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Greed! Announcing Econ4 Video Contest

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By Jim Boyce and Doug Smith, co-founders of Econ4

The Econ4 network of teachers, professors, practitioners, students and others are working to shift how economics is understood, taught and practiced. Together with our partners at Softbox, we have made a number of well-received videos ranging from housing to healthcare to jobs to the link between diminishing marginal utility and tax policy – and more.

We are now launching a video contest to crowd source as many short, 3 minute videos about “Greed” as possible. We will distribute many of these across our network and beyond. Indeed, Yves has kindly offered to run the contest winners here at Naked Capitalism.

The contest is patterned after the New Yorker cartoon contest where the magazine provides the cartoon itself and contestants supply text/punch lines. In our case, we’ve selected four video clips and ask contestants to produce 3 minute videos by remixing one or more of these four — and adding original text, graphics, sound and pretty much anything else.

The contest runs until February 1, 2016. There are four $500 prizes to be awarded to the funniest, most creative, most inspiring and best overall video.

We invite and hope many of you in the Naked Capitalism Commentariat will submit entries. We also invite and encourage you to share this blog post as widely as possible with others who might be interested: students, teachers, film makers, journalists, web designers, artists, musicians, activists, not-for-profit folks, union members, baristas, financial analysts – anyone and everyone who have a point of view on greed they wish to share.

Thanks!

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14 comments

  1. Brandon

    FYI… Your links to the videos on housing, healthcare and jobs do not work.

    So you are looking for videos that use the supplied videos in their entirety, with out edits to the base video?

    Or are all rules off the table?

    2. Doug

      Econ4 welcomes any use of the four videos you like. Could use just one; could mix from two or more; and, can add in other materials, etc as you like

  3. craazyman

    so if some creative genius spends 500 hours making a masterpiece, that comes out to $1 per hour?

    hahahahahahahah

    Just kidding. It sounds better than laying on the floor with xanax and red wine surfing Youtube for 500 hours watching Adele’s “Someone Like You” video over and over.

    This should be good, to see what kind of creativity progressive economists come up with! I hope there’s no equations!

    2. HopeLB

      You must Do This Craazyman! For us. your faithful fans. For our devotion to scanning the comments for yours. To view a video capturing your spikey energy would be priceless!And like Van Gogh, this pricelessness will only be paid in full after your death and probably purchased bought by a Chinese billionaire or another outsourcee countryman/woman.

      1. Lambert Strether

        I second the motion. I’m not sure that what craazyman comes up with would be spot on for the audience the contest has in mind, but I think it would be a worthy endeavor in its own write. As it were.

  4. Jef

    Greed is in the eye of the beholder.
    Greed is the natural response to scarcity and we have made scarcity the centerpiece of society.
    To label someone as greedy one would have to state as fact that that person already has enough and doesn’t need more. There is no such thing as enough as everyone, including the most wealthy understands that due to forces beyond their control everything can be lost.

    Fear of death is the #1 concern of all humans…Survival! Threaten that survival or the survival of their loved ones and you can get a lot worse reactions than greed out of people.

    Create a baseline where extreme poverty, homelessness, no access to education or healthcare are gone and you will cut greed down to a handful and then you can point fingers.

    1. JTMcPhee

      Maybe jef needs a visit to the ethical ophthalmologist?

      Sure seems like a very few humans with more wealth and power than has ever been so concentrated before are working three shifts (with a lot of help from aspirants to the same ridiculously indulged state) to be dang sure that “baseline” can never happen. At least before the political economy they have laid down finishes the job of extinctifying our poorly designed species…

      And those Few are right to fear death.. They’ve set it up, of course, so that more and more of us that feed their bottomless, perverse appetites are choosing or being worked into early graves.

      Go Galt!

    2. flora

      “There is no such thing as enough as everyone, including the most wealthy understands that due to forces beyond their control everything can be lost.”

      Ah. So greed is a pathological and doomed attempt to control the future?

  6. Code Name D

    I nearly finished my first video, so this looks like a cool second project. So I will toss my hat into the ring.

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