To mark the 70th anniversary of “Thomas & Friends,” NPR explored the economics of the railroad series and interviewed Professor Paul Horwitz, who analyzed the issue in a 2008 blog post after watching Thomas on television with his 2-year-old daughter while he was at home recovering from surgery.
Horwitz wrote:
What is the lesson of Thomas the Tank Engine? It strikes me as being a pro-market show, but a genuine, Hayekian coordination-of-information free-market type of capitalism, with maybe a dose of TR-ish trustbusting spirit. Simultaneously, surely it is also a critique of the kinds of market imperfections that arise in a more oligarchical, monopoly-permitting market. Think about Sir Topham Hatt for a bit. He is a caricature of a robber baron, but he’s not simply an unrestrained successful capitalist in an open and competitive market, a Gates or Carnegie. Rather, he runs everything on the island of Sodor: the railroads, the towns, all other means of transportation, etc. He’s not villainous, exactly; but his tentacles extend over the entire economy of the show. On Sodor, Hatt truly controls all the means of production.
Horwitz told NPR, after writing his blog, he found a variety of economic views about Thomas. “If you’re libertarian, you can write about Sodor as a libertarian paradise. And if you hate big industry you can say ‘Down with the capitalist Sir Topham Hatt,’ and if you just want an economy that’s a little more personal in scale, then you can talk about that aspect of the show,” he said.
For more, read “Just How Do ‘Thomas & Friends’ Drive Sodor’s Economy.”