Back around 1989, I drew my father’s attention to a $40,000 Infiniti automobile, which passed us on the highway. My dad (a WWII vet) couldn’t even comprehend how the Japanese could sell a car at that price point. He associated Japan with cheap stuff. (He died a year later.)

I had a similar feeling when I saw this FT headline:

Vietnamese electric-car maker worth more than Ford or GM after US listing

Lossmaking VinFast’s market capitalisation tops $85bn following New York debut

When I was first old enough to notice cars, GM was a colossus, controlling roughly 50% of the US car market. It was our most dominant company—our Apple. Vietnam was regarded (wrongly) as a tiny country full of primitive people who lived in the jungle. If in 1965 you’d showed the average American this headline from 2023 their jaw would have dropped.

[They would also have assumed the communists lost the war. And they’d wonder what an “electric-car” was. Perhaps in a sense the communists did lose the war, after winning the battle.]

As I get older, I’m increasing aware that every generation lives in a different world. This tweet caught my eye:

I presume that Yglesias is more in tune with what’s currently “creepy and weird”, but I actually liked this film. It does have some uncomfortable moments (a 12-year old girl exposed to some pretty intense violence), but I’ve seen enough similar examples that it no longer fazes me. Remember Taxi Driver? Why not make this sort of film today?

On these sorts of subjective questions, I try to maintain both an inside view and an outside view. Each generation will have standards that seem appalling to the subsequent generation. In many cases, such as slavery, the views of the newer generation tend to prevail in the long run. In other cases, the reforms are later reversed. Thus the Victorians probably saw themselves as progressives, who rose above the more lascivious culture of Georgian-period England. Later generations saw the Victorians as foolish prudes—sexual reactionaries.

As I came of age, young people were increasingly mocking the censorship of the 1950s, a time when Hollywood showed married couples sleeping in separate twin beds. By the 1970s, “anything goes” was viewed as the hip position. Now younger people often decry a lack of censorship in the old. Where will things be in 50 years? I have no idea.

So my inside view is that Yglesias is wrong—Léon is a perfectly respectable film. (If I were Trump, I’d say the film is “perfect”.) My outside view is that Yglesias is probably correct and I’m probably wrong. That’s based on two factors:

1. No one can evaluate their own values in an objective fashion.

2. “The arc of history is long and it bends toward justice.” In other words, the Whig view of history is correct. The younger generation generally has superior views of what is right.

The inside/outside dichotomy relates the the efficient markets hypothesis. Each person should form a view as to the value of a given asset, say Bitcoin. Each person should also recognize that the market view is probably superior to their (inside) view. But that knowledge should not cause individuals to abandon their inside view. If the public blindly accepted the market view, then people would no longer contribute the local views required to form an efficient market in the first place. Thus, in a well functioning system people should hold both views—their own view based on their personal information set and a dispassionate understanding that the consensus view is usually superior.

I disagree with Yglesias about Léon, but I also believe that he’s probably correct. I’m probably just a creepy and weird old boomer.

PS. It’s rated at 74% by critics at Rotten Tomatoes. The general audience is especially creepy and weird, coming in at 95%. I suppose only a boomer would be unhip enough to frequent Rotten Tomatoes.

PPS. I wrote this post a couple week ago. Yesterday I was reading Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, and came across this (from Google):

Paul Auster called this memoir “The best autobiography ever written.”