Brigadoon vs. the hockey stick

I woke up in the middle of the night last week and turned on Turner Movie Classics (TCM). The 1954 film was playing at the time Brigadeon. I had heard of it but never seen it. It’s about two boys who are on a hunting trip to Scotland and discover a place in mid-18th century Scotland where people live as if it were the mid-18th century. But it exists in the mid-20th century. One of the characters, played by Gene Kelly, falls in love with one of the town’s residents, Brigadoon. She is a beautiful woman, played by Cyd Charisse.

I know it’s fantasy in the obvious sense. But there is another sense in which it is fantasy, a sense familiar to anyone who knows much about the last three centuries of economic history.

I only captured the last 20 minutes, but in that time we see Cyd Charisse dressed in a beautiful dress and looking stunning as if she came out of a 1950’s edition. Fashion.

Do you see the problem?

If the village really was in the mid-18th century, it wouldn’t look like this. She wouldn’t have nice clothes and probably rotten teeth, to name just two.

I once wanted to write something for a think tank focusing on the “hockey stick,” the graph showing GDP per capita in the modern world from 1000 AD to today. The person at the think tank told me that the vast majority of their readers know about the hockey stick. I suspect there is at least a significant minority who don’t.

Go ahead and fantasize about Brigadoon, but realize that if you were the character Gene Kelly played, the actual Brigadoon wouldn’t be attractive and you almost certainly wouldn’t be attracted to the woman he fell in love with.

Here’s Don Boudreaux explaining it in more detail in a 5 minute video.

The photo above is of Cyd Charisse.