Thanks for the Rollerball

I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to Adam Davidson, one of the sharpest, most insightful media personalities I know. I love what the NPR team is doing with Planet Money.

The segment they ran on Alec Litowitz, Magnetar, and their mortgage/collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) shorting strategies actually kept me sitting in my car in a parking garage until it was finished. Nobody should be allowed to read Michael Lewis’s "The Big Short" until they’ve listened to it.

My book, The End of the Free Market, has just had the honor of serving as guinea pig (their term) for the first Planet Money "Deep Read" — a good hour getting inside the arguments of the book and thinking about where the world is going. Before Adam begins an interview, he absorbs a book cover to cover, helping him conduct sharp, nuanced, provocative conversations.

I love that he peppered the interview with some of my favorite dystopian "corporations take over the world" movies. Network is an obvious choice. (I used it in the book.) Adam made me wish I’d also worked in a reference to Robocop. But the citation of Rollerball (the James Caan and John Houseman original) takes the gold. 

It also raises an interesting question: Why did so many folks think corporations would take over the world? Were screenwriters sharing a private joke about Hollywood’s most megalomaniacal studio executives?

No matter. Each day provides more evidence that the power of the state is back. Salad days for political scientists.  

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and author of The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?