I’d never say that I know much about economics, but I’m very interested in economic issues and I try to read as much about them as possible. I do not know everything about movies, but I can say that I know a lot about movies, the making of movies and, of course, I enjoy watching them. Considering that I’m into both economics and movies, you can imagine that the following article from the Financial Times Alphaville blog got my attention today.

It is a post by FT Alphaville columnist John Authers, which is titled “The Travis Bickle Effect” and explains that Martin Scorsese’s 1976 movie Taxi Driver might very well be the most wealth-creating film in the history of motion pictures. Not the most serious theory in modern economics, but worthwhile and interesting nevertheless.

What was the greatest wealth-creating film of all time? Titanic might be a popular guess, but the answer, according to Columbia University’s Nobel laureate economist Robert Mundell, is Taxi Driver.

John Hinckley, the deranged would-be assassin who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981, claimed that he was inspired by it. (…) According to Mundell, the wave of sympathy for President Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Due to this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Professor Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed.

“Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP,” Mundell told delegates. “It’s the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5 trillion and $15 trillion of output to the US economy.”

Click here for the complete article.

For those of you who don’t remember De Niro’s “You talking to me?” line, here’s a part of the scene (via YouTube):