Show and Biz: The Market Economy in TV Series and Popular Culture (2000-2020)

How is capitalism represented in popular culture today? Are profits seen as a legitimate reward of entrepreneurship? Are thrift and effort still considered a cornerstone of a healthy society? Or is it that inequalities are eliciting scandal and reproach? How is the ecosystem portrayed, vis-à-vis profit seeking companies? Are they irreconcilable, or maybe not? Are there any established trends with respect to the presentation of entrepreneurship, and that complex legal artefact that is the modern limited liability company?

These are questions that will be at the core of this book. But they are not examined through the usual theoretical point of references, but looking at TV series produced in 2000-2020.

Each chapter of this book is a case studies, covering some of the most popular, successful and engaging TV shows of the last 20 years. And showing how deep economic ideas and biases lie, at the roots of some of our times’ most successful entertainment products.

María Blanco is Associate Professor of History of Economic Thought at the School of Economics and Business of Universidad CEU San Pablo, Spain. She is the author of successful books such as Afrodita desenmascarada: Una defensa del feminismo liberal (2017) and, with Carlos Rodríguez Braun and Luis Daniel Ávila, Hacienda somos todos, cariño: Cómo nos engañan para que creamos que pagamos poco y por nuestro bien (2020).

Alberto Mingardi is Associate Professor of History of Political Thought at IULM University of Milan, Italy. He is also Director General of Istituto Bruno Leoni, Italy’s free-market think tank. He is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, USA. He is author of Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class: The Economic Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (2020), The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (2020), and Herbert Spencer (Bloomsbury 2011).