Canada's consumer carbon tax was repealed in 2025, and research suggests it died because many people did not believe how it worked. Before repeal, researchers asked Canadians what it cost them at the pump. Conservative voters estimated hundreds of dollars more a month than neighbors with similar fuel use, who would have paid about the same. Evidence from British Columbia's carbon tax shows that a policy that was fair, effective and put money back into most households' pockets through rebates still lost, because misinformation and partisan politics distorted perceptions of its cost.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.