I woke up in the middle of the night last week and turned on Turner Movie Classics (TCM). Playing then was a 1954 film Brigadoon. I’ve heard about it but never seen it. It’s about 2 guys on a hunting trip to Scotland who find a place in mid-18th century Scotland where people live like it’s mid-18th century. But it exists in the middle of the 20th century. One of the characters, played by Gene Kelly, falls in love with one of the townspeople, Brigadoon. She is a beautiful woman played by Cyd Charisse.
I know it’s a dream in a literal sense. But there is another sense in which it is a dream, a feeling known to anyone who knows much about the last 3 centuries of economic history.
I only caught 20 minutes but in that time, we see Cyd Charisse wearing a beautiful dress and looking as good as if she came out of a 1950’s magazine. Vogue.
Do you see the problem?
If this town really existed in the mid-18th century, it wouldn’t look like that. He wouldn’t have nice clothes and he might have rotten teeth, just to name two.
I once wanted to write a think tank where I highlighted the “hockey stick,” a graph showing GDP per capita in the modern world from 1000 AD to today. Someone at the think tank told me that most of their students know about the hockey stick. My guess is that there are at least a large minority who don’t.
Go ahead and have your Brigadoon dream, but be aware that if you were the character played by Gene Kelly, the real Brigadoon would be unlikable and you probably wouldn’t be attracted to the woman he dated.
Here’s Don Boudreaux laying it out in great detail in a 5 minute video.
The photo above is of Cyd Charisse.
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