then, given the very limited scope of a review essay, to focus on the only openly capitalist show, with its enthusiasm for entrepreneurs and investors, Shark Tank, a Japanese “reality TV” show licensed around the world with great success. Cantor discusses only the American version, but since it is popular (it’s been going on for 15 seasons, starting in 2009, and more than 300 episodes) in a time when prestige TV denounces capitalism, it is worth the attention.

Cantor presents the show as the ideal of middlebrow art, a combination of entertainment and education. The education is primarily offered by experienced investors to aspiring entrepreneurs, whose businesses they might or might not buy into, and, by extension, to the audience as well, since anyone might get it into his head to start a business, if he can think of a product people might really want. This requires taking chances rather than being cautious, which makes the entrepreneur an interesting and impressive figure, since he innovates: “This is a principle that Shark Tank repeatedly illustrates. The entrepreneur is the visionary who paradoxically know what people want before they even know what it is.”

The entertainment is twofold, partly a matter of poetic justice, seeing worthy aspiring entrepreneurs rewarded and arrogant ones thwarted, and partly a matter of curiosity, figuring out how difficult it is to bet intelligently on businesses and thus how irreplaceable the marketplace is to the allocation of capital. Thus, Cantor:

In accord with the marginal revolution in economics, Shark Tank rests on the subjective theory of value. A company is worth what investors are willing to pay for it, and that depends on what they think it is worth. The best way to determine the value of anything is at an auction, when potential buyers can compete against each other, bidding whatever they want to make the purchase. Shark Tank is a kind of auction house. It focuses on the issue of how to put a price on a company, a very complicated matter, but one that is at the heart of a functioning capitalist economy. This kind of pricing is particularly difficult when one is dealing with start-up situations, in which so much about the future of a company is hypothetical and uncertain.

Shark Tank is, like all the other shows, capitalist in the sense that it must prove itself profitable, to recoup its costs and reward the investment, but, unlike them, it is also capitalist in the sense that it applauds the capitalism it practices. Further, it is also capitalist in the sense that it is inspiring people, to paraphrase Horace Greeley, to go West, that is, to become entrepreneurs. People watch the show and then want to be on it; some make it. A few of the deals made on the show have led to incredibly successful businesses that make life more convenient for us, as have some of the rejected proposals; while others are more modest; and many, perhaps most, are, of course, failures. Moreover, the very success of the show makes it attractive to anyone who wants attention to his business; even failing to make a deal with an investor, one could get valuable advertising.

Reality TV is the least polished and ambitious form of TV, though perhaps the dominant one and, thus, one that deserves a lot more attention than it receives. Self-promotion and trying to use fame to sell products—that’s also what influencers do on all the forms of social media that have replaced society as we used to know it. I confess, if I may be excused for mentioning myself, that I am on Twitter, where I tell people to read essays such as this one, as worthier uses of their time than others available to them. Reality TV seems to be somehow correlated to the taste for ugliness in our prestige dramas, but it more plausibly accepts people as they are. Cantor makes a compelling case that Shark Tank is nearly unique in encouraging people to prosper in a legal and respectable way.

Entrepreneurs and especially those among them successful and thoughtful enough to become investors are certainly better educators than our celebrities, if more modest. It is very amusing, but also reassuring to see the drama of betting on the future presented as the art of making deals and the not entirely unrelated art of dealing with our limits. Freedom becomes manageable this way, because it becomes productive. Cantor always delights in how clever ordinary people can prove and in his own extraordinary cleverness in figuring things out; this suggests ultimately that knowledge is good for us and that we can deal with chance by taking chances intelligently, together.

This is useful teaching also for judging the other, more ambitious, and relentlessly grim shows in Show and Biz, which as productions are the exact kind of success they, as stories, pretend is not possible for us anymore. In Cantor’s spirit, the authors of the various essays, which I recommend to your attention, try to show that there is much to be said for entrepreneurship even in terms of the shows that attract attention and awards these days. They may help you distinguish between culture, manipulation, and technology and gain insight into our situation.