Why Do Animated Films Use Such Famous Voices?
(SDL)
I took my four children to the movie Coraline this weekend. After the movie, I asked them how they liked it. Their four answers: “great,” “good,” “okay,” and “Thank God it’s over.”
Coming from my kids, who always say the latest movie is their favorite, those are not very positive reviews.
I have never been in a movie theater full of kids as quiet as it was at Coraline. That quiet, along with the plodding pace of the movie, left plenty of time to ponder things.
First, I couldn’t get over the fact that the name of one of the children in the movie was Wyborn, known as Wybie for short, as in “Why be born?” Wybie didn’t seem to have any parents, although he did have a grandma who would yell for him from time to time. It made me think of the unwanted children/abortion argument in Freakonomics.
Second, two of the voices in this animated film were done by Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher. The last movie I saw was Bolt, with voices by Miley Cyrus and John Travolta. The list of stars who have recently lent their voices to animated movies goes on and on: Eddie Murphy, Dustin Hoffman, Cameron Diaz, John Goodman, etc.
Why do big-name stars so dominate the voices in animated films?
One hypothesis is that they are better than other people at doing the voices. I’m almost certain that is not correct. I have to believe that there are a group of voice actors and books-on-tape readers who don’t have the faces to be movie stars but have great voices.
A second hypothesis is that the big stars don’t charge much for their voices. According to what I’ve read in The New York Times and elsewhere, doing the voice for an animated film doesn’t take much time or effort. If that is the case, then maybe the cost of the actors’ voices is just a small part of the total cost of the movie; but I don’t think that is the case, at least not always. I have read that Cameron Diaz and Mike Myers each got paid $10 million for their parts in Shrek 2.
A third explanation is that people really like to hear the voices of the stars. I tend to doubt that story as well. With a few notable exceptions, my guess is that audiences couldn’t even identify the voices of the stars if they didn’t see the credits.
A fourth hypothesis is one that sounds odd, but will be familiar to economists. Under this hypothesis, it isn’t that famous actors are better at doing voices, or even that moviegoers like to hear their voices, or that stars are cheap. Rather, big-time actors are hired to read these parts precisely because they are expensive. In order to be willing and able to give multi-million-dollar deals to stars to do voices that a no-name could do for $50,000, a producer must be confident that the movie will be a big hit. Thus, the big star is hired solely to give a credible signal to outsiders that the producer thinks the movie will be a blockbuster.
Ultimately, I’m not sure any of these hypotheses really feel right to me.
Why Pay $36.09 for Rancid Chicken?
(SJD)
An old friend came to town not long ago and we met for a late lunch on the Upper West Side. Trilby ordered a burger, no bread, with Brie; I ordered half a roasted chicken with mashed potatoes. The food was slow in coming but we had so much catching up to do that we didn’t care.
My chicken, when it arrived, didn’t look good but I took a bite. It was so rancid I had to spit it out into a napkin. Absolutely disgusting-gagging-rotten rancid. I summoned the waitress, a young and pretty redhead, who made a suitably horrified expression, then took the food away and brought back a menu.
The manager appeared. She was older than the waitress, with long dark hair and a French accent. She apologized, said the chefs were checking out the dish now, trying to determine if perhaps the herbs or the butter had caused the problem.
I don’t think so, I told her. I think your chicken is rotten. I cook a lot of chicken, I said, and I know what rotten chicken smells like. Trilby agreed: you could smell this plate across the table, probably across the restaurant.
The manager was reluctant to concede. They had just gotten the shipment of chicken that morning, she said, which struck me as relevant as saying that “no, so-and-so couldn’t have committed a murder today because he didn’t commit one yesterday.”
The manager left and, five minutes later, returned. You’re right! she said. The chicken was bad. The chefs had checked the chicken, found it rotten, and were throwing it away. Victory! But for whom? The manager apologized again, asked if I’d like a free dessert or drink. Well, I said, first of all let me try to find some food on your menu that doesn’t seem disgusting after that chicken. I ordered a carrot-ginger-orange soup, some french fries, and sautéed spinach.
Trilby and I then ate, fairly happily, though the taste of the rancid chicken remained with me; in fact, it remains with me still. Trilby had had a glass of wine before we ordered, and took another with her meal, sauvignon blanc. I drank water. When the waitress cleared our plates, she asked again if we wanted complimentary dessert. No, we said, just coffee.
As Trilby and I talked, I mentioned that I had not long ago interviewed Richard Thaler, the godfather of behavioral economics, which seeks to marry psychology and economics. Thaler and I had considered some small experiments at lunch—offering the waiter a gigantic tip, perhaps, in exchange for special considerations—but we didn’t get around to it. Trilby was interested, so we kept talking about money. I mentioned the behavioralists’ concept of “anchoring” (which used-car salesmen in particular know so well): establish a price that may be 100 percent more than what you need in order to ensure that you’ll still walk away with, say, a 50 percent profit.
Talk turned to what we might say when our check came. There seemed two good options: “We don’t care for any free dessert, thanks, but considering what happened with the chicken, we’d like you to comp our entire meal.” That would establish an anchor at 0 percent of the check. Or this option: “We don’t care for any free dessert, thanks, but considering what happened with the chicken, would you please ask the manager what you can do about the check.” That would establish an anchor at 100 percent of the check.
Just then the waitress brought the check. It was for $31.09. Perhaps out of shyness, or haste, or—most likely—a desire to not appear cheap (when it comes to money, things are never simple), I blurted out Option 2: Please see what the manager “can do about the check.” The waitress replied, smiling, that we had already been given the two glasses of wine for free. To me in particular this felt like slim recompense, since it was Trilby who had drunk the wine while it was I who still radiated with the flavor of rancid chicken. But the waitress, still smiling, duly took the check and headed toward the manager. She zipped right over, also smiling.
“Considering what happened with the chicken,” I said, “I wonder what you can do about the check.”
“We didn’t charge you for the wines,” she said, with great kindness, as if she were a surgeon who had thought she would have to remove both my kidneys but found instead that she had only had to remove one.
“Is that the best that you’re prepared to offer me?” I said (still unable to establish an anchor at 0 percent).
She looked at me intently, still friendly. Here she was making a calculation, preparing to make the sort of gamble that is both financial and psychological, the sort of gamble that each of us makes every day. She was about to gamble that I was not the kind of person who would make a scene. After all, I had been friendly throughout our dilemma, never raising my voice or even uttering aloud the words vomit or rancid. And she plainly thought this behavior would continue. She was gambling that I wouldn’t throw back my chair and holler, that I wouldn’t stand outside the restaurant telling prospective customers that I’d gagged on my chicken, that the whole lot was rancid, that the chefs either must have smelled it and thought they could get away with it, or, if they hadn’t smelled it, were so detached from their job that who knows what else—a spoon, a sliver of thumb, a dollop of disinfectant—might find its way into the next meal.
And so, making this gamble, she said “yes”: as in yes, that is the best that she was prepared to offer me. “All right,” I said, and she walked away. I added a five-dollar tip to bring the total tab to $36.09—no sense penalizing the poor waitress, right?—walked outside, and put Trilby in a cab. The manager had gambled that I wouldn’t cause trouble, and she was right.
Until now.
The restaurant, should you care to note, is called French Roast, and is on the northeast corner of Eighty-Fifth and Broadway, in Manhattan.
Last I checked, the roast chicken was still on the menu. Bon appétit.
Please Buy Gas!
(SDL)
The e-mail reprinted below, which is circulating incredibly widely, may represent a new low in economic thinking. It declares September 1 “No Gas Day”:
IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED THAT IF EVERYONE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA DID NOT PURCHASE A DROP OF GASOLINE FOR ONE DAY AND ALL AT THE SAME TIME, THE OIL COMPANIES WOULD CHOKE ON THEIR STOCKPILES.
AT THE SAME TIME IT WOULD HIT THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY WITH A NET LOSS OF OVER 4.6 BILLION DOLLARS WHICH AFFECTS THE BOTTOM LINES OF THE OIL COMPANIES.
THEREFORE SEPTEMBER 1ST HAS BEEN FORMALLY DECLARED “STICK IT TO THEM DAY” AND THE PEOPLE OF THESE TWO NATIONS SHOULD NOT BUY A SINGLE DROP OF GASOLINE THAT DAY.
THE ONLY WAY THIS CAN BE DONE IS IF YOU FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN AND AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN TO GET THE WORD OUT.
WAITING ON THE GOVERNMENT TO STEP IN AND CONTROL THE PRICES IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REDUCTION AND CONTROL IN PRICES THAT THE ARAB NATIONS PROMISED TWO WEEKS AGO?
REMEMBER ONE THING, NOT ONLY IS THE PRICE OF GASOLINE GOING UP BUT AT THE SAME TIME AIRLINES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES, TRUCKING COMPANIES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES WHICH EFFECTS [SIC] PRICES ON EVERYTHING THAT IS SHIPPED. THINGS LIKE FOOD, CLOTHING, BUILDING MATERIALS, MEDICAL SUPPLIES ETC. WHO PAYS IN THE END? WE DO!
WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. IF THEY DON’T GET THE MESSAGE AFTER ONE DAY, WE WILL DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN.
SO DO YOUR PART AND SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND MAKE SEPTEMBER 1ST A DAY THAT THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA SAY “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”
THANKS AND HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY :O}
Here is a (no doubt) partial list of totally idiotic mistakes in that e-mail:
1. If nobody buys gas today, but everybody drives the same amount, then it just means that we either had to buy more gas in anticipation of not buying any on September 1 or that we will buy more a few days later. So even if you believed this would take a $4.6 billion bite out of the oil companies that day, consumers would hand it right back over. If this was “No Starbucks coffee day” it might have some chance of mattering, because people buy and drink Starbucks coffee the same day, so a forgone cup of coffee today may never be consumed. But this is not true of gasoline, especially if no one is being asked to reduce gas consumption. All you will get is longer lines at the pump the day after.
2. A one-day total boycott of gas would not reduce oil company bottom lines by anything like $4.6 billion, even if it was accompanied by a one-day moratorium on all gasoline use. Americans consume about 9 million barrels of gas a day. There are about 42 gallons in a barrel, so that equals 378 million gallons of gas sold a day in United States, or about one gallon per person. Toss in another 10 percent for Canada. At $3 a gallon, that is about $1.2 billion in revenues. Profit as a share of revenues in this industry is probably 5 percent or less, so the bottom-line impact is a max of $60 million—or about 1/100th of the stated number. And from point (1) above, even this is a gross exaggeration of the true impact.
3. One day of no purchasing of gasoline would certainly not cause the oil industry to choke on their stockpiles. Gasoline inventories in the U.S. are typically about two hundred million barrels, but right now they are on the low side—a big part of the reason why gas prices are high. Nine million extra barrels would create no problems whatsoever for stockpiles.
So everyone, please buy gas on September 1.
And if you ever have the bright idea to circulate an e-mail like this, at least tell people not to use gas, rather than not to buy gas.
This post was published in August, 2005, when the average price of regular gasoline in the U.S. was about $2.85 per gallon. As of this writing (January 2015), a gallon costs about $2.06, which gives people all the more reason to buy gas!
Pirate Economics 101
(Q&A CONDUCTED BY RYAN HAGEN)
The crew of the Maersk Alabama recently survived an attack by pirates in Somalia and has returned home for a much-deserved rest. But with tensions growing between the U.S. and the ragtag confederation of Somali pirates, we thought it might be worth looking to the past for clues on how to tame the outlaw seas.
Peter Leeson is an economist at George Mason University and author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Leeson agreed to answer some important piratical questions for us:
Q. The Invisible Hook is more than just a clever title. How is it different from Adam Smith’s invisible hand?
A. In Adam Smith, the idea is that each individual pursuing his own self-interest is led, as if by an invisible hand, to promote the interest of society. The idea of the invisible hook is that pirates, though they’re criminals, are still driven by their self-interest. So they were driven to build systems of government and social structures that allowed them to better pursue their criminal ends. They’re connected, but the big difference is that, for Adam Smith, self-interest results in cooperation that generates wealth and makes other people better off. For pirates, self-interest results in cooperation that destroys wealth by allowing pirates to plunder more effectively.
Q. You write that pirates set up their own early versions of constitutional democracy, complete with separation of powers, decades before the American Revolution. Was that only possible because they were outlaws, operating entirely outside the control of any government?
A. That’s right. The pirates of the eighteenth century set up quite a thoroughgoing system of democracy. The reason that the criminality is driving these structures is because they can’t rely on the state to provide those structures for them. So pirates, more than anyone else, needed to figure out some system of law and order to make it possible for them to remain together long enough to be successful at stealing.
Q. So did these participatory, democratic systems give merchant sailors an incentive to join pirate crews, because it meant they were freer among pirates than on their own ships?
A. The sailors had more freedom and better pay as pirates than as merchantmen. But perhaps the most important thing was freedom from the arbitrariness of captains and the malicious abuses of power that merchant captains were known to inflict on their crews. In a pirate democracy, a crew could, and routinely did, depose their captain if he was abusing his power or was incompetent.
Q. You write that pirates weren’t necessarily the bloodthirsty fiends we imagine them to have been. How does the invisible hook explain their behavior?
A. The basic idea is, once we recognize pirates as economic actors—businessmen really—it becomes clear as to why they wouldn’t want to brutalize everyone they overtook. In order to encourage merchantmen to surrender, they needed to communicate the idea that, if you surrender to us, you’ll be treated well. That’s the incentive pirates give for sailors to surrender peacefully. If they wantonly abused their prisoners, as they’re often portrayed as having done, that would have actually undermined the incentive of merchant crews to surrender, which would have caused pirates to incur greater costs. They would have had to battle it out more often, because the merchants would have expected to be tortured indiscriminately if they were captured.
So instead, what we often see in the historical record is pirates displaying quite remarkable feats of generosity. The other side of that, of course, is that if you resisted, they had to unleash, you know, a hellish fury on you. That’s where
most of the stories of pirate atrocities come from. This is not to say that no pirate ever indulged his sadistic impulses, but I speculate that the pirate population had no higher proportion of sadists than legitimate society did. And those sadists among the pirates tended to reserve their sadistic actions for times when it would profit them.
Q. So they never made anyone walk the plank?
A. There was no walking the plank. There’s no historical foundation for that in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century piracy.
Q. You write about piracy as a brand. It’s quite a successful one, having lasted for hundreds of years after the pirates themselves were exterminated. What was the key to that success?
A. There was a very particular type of reputation that pirates wanted to cultivate. It was a delicate line to walk. They didn’t want to have a reputation for wanton brutality or complete madness. They wanted to be perceived as hair-trigger men, men on the edge, who if you pushed, if you resisted, they would snap and do something horrible to you. That way, the captives they took had an incentive to be very careful to comply with all of the pirates’ demands. At the same time, they wanted a reputation for meting out these brutal, horrible tortures to captives who didn’t comply with their demands. Stories about those horrible tortures were relayed not only by word of mouth, but by early-eighteenth-century newspapers. When a former prisoner was released, he would oftentimes go to the media and provide an account of his capture. So when colonials read these accounts in the media, that helped institutionalize the idea of pirates as these men on the edge. That worked marvelously for pirates. It was a form of advertising performed by legitimate members of society that again helped pirates reduce their costs.
When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants Page 22