Published: Wednesday, 23 Sep 2009 | 11:07 PM ET

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It’s fair to say that Michael Moore’s new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story", is not really a chronicle of the financial crisis or a dummies guide to economics and high finance. Instead, it's a populist analysis of the role of money—Wall Street money, in particular—in politics and government and the unequal distribution of wealth in the U.S., personified by a new group of robber barons.

The film's release has been timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the failure of Lehman Brothers. But the financial crisis serves as icing on the cake—a denouement of sorts—for Moore's decline-of-America saga that starts in the happy, prosperous post-war days of the nation. President Jimmy Carter's speech about the excesses of consumerism marks the beginning of the end. But the real damage, in Moore's view, is done by the Reagan, Bush 2 and Clinton administrations.

Source: Overture Films Michael Moore oustide Goldman Sachs headquarters.

The devil here—capitalism—is not in the detail. It’s in the dialectic. Nevertheless, one can't make a film (a documentary film, no less ) about economic injustice without relying on some statistics to make a case. The film is a study in contrasts. Moore uses his statistics sparingly and, more importantly, swiftly.

Every now and then, the conventional narrative is interrupted by a salvo of statistics, either in a succession of rolling numbers or squiggly line charts. Neither are on screen long enough to digest. That's probably no coincidence, given Moore’s ample experience in TV production.

If, like myself, you attended a screening partly to determine the veracity of Moore’s statistical argument, you have a fact-checker’s nightmare—especially since the US distributor, Overture Films, told me there is no script because the film is a documentary. (That's interesting because two of Moore's prior films won screenplay awards.)

What's more, unlike Moore's previous effort, "Sicko," there is no section on the film's website that supports the body of facts.

Albert Bozzo
Senior Features Editor
CNBC.com

The process is all the more complicated by the fact that in the imprecise science of economics there are facts and then there are facts. Some facts can be traced to one reliable source and some may be based on a number of sources, with some measure of extrapolation or analysis.

For instance,  Moore scrolls through a series of dreadful monthly job-loss numbers, and the information is indisputably correct. The economy did lose 587,000 jobs in November 2008, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In another rapid-fire sequence superimposed over a timeline chart covering 1980 to 2000, Moore reports that worker productivity rose 45 percent while income rose just one percent. (The filmmaker has also cited those stats in interviews.)

Well, one out of two ain't bad.

If by productivity, he means the widely-followed BLS measure reported on a quarterly basis, productivity is actually up 44.5 percent on a cumulative basis during the two-decade period. That's not that surprising given all the technoogical advancements during that period.

The more general category of income is a little harder to pin down. What Moore is specifically referring to is unclear and the numbers are more up to variation and interpretation.

Based on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of IRS data, considered to be the most reliable, average after-tax income, adjusted for inflation, rose from $46,400 to $66,800 between 1980-2000. The lowest group's income rose from $14,900 to $16,000. You do the math, but both are obviously well more than 1 percent.

Another economic survey shows median household income rose from $41,258 to $49,163 in the 1980-2000 period, according to the Census Bureau.

What's more, in interviews about the film, Moore has been unclear about the timeline, leaving one to assume that those statistics span 1980 to the present.

Of course, there are other measures of income, such as average hourly wages, but they also don't show a flat line. In all fairness, however, few will argue with the general trend showing that upper-income groups have realized the greatest percentage income gains.)

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