Marketplace of Ideas Blog

If something interesting can be said about the economic impact of the late Michael Jackson, of course First Trust Advisors’ Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein will say it:

The good news is that, ultimately, real economic growth is about much more than the components of GDP, such as consumption, home building, and business investment. It’s about the productive decisions and behaviors of individuals. Really, it’s about entrepreneurs.

The reason this comes to mind is the recent death of Michael Jackson. Regardless of what one thinks of his music or his life choices, it is easy to recognize how enormously productive Jackson was. He broke all the records for album sales, put MTV on the map and propelled music videos into the mainstream.

He created something out of nothing. And the product of his talent, hard work, and creativity, focused on pleasing the ears and eyes of consumers around the globe. If Jackson — or any entrepreneur, for that matter — had asked a certain kind of economist whether he should pursue this line of work, this innovation, he would have been told it was foolhardy. “If there really was a market for that kind of stuff, someone would have done it already,” they would say. But this is in a static world.

In reality, the economy is dynamic. And what allows that dynamism, what creates the environment for entrepreneurship is the institutional framework — property rights, the rule of law and even the level of common trust among citizens. These factors cannot be quantified or easily measured, and so are often overlooked.

And yet without these social attributes great talent goes wasted around the world. The US is blessed in countless ways, but do we really think we are just “lucky” to have so many talented people who live here? Would Michael Jackson have been just as successful if he had been born in France or Ghana? Of course not.

(Side note: Does anyone else find the number of celebrities who have died recently to be strange? Jackson’s death pushed off the front page the death of Farrah Fawcett, whose impact need not be mentioned to those older than 40. And then there’s the as-seen-on-TV career of pitchman Billy Mays, who died Sunday. June has been a rough month for celebrities, including blues singer Koko Taylor, actor David Carradine, 105-year-old Ink Spots guitarist Huey Long, Del Monroe (Kowalski on “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”), comedian/celebrity impersonator Fred Travalena, and Johnny Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon.)