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Few writers today can claim to be as simultaneously entertaining and informative as Michael Lewis. Whether writing about bond derivatives or baseball, he unravels complex and often arcane subjects with such compelling narrative style that they read like mystery novels.
He is in particular demand at the moment because of the book that made him famous twenty years ago. That book, Liar’s Poker, is an autobiographical account of Lewis’s experience working in the financial markets of New York and London. His writing caught the spirit of the time, as people were beginning to realise that there would be a price to pay for the greed and excesses of the late eighties. In the book, Lewis strongly criticised the attitudes and ignorance of traders, and the lack of control of funds put in the hands of those who have little idea of what they are really doing. He argued that deregulation in the 1980s led directly to the Savings and Loans crisis and the rise of junk bonds as a financial instrument. At the time, Lewis predicted that no good would come of the greed, and the recession of 1990-91 seemed to bear him out. This description may put you in mind of the current economic malaise, and in an excellent article in the December issue of Portfolio magazine Lewis drew parallels with his experiences twenty years ago and brought the story up to date. At the start of the article, Lewis writes of his experiences as a trader, hired as an Art History graduate with no knowledge of the bond markets, and given paltry training in the workings of the markets in which he would be given the responsibility of investing other peoples’ money:
I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
[...]
In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?
The article goes on to explain the roots of the current crisis through the story of Steve Eisman, one of very few traders to see through the madness and to make money from speculating on the collapse of the subprime market. The tale of Eisman’s steadily growing incredulity at the scale of greed, dishonesty and obliviousness of all involved to the inevitable catastrophic effects of the bursting of the bubble remind me of the story of Woodward and Bernsteins’ uncovering of the Watergate scandal. On the subject of Eisman’s uncovering of the real workings of the subprime market, Lewis writes:
The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB [medium risk], threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA [very low risk].
But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.
When the inevitable collapse happened and Eisman and his colleagues made their fortunes, they found it hard to celebrate:
At the market opening in the U.S., everything—every financial asset—went into free fall. “All hell was breaking loose in a way I had never seen in my career,” Moses says[...] He might have been forgiven if he stood up and cheered. After all, he’d been betting for two years that this sort of thing could happen, and now it was, more dramatically than he had ever imagined. Instead, he felt this terrifying shudder run through him. He had maybe 100 trades on, and he worked hard to keep a handle on them all. “I spent my morning trying to control all this energy and all this information,” he says, “and I lost control. I looked at the screens. I was staring into the abyss. The end. I felt this shooting pain in my head. I don’t get headaches. At first, I thought I was having an aneurysm.”
[...]
Eisman was at a Goldman Sachs conference for hedge fund managers, raising capital. Moses and Daniel got him on the phone, and he left the conference and met them on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “We just sat there,” Moses says. “Watching the people pass.”
[...]
“As we sat there, we were weirdly calm,” Moses says. “We felt insulated from the whole market reality. It was an out-of-body experience. We just sat and watched the people pass and talked about what might happen next. How many of these people were going to lose their jobs. Who was going to rent these buildings after all the Wall Street firms collapsed.” Eisman was appalled. [...] He had tried a thousand times in a thousand ways to explain how screwed up the business was, and no one wanted to hear it. “That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice,” he says. “[...] They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.”
As in many of Lewis’s writings, you don’t need to understand all the terminology and you don’t need even to have a particularly deep interest in the subject to become enthralled in the story and the characters Lewis portrays. This is true not only for Lewis’s writings on business and finance, but also for those on his other favourite subject: sports.
In 2003, Lewis published Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The book examined a revolution in the statistics of baseball. The premise may seem dull to many, but Lewis, as usual, weaves a compelling tale based on a season he spent with the Oakland Athletics recording their attempts to overturn baseball orthodoxy, hiring players who look everything but the ball-player archetype, and who don’t stand out in terms of regular statistics, but who do make a significant difference on the field of play (and are therefore excellent value for money). Behind this ground-breaking strategy was a new approach to baseball statistics, known as Sabermetrics, spearheaded by the legendary (in baseball statistics circles at least) Bill James. The book records the tension inside the organisation as the old-timers clash against the new number crunchers while the Athletics strive for glory on the field.
The book caused enormous controversy in baseball. Some saw Lewis’s words as ill-informed heresy, others as revolutionary. Oakland performed beyond all expectations but failed to get to the World Series. In the same year Moneyball was published, however, the Boston Red Sox hired Bill James. The following year, with the help of James’s statistical insights, the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 84 years, breaking the infamous Curse of the Bambino.
To a British sports fan, the obsession with statistics in North American sports may be puzzling. Few have attached much importance to compiling detailed statistics relating to soccer, for example. Even cricket, a game ripe for statistical analysis , is not broken down to anywhere near the degree that baseball is. In North America, however, numbers matter. In every North American sport, a player’s stats largely determine his value – even though the numbers often have little relation to what a player may actually contribute to a team. In baseball (or cricket) at least, the game can be seen as a series of individual confrontations between pitcher and batter, and the effects of one player’s performance on his team-mates can therefore be considered fairly minor. In team-on-team sports such as soccer, hockey or basketball, however, things can become much more complicated.
Lewis’s recent article in the New York Times on basketball statistics and, in particular, the Houston Rockets’ Shane Battier, therefore, make highly interesting reading. Battier is the kind of player that escapes notice by basketball’s banner statistics. He scores few points, gets an unremarkable number of rebounds, and generally does very little on the court other than make life very difficult for the other team, and make sensible use of the ball when he gets it.
Daryl Morey, Battier’s General Manager at the Houston Rockets, however, calculates that his team is 6 points a game better when Battier is on the court than when he is not – enough to make a very significant difference to the win-lose ratio of every team Battier has played for. Morey’s analysis of the real value of Battier is an example of attempts to bring baseball’s Sabermetrics approach to basketball, and Michael Lewis is there once again to profile in a highly readable fashion the misfits and iconoclasts involved in a sporting revolution.
The article has proved as controversial among basketball aficionados as Moneyball was to baseball fans. Some have questioned Lewis’s statistics, and argued against the premise of his article, but no-one can say that his writing doesn’t entertain and provoke thought. Take a read of one of his books or articles, even if you don’t think you’re that interested in the subject, and you’ll see what I mean.
The job market has certainly changed. There was a time when failing to be selected for a job resulted in receiving a letter in the post informing you that you had been unsuccessful in your application. It seems that the onset of labour-saving devices and office automation has left employers with no time to even send out a short, standard email informing unsuccessful applicants of the need to look elsewhere. In spite of the countless positions I have applied for, I have only received one rejection email (from RIM, who therefore deserve an honourable mention). It seems that the art of the rejection letter, with its consoling words, conjuring images of executives wailing and gnashing teeth before throwing you on the scrap heap, is a dying one.
I was amused, therefore, to find this corruption of the rejection letter format in the backwaters of the internet, leading me to think that maybe I should start sending my own:-
Herbert A. Millington
Chair – Search Committee
412A Clarkson Hall, Whitson University
College Hill, MA 34109
Dear Professor Millington,
Thank you for your letter of March 16. After careful consideration, I
regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me
an assistant professor position in your department.
This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually
large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field
of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.
Despite Whitson’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in
rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at
this time. Therefore, I will assume the position of assistant professor
in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then.
Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.
Sincerely,
Chris L. Jensen
As a recent immigrant to Canada, it should come as no big surprise to anyone that I am a big fan of the country. I love the Canadian way of life, its culture and its people. A British person I met over here compared Canadian society to Britain’s 50 years ago, and in spite of a lack of direct experience of those times, I know what he was referring to. He didn’t mean that Canada is a backward nation. He was talking about the community spirit, the pride in one’s country, and the feeling of personal safety, all of which have been significantly devalued in Britain in recent times. Combined with the standard of living, the space and the climate (no, I’m not joking – four seasons is better than one or two), Canada is a truly great place to live. These blessings are, however, easily taken for granted. Canadians who haven’t spent much time overseas may assume that their advantages are shared by citizens of many other countries. If they wanted an objective view, they could do worse than look at the latest report from Mercer.
For Canadian readers, I should point out that this is nothing to do with the popular Canadian comedy series The Rick Mercer Report, but as an aside, I cannot resist posting this excerpt showing Mr Mercer at his finest, finding out how much Americans know about Canada:
With that out of the way, the Mercer report I am referring to is the Mercer Quality of Living Survey, an annual comparison of living standards in 215 of the world’s cities. The report ranks cities by the quality of life enjoyed by their citizens. Criteria taken into account in the survey include safety, education, hygiene, recreation, political-economic stability and public transportation. The recently published report for 2008 made good reading for Canadians. Vancouver is ranked number 4 on the list, Toronto at 15 (in spite of the annual polar bear hunt), with Ottawa, Montreal and Calgary also in the top 25. All the top 10 cities are in Central Europe, Canada or Australasia, with Zurich ranked number one. Meanwhile, Honolulu is the top ranking US city in 28th place, and London 38th.
Security plays an important part in the high ranking of Canadian cities. Crime is significantly lower in cities in Canada than those in the US. For example, Toronto has around 2 murders per 100,000 population each year compared with 10 for a relatively safe American city like Boston, and 42 for Detroit. The figure for London, England is just under 3 murders per 100,000.
Weather is also taken into account in the rankings. It’s interesting to note that Eastern Canadian cities on the list are penalised for their cold climate in relation to Vancouver. I find this to be quite curious. Many Canadians ask how I cope with the winter here in Ontario. When I point out that I would rather have Canada’s dry cold and snow than Britain’s damp, rainy winters, they agree that they would prefer the Ontario climate to Britain’s or Vancouver’s (similarly grey and rainy in the winter), even if some may dream of wintering in Florida or California.
Mercer also publish a parallel cost of living survey for the world’s cities, showing how much it costs for the privilege of living in the best cities in the world. Significantly, Zurich, Vienna and Geneva are all all among the top 20 most expensive cities in the world to live in, while no Canadian city is found in the top 50.
It is not only the Mercer surveys which highlight the comparative merits of living in Canada. A similar survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit placed three Canadian cities in the top 10 best cities to live in, with Vancouver top of the list, and Canada was ranked third in the UN’s index of human development behind Norway and Iceland (the latter of whom will presumably be falling down a few places in the next survey).
According to all leading international comparitive measures, therefore, Canada is one of the best places in the world to live. Those who blame the country’s ills on immigration should consider that Canada has attained and maintained this position while having the highest rate of immigration of any country in the developed world. It may be a moot point as to whether immigration helped to raise Canada to this status, but it certainly does not seem to have done any harm. Certainly such statistics can’t tell the whole story, but on the whole Canadians shouldn’t really have too much to complain about, apart from the Saskatchewan seal hunt of course.
The Single Men's Unemployed Association parading to Bathurst Street United Church, Toronto, Ontario, circa 1930
In the three months that have passed since I arrived in Canada, trying to find work has been my full time employment. I don’t want to sound ungrateful about this. The position has many perks: the hours are flexible, I’m my own boss, and the commute to work couldn’t be easier. The only trouble is, the pay is lousy, and I could seriously do with a promotion.
The job market in Canada, however, seems to have other ideas. It’s extremely tough for anyone to find work at the moment, let alone new immigrants. Although the domestic economy has actually held up pretty strongly in the downturn, the same cannot be said for Canada’s trading partners. The country is highly dependent upon its export markets, and almost 90% of exports are destined for the United States – in fact, around 40% of Canada’s total domestic output ends up south of the border. It is no wonder, therefore, that when the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold, and the virulence of this particular strain was made particularly clear by the announcement yesterday that Canada’s trade balance is in deficit for the first time in 33 years. With around one in three Canadian jobs dependent upon export markets, the effect on employment has been swift and severe. Economists predicted a rise in unemployment of 40,000 in January. The actual increase was 129,000 – the largest increase on record, leaving unemployment at 7.2% in Canada, 8% in Ontario, and set to grow in coming months.
That doesn’t mean I’m letting things get me down, however. It’s only natural that I have the occasional bad day (you should have seen this post yesterday before I wisely decided on a “cooling off period”), but then I remember how lucky I am. My wife has recently managed to get two part time jobs, which is helping to steady the finances, and we have a roof over our head thanks to the hospitality of my mother-in-law. This puts us in a much better place than many other victims of the current crisis, and means that I can concentrate on finding work without worrying about my house being repossessed or where the next meal is coming from. Also, given the economic crisis in Britain (not to mention the snowfalls in Britain which have coincided with a sudden thaw here), it may be true to say that the grass is greener here in Canada at the moment.
Given my current situation I was, however, interested to read that the Canadian government is considering limiting the numbers of immigrants coming into Canada. Immigration minister Jason Kenney stated yesterday that: “We don’t want people to be coming to Canada and facing unemployment. So, we need to be sensitive to a changing labour market, and if we need to make changes, we will”. I am touched by Mr Kenney’s concern. As the reader comments attached to the article linked to above attest, a curb on immigration wouldn’t come a minute to soon for many. Curiously, however, in spite of the votes on offer from a populist stance on this issue, all of the main political parties favour immigration, including the Conservative government. Mr Kenney was quick to add: “We need to be flexible, prudent and ensure that our response to short-term conditions does not counter our long-term goals, in which immigration will play a significant role”.
I can at least reassure any immigrant-bashing Canadians who may be reading that I will not be stealing welfare payments out of the pockets of hard-working Canadians during my downtime. My Canadian wife has to sponsor me for my first three years in Canada, during which time I am not entitled to a cent of help from the Canadian government. Also, I won’t be sending money home to England – on the contrary, we’re bringing money into the country to support us. I also intend to buy locally wherever it makes sense (with the exception of the occasional jar of Marmite when I can afford it, of course) so as to support other Canadian workers, and to immerse myself fully in the Canadian lifestyle at every possible opportunity. That’s why I’m here. So can I have a job now please?
Wiarton Willie delivers the bad news
Every February 2nd in North America, otherwise sane people look to a ’shadow cabinet’ of groundhogs (bereft of a collective noun, this is the best I can come up with for reasons which will become apparent) to predict the weather for the next six weeks. The method of prognostication is to pull the poor creature from its burrow in the midst of what should be its hibernation season, to determine whether it can see its own shadow (in layman’s terms, to see if it’s sunny or not). If the animal sees a shadow, it predicts a further six weeks of winter. If not, spring is deemed to be on its way.
The roots of this curious tradition go back a very long way. It was brought to North America by the Pennsylvania Germans, who had a tradition in the old country of venturing out into the woods on the feast of Candlemas to observe the habits of hedgehogs. It was supposed that hibernating animals came out of their burrows on this day to test the weather. Seeing the sun was supposedly interpreted by the creatures as a forecast of crisp, cold days ahead, and they would retreat back into their burrows for a bit more sleep. A cloudy day, on the other hand, was seen as a harbinger of warmer (if more dreary) weather, and they would start preparing for spring.
What does this odd weather divination ritual have to do with Candlemas? There’s no clear answer, but it is perhaps significant that Candlemas is the last feast day associated with Christmas, coming 40 days after December 25th, to celebrate the presentation of Jesus at the temple. In the past, it was customary in many traditions to keep Christmas decorations up until this day (but please don’t tell my Christmas-obsessed wife). As such, it marks the last goodbye to winter festivals. Subsequent religious days are calculated in relation to Easter, the Christian rite of spring.
But rituals associated with this day go back long before Christianity. February 2nd also marks the midpoint between the longest night of the winter solstice and the spring equinox, when day and night are of equal length. This astronomical landmark was celebrated by the Celtic pagans as Imbolc. The Celtic calendar was arranged around the solstices and equinoxes, with each one marking the middle of each season. Thus, Imbolc marked the beginning of spring. As such, many rituals were associated with the day, including weather forecasting through the observation of animals.
Christianity’s feasts and rituals often failed to completely obliterate the old ways, and instead became entwined with them, as seen in the many pagan traditions associated with Christmas (mistletoe and yule logs for example). Imbolc was only partially overwritten by Candlemas in the Celtic consciousness. The feast day became known as St Brigid’s Day, named after a (possibly apocryphal) saint sharing a name with the Celtic goddess Brigid who was herself celebrated by Pagans at Imbolc. The legends surrounding St Brigid became intertwined with those associated with the Pagan Brigid, and many of the old ways continued under the new religion. Among these transplanted traditions were the weather superstitions. Take, for example, this traditional Scottish couplet associated with the day: “If Candlemas Day is bright and clear/ There’ll be twa [two] winters in the year.”
Whatever the origin of the tradition, when the Pennsylvania Germans transported it to North America they encountered a problem. In the absence of hedgehogs, they had to find another hibernating creature upon which to base their prognostications. Enter the groundhog. The earliest reference to groundhog weather forecasting comes from Pennsylvania shopkeeper James Morris’s diary entry from February 5th 1841:
Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.
The first recorded Groundhog Day ceremony took place in 1886 just outside Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, beginning a tradition which has now spread across the northern United States and Canada. Canada’s most famous groundhog celebration began in Wiarton, Ontario in 1956 by complete chance. A local resident Mac MacKenzie decided to throw a Groundhog Day party for his friends on February 2nd. A reporter from the Toronto Star heard about the get together and mistakenly thought there was to be a similar ceremony to the one in Punxsutawney. Feeling sorry for the reporter, who had driven all the way up to Wiarton (a journey of about 150 miles), MacKenzie dug a burrow and placed his wife’s fur hat in it. The journalist took photos of the ‘groundhog’ and published his story. The following year, duped readers and more journalists turned up in Wiarton to observe the ceremony. Mackenzie quickly laid his hands on a groundhog, which he named Wiarton Willie, and the new tradition started.
This year sadly brought no glad tidings from the groundhogs. First came bad news from Nova Scotia’s Shubnedacadie Sam, who at 7am saw his shadow and dived back quickly into his den, expecting six more weeks of winter. Soon after, Punxsutawney Phil and Wiarton Willie both came to the same wintry conclusion. Others concurring with this prediction included Octoraro Orphie, Buckeye Chuck, and Balzac Billy. Among the detractors were French Creek Freddie, Dunkirk Dave and David Philips from Environment Canada. Philips has analysed all of Wiarton Willie’s predictions, and found that the groundhog gets it right exactly 50% of the time, no better than tossing a coin. He commented: “I’m not dumping cold water on Willie. I’m just the truth squad. And there are no predictive skills with Wiarton Willie.” Unfortunately, Philips’s employer, Environment Canada then blew their scientific cachet by arrogantly ‘predicting’ above average temperatures for Eastern Canada for the next three months, a prediction which will only have more credence that Wiarton Willie’s as long as no butterflies flap their wings on the other side of the world in the meantime. So much for the ‘truth squad’…
Mention Groundhog Day to anyone outside North America, however, and they will undoubtedly think of Bill Murray caught in a time-loop in the film of the same name instead of weather forecasting ground squirrels. The term ‘Groundhog Day’ has become an expression describing the experience of being caught in a rut, facing the same intractable problems day-after-day. It is used, for example, to describe such feelings during a tour of duty overseas by American soldiers. Tony Blair used the term in relation to the daily demands in Parliament for a public enquiry following the invasion of Iraq. Roy Halladay, star pitcher with baseball’s hapless Toronto Blue Jays used the term to describe the experience of turning up at spring training every year following yet another season of underachievement.
The 1993 film has, over time, become a classic. Although only the 13th highest grossing film of 1993, it is now ranked second best film of that year behind Schindler’s List on the top 250 list at imdb.com. It has also developed an extraordinary following among the world’s religions. In the truest sense of the word, it is a ‘cult’ film.
In 2003, for example, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art decided to stage a religious film festival with the title ‘The Hidden God: Film and Faith’, the curators of the series polled a number of figures from the fields of religion, film and literature for suitable films with a religious dimension, and found that Groundhog Day was repeatedly mentioned by representatives of all faiths, to the extent that there was a spat over who would write the entry about the movie in the festival catalogue. By popular demand, Groundhog Day ended up opening the season.
To explain the religious context in detail would give away too much of the film to anyone who hasn’t seen it. Suffice it to say that Bill Murray plays an arrogant, cynical weather man, Phil Connors, who is sent to Punxsutawney to cover Groundhog Day. He has a thoroughly miserable time, posts his report and tries to leave, but a blizzard forces him to stay the night. To his dismay, when he wakes the next day he finds it’s Groundhog Day again. The trailer summarises the action without giving too much away far better than I can:
When I first saw the film at the cinema at the time of its release, I thought it was very funny, but didn’t really dwell on it. But the plot of the film is so cleverly realised, that it kept coming back to my mind. Others have pointed out that in comparison to other classic movies it is not remembered for a few iconic lines or particular scenes, it is the overall narrative structure of the film that is memorable. In the final analysis it is a morality tale of a selfish man learning that salvation can only come through dedicating himself to others. As such, it comes from the same rich tradition as A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, but the deliberate lack of religious (or any other) explanation for the protagonist’s predicament and ultimate release lends it in particular to interpretation and support by many of the world’s faiths.
The concept of a man repeating his experiences over and over again until he achieves the ‘perfect’ day is particularly keen to interpretation by Buddhists and Hindus, who believe that living an imperfect life leads to reincarnation in a cycle of suffering and learning known as samsara which only ends when the soul learns to reach the state of selflessness and peace with the world known to Buddhists as nirvana. Sound familiar?
Similarly, Jews see Bill Murray’s release from the spell as coming as a result of performing ‘mitzvahs’, or good deeds. In the Jewish tradition, performing good deeds does not result in a trip to heaven, but rather an opportunity to do more good on earth, as could be argued happens to Phil Connors at the end of the film. Curiously, Buddhism seemingly has a great deal of appeal to Jews. Around 30% of all Buddhists in North America were born Jewish. Famous ‘Jubus‘ include Leonard Cohen, Goldie Hawn and Allen Ginsberg.
Christians have also got in on the act, observing their own religion’s teachings in the film. When Jonah Goldberg, editor of the National Review polled readers for their views on the film for an article he was writing, he received numerous emails from pastors for whom it is a favourite film and others who have used the story as part their sermons. Catholic theologian Michael P. Foley wrote that the film is “a stunning allegory of moral, intellectual, and even religious excellence in the face of postmodern decay, a sort of Christian-Aristotelian Pilgrim’s Progress for those lost in the contemporary cosmos.” Meanwhile, even Falun Gong, the Chinese spiritualist cult, use the film as a teaching device.
The movie clearly touches something very deep within us as people. When one thinks of the stories from the distant past which have survived with us to this day, most of them are fairy tales, fables or religious stories. As other stories have fallen by the wayside, these moral allegories have stood the test of time. Groundhog Day is in this great tradition, weaving magic, morality and redemption into a greatly memorable tale. Perhaps the affinity with the world’s great religions is not so mysterious after all.
