“System Error,” a documentary now available on demand, uses a series of quotations from Karl Marx to offer diagnoses of the modern economy. Its central idea is that “growth,” as an economic mantra, has become such an article of faith globally for politicians and financiers that they have become blind to its potential limits and consequences. Toward the end, the movie, directed by Florian Opitz, projects a world in which capitalism will devour itself: Thanks to automation, jobless workers won’t have the wages to pay for the goods that ostensible prosperity has produced.
Tim Jackson, an ecological economist at the University of Surrey in England, says that in nature, mechanisms that grow unchecked “end up basically killing their host.” The film lays out the environmental effects of rapid transformations in agriculture and transportation, and it notes ways in which markets and trading have become divorced from the public and the broader economy.
If the movie’s points can be well taken, its rhetorical strategies are often facile. An Airbus executive in China talks about economic progress and the profound shift from bicycles to cars there — but then is pressed to admit that traffic jams are “a real headache in Beijing.”
The CNBC correspondent Bob Pisani says it is difficult to engage viewers with the ambiguities of markets — that he can’t go on television and say “there is no real meaning of anything that’s happening today.”
But it is easy to make seemingly uncritical financial-sector boosters look like fools; it is harder to grapple thoroughly with economic trade-offs. The subject matter of “System Error” is better suited to tables and charts, not a movie that uses editing tricks and an anxious score to goose its points.
System Error
Not rated. In English, German, Portuguese and Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
