The Lego Movie Mixes Economics and Entertainment

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Unless you've been living under a rock, or you're made out of tiny plastic, interlocking bricks, you've heard about The Lego® Movie. It's raked in over $183 million in just 3 weeks. But this action-packed story is more than just entertaining-it also teaches important lessons about economics and the value of each individual to flourishing communities.

Economics is the study of human action, including how economic policies affect the choices people make. Ultimately, economists try to understand what societal structures and norms allow people to realize their full, creative potentials. It's a big, ambitious question that The Lego® Movie answers in a refreshing way.

Entrepreneurship is at the heart of the movie's economic message. Entrepreneurs use their uniquely human gifts of reason and imagination to offer new possibilities to those around them, often in the face of skepticism. Indeed, it took imagination and courage for Ole Kirk Christiansen, founder of LEGO®, to buck the trend of wooden toys to develop plastic, interlocking blocks that many thought would fail.

In The Lego® Movie, the Master Builders are the entrepreneurs. These characters are able to envision-literally, "see"- different Lego® pieces in the landscape, which can be assembled to meet a need or get out of a jam. Master Builders don't need instruction manuals. Like real-life entrepreneurs, Master Builders take what already exists, and create something new and better.

Emmet, the unlikely hero of The Lego® Movie, shows us that entrepreneurial vision and creativity lies within all of us. But his journey also offers a cautionary tale of how top-down planning can stifle the entrepreneurial impulse.

Bricksburg, the world in which The Lego® Movie takes place, has very few Master Builders left. They have been locked up by the sole-ruler, Lord Business, who uses a suction cup device to pull their creativity into a super computer that then calculates the "one best way" to do things.

With the help of his armed henchman, Bad Cop, and a robot army of "micromanagers," Lord Business aims to establish order through these state-sanctioned instructions for everything from clothes and food, to entertainment and work. And, once everything is in order, Lord Business plans to use the "Kragle" (glue) to lock into place what he has created, leaving a world in which everyone and everything is the same.

As a result, Emmet and his fellow Legos® listen to the same song (Everything is Awesome!), watch the same television show (Where Are My Pants?!), buy the same over-priced coffee, and have the same posters of "Popular Band!" hanging in their homes. Furthermore, they are employed by Lord Business as construction workers to destroy all of the diverse structures created in the past, and rebuild Bricksburg according to a central plan of uniformity, with orders to report anything "weird."

What makes this portrayal of Bricksburg so powerful is that it parallels many of today's social and policy trends. Government bailouts, special interest lobbying, and volumes upon volumes of regulation-often in the name of justice or fairness-have the same effect of locking into place the existing order, and locking out those who might dare to try something new.

In painting a picture of the dangers of top-down planning, The Lego® Movie makes a powerful case for individual freedom and less government interference.

Over and over, the movie shows that the most humane order is one that leaves space for and celebrates creativity, and recognizes that valuable contributions to human flourishing can come from the most unlikely places.

That order can't be dictated by central planners. It's only through competing attempts to create the good and beautiful-brought to us by sometimes unlikely creators-that we actually get closer to realizing something truly good and beautiful.

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