“How many fingers am I holding up?” asks the referee mid-fight.

“Thursday,” the dazed boxer answers.

That one joke had plenty of company on “Police Squad!” The 1982 ABC sitcom reunited the creative team behind “Airplane!” – David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (ZAZ) – to parody the modern cop show. The trio already reinvented the big screen comedy by bombarding audiences with jokes via their 1980 romp.

They reteamed with “Airplane!” standout Leslie Nielsen for the series, casting him as the intrepid Lt. Frank Drebin. His dedicated cop character ran through a gamut of gags without ever cracking a smile.

That was the beauty of the former straight man’s performance.

“Police Squad!” uncorked six sublime episodes that shook up the cop show formula in hilarious fashion.

ABC brass thought the show demanded too much of the viewer and swiftly pulled the plug. That’s show business, and TV is replete with promising shows that never stood a chance.

Except the ZAZ team refused to let the concept die.

They repackaged it years later as “The Naked Gun,” and this time audiences were ready for Frank and friends. The 1988 film, infamously co-starring O.J. Simpson, became a smash and paved the way for two sequels.

Now, naturally, Hollywood is rebooting the franchise. 

“The Naked Gun” casts Liam Neeson as the son of the late Frank Drebin. It’s an attempt to introduce the saga’s warped humor to a new generation. The previous films weren’t always PC, to put it mildly.

The first teaser trailer bowed this week along with a curious nod to Simpson’s days with the franchise.

Neeson is better known of late for his action film chops, but he strikes the right tone in the trailer. He’ll be joined by Pamela Anderson, enjoying a career rebirth courtesy of “The Last Showgirl.”

“Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane is part of the creative team behind the new film. Will his signature style overwhelm the film, or can “The Naked Gun” pay proper homage to the ZAZ formula?

We’ll find out when “The Naked Gun” hits theaters Aug. 1.

The post The Canceled TV Show That Refuses to Die appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

As Paul Krugman pointed out productivity isn’t everything. But in the long run it’s almost everything. For the income that can be gained, consumption that is enabled, from an hour of human labour is clearly not just limited but defined by the output from an hour of human labour. Thus, if we desire to increase consumption, which is by definition an increase in incomes, we need to increase the productivity of labour.

As William Baumol has also pointed out increasing productivity in services is difficult. Largely on the grounds that a service is, roughly enough, the time of a person. But it’s necessary to recall that it’s only “more difficult”, not impossible. Technological advance can indeed reduce the amount of human time, labour, required to produce a service. By, obviously enough, turning it into a manufacture - something done by machines perhaps - and thus improving the productivity of human labour that way.

Ms. Phillipson asks the right question:

AI tools will soon be in use in classrooms across England, but the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has one big question she wants answered: will they save time?

Attending a Department for Education-sponsored hackathon in central London last week, Phillipson listened as developers explained how their tools could compile pupil reports, improve writing samples and even assess the quality of soldering done by trainee electrical engineers.

After listening to one developer extol their AI writing analysis tool as “superhuman”, able to aggregate all the writing a pupil had ever done, Phillipson asked bluntly: “Do you know how much time it will have saved?”

But will she then draw the correct conclusion? If time is saved but we continue to have the same number of teachers producing the same amount of education then productivity hasn’t increased. We’ve the same labour input, the same output.

If time is saved and we react by having fewer teachers then productivity has increased and we’ve all got richer. That newly freed up labour can go off and contribute to saying some other human need and we are able to consume that new production, our incomes are higher by the value placed upon it.

So, AI saves teachers time, that’s good. But it’s only good for all of us - as opposed to just for teachers who now have more time - if we react by having fewer teachers. Which is the big question.

Will the Minister draw the right conclusion, that AI means fewer teachers?

To even ask that question that way is to answer it, isn’t it.

Tim Worstall

So the mathematician asks the economist whether there’s actually anything at all in all of the social sciences that is not obvious nor trivial. Yes, Ricardo on trade.

Much of macroeconomics is the maths lads playing with their protractor sets. Most of microeconomics can be explained by Granny without taking the eggs out of her mouth. Raise prices and people buy less - Rilly? Sell cheap and you’ll get a queue - Well, We Never. Sting people with taxes and they’ll do less of what gets them stung with taxes - Gosh. Etc, etc….

But trade, ah, trade. Folk wisdom just doesn’t, quite, get to grips with the difference between absolute advantage and comparative advantage. The first is that they are better at this than we are so we should buy from them. The second is that we, ourselves, are better at this other thing so we should do that and buy the first from those others. This then goes on to insist that while others might have an absolute advantage in everything over us it’s never, ever, possible for us not to have a comparative advantage. For the comparison is always to our own abilities at these different things.

Comparative advantage really is - if we all do the things we’re least bad at and swap the results then we’ll be better off.

So, free trade it is then.

Now, obviously, there are exceptions. National security for example. It is necessary to be able to build a Royal Navy to repel the French if we are to remain this silver girt isle, this realm, this England. But beyond such very limited cases free trade it is:

Large majority of Europeans support retaliatory tariffs against US, poll finds

Survey shows between 56% and 79% across seven countries in favour if Trump introduces ‘Liberation Day’ levies

As we say, this is where actual economics diverges from folk economics. This is also one of those few times that The Man in Whitehall does know best. Or rather, where we’d hope that the expensive education received by those Rolls Royce minds should come into play. For, as Joan Robinson pointed out:

The logic of embracing free trade unilaterally, that is, no matter what policy any other national government adopts, is well expressed in an adage attributed to the economist Joan Robinson: Even if your trading partner dumps rocks into his harbor to obstruct arriving cargo ships, you do not make yourself better off by dumping rocks into your own harbor.

Which is, actually, a good test of that right of Whitehall to rule over us. We have here that one grand test of whether they do know better. Whatever Trump does, the EU does, China does, the correct answer for the United Kingdom is to declare unilateral free trade.

Will it? No, obviously it won’t. Which neatly destroys the whole case for us to be ruled by those Rolls Royce minds, doesn’t it? For they cannot even get the one interesting finding in all of the social sciences right. The one time we actually need them to deploy that know better they don’t.

There’s really no point at all in paying them 40% of everything if they can’t even get this right. It’s tumbrils on Tower Hill time if they drag us into this trade war.

Tim Worstall

The Trump administration calls this ‘Liberation Day’—a triumph for US workers and a levelling of the global trade playing field—with sweeping new tariffs on imports from the UK and EU. But the policy is more likely to shackle the US and European economies, rather than liberate them.

The argument, of course is that tariffs will protect US industries by making foreign goods, such as cars, more expensive, thus boosting demand for US-made alternatives. But recent history shows the folly of it. When the first Trump administration imposed steel tariffs in 2018, jobs in the US steel industry were certainly saved—but at huge cost (some studies say $800k per job). That is because the US economy in general suffered as manufacturers (including carmakers) who needed steel had to pay more for it or could not get the type and quality of steel they needed from US producers. The result was higher prices, stretched budgets and lay-offs elsewhere.

The effects are likely to be even broader this time. The UK and EU are large trading partners for the US. The EU buys about a fifth of US export goods, and the UK is an important market for US tech and services. And putting tariffs on European exports simply invites retaliation. Already, the EU says it will respond ‘robustly’, and the UK —which sadly missed its post-Brexit opportunity to negotiate a free trade deal with the US and is now seeking a closer relationship with the EU—could be pushed into following suit. That would hurt the US as much as Europe, costing US exporters billions across industries from agriculture to aerospace.

And there is a wider political aspect too: Europeans thinking that they cannot trust the United States, nor rely on its unflinching goodwill. That might be part of Trump’s plan—getting Europe to be more self-reliant on defence, for instance—but if so, it comes at huge political and economic cost.

How often do we need to say it? Tariffs are not a tax on foreigners. They are a tax on domestic manufacturers and consumers. Even if US importers absorb some of the tariff cost, their profit margins will suffer, jobs will be cut, and trade will go elsewhere. Supply chains too will be disrupted. US carmakers like Ford and GM are reliant on European-sourced parts that they will not be able to source quickly or cheaply. Americans will notice it in the ‘sticker price’ of the cars (and much else) that they buy. And with Trump calling tariffs ‘reciprocal’, there seems no limit to their potential scope. French wine (Americans drink a lot, particularly the good stuff) will get more expensive in the US; so will other goods that Americans take for granted. 

The Trump administration sees tariffs as a matter of fairness, citing high EU tariffs on cars and the UK’s imposition of VAT on technology. But both those countries buy more from the US then it buys from them. (How ‘reciprocal’ is that?) Remember too that the UK is a key US ally, not just on trade, but in terms of its wider world view. Its prosperity and economic stability matters to Americans. Disrupting that relationship for short-term economic—or even political—leverage comes at much greater long term economic and political cost. And meanwhile, China—which uses trade as a foreign policy weapon—looks on gleefully as the US proceeds to lose its friends in the other liberal democracies.

After the Second World War, politicians and economists came to the conclusion that trade restrictions were a major source of conflict and must be reduced. Institutions such as GATT and the WTO helped reduce global tariffs significantly—even if too many unseen restrictions remained in place. This major reversal is therefore disappointing. Trump’s tariffs might raise a few cheers from a few factory workers, but not from roughly 99.9% of economists. And the cheers will fade when prices rise, jobs go and allies find other markets and other friends. Liberation? Isolation, more like.

Eamonn Butler is author of An Introduction to Trade and Globalisation (IEA, 2021) and ‘The Psychology of Protectionism’, in M Rangely & D Hannan (Springer, 2025), Free Trade in the Twenty-First Century.