A Player or Nothing...

The sequel to Oliver Stone's 1985 classic "Wall Street" is set to come out later this year. "Wall Street" is a movie I show my economics classes and I am excited that showing a 1980's movie to my students will be vindicated with the release of a sequel twenty five years later.

Vanity Fair recently published an article written by the estimable Michael Lewis which ponders how the 1985 version of the movie "Wall Street" and its characters would never pass muster with today's generation:

The character of Gordon Gekko doesn’t really even exist anymore. Or, rather, he has become so ordinary—the hedge-fund manager—that he blends in with the landscape. In 1985, cold-calling ordinary people in the phone book and trying to sell them stock—Charlie Sheen’s character’s chosen road to riches—was still a plausible thing for a truly ambitious young man to be doing with his time. In 2008, the mere fact that he deals directly with ordinary people would cause anyone who works on Wall Street to pity him.

It is unsettling to think that, Gordon Gekko,the icon of 1980's Machiavellianism is considered trite by today's ambitious youth. As a teacher, one hears a lot of griping by peers about "this generation." This article would seem to reinforce this pessimistic view of teenagers about to enter the adult world. Lewis continues:

In 1985 it was plausible that an old guy might manipulate and ultimately corrupt a young guy. In 2010, after entire Wall Street firms have been destroyed by young men running out of control, it seems far more likely that a young guy would run circles around an old guy.

Is Michael Lewis right? Are the current 20 somethings arriving on Wall Street already jaded? Is all hope lost that morality and honest values are not perceived by the young as passe, a vice of the weak and naive?

In someways I think Michael Lewis is right and in some ways wrong.

Older generations bemoaning the loss of values and respect for their elders is as old as time itself. A teacher I worked with described a lesson he had in graduate school where the professor distributed a quote that said, "The younger generation will be the end of civilization, their morals are corrupt and they have no respect for the wisdom of their elders." The class was asked to guess the decade this quote was made. Most people in the class guessed the 1960's the decade synonymous with generational conflict.

The answer?

It was a scribe to an Egyptian pharoah in 2500 B.C talking about the children he was teaching.

So it seems our foreboding that the next generation leading us into the apocalypse may be somewhat overwrought. And yet here we are still.




The title of the post comes comes from one of the famous scenes in the original movie. Gekko is attempting to seduce Bud Fox to become his accomplice in his inside trading schemes:

Wake up, will ya pal? If you're not inside, you're outside, OK? And I'm not talking a $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff flying first class and being comfortable, I'm talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars buddy. A player, or nothing. Now you had what it took to get into my office; The real question is whether you got what it takes to stay.

Of course Bud Fox's seduction is supposed to serve as a warning to us all not to follow down that rabbit hole. Unfortunately Michael Lewis writes that people have taken away the exact opposite lesson:

As a vehicle for social change, however, the movie was a catastrophe. It did not show Wall Street in its best light, yet Wall Street was, by far, the movie’s most enthusiastic audience. It has endured not because it hit its intended target but because it missed: people who work on Wall Street still love it. And not just any Wall Street people but precisely those who might have either taken Stone’s morality tale to heart or been offended by it. To wit, not long before hedge-fund manager Seth Tobias was found dead in his Florida swimming pool, with an unlucky mixture of cocaine, Ambien, and alcohol in his bloodstream, he gave an interview for Wall Street’s DVD bonus reel, in which he said, “I remember when I saw the movie in 1987. I recall saying, That’s what I want to be. I want to start out as Bud Fox and end up as Gordon Gekko.”

Michael Douglas often expresses his astonishment at the many Wall Street males who have sought him out in public places just to say, “Man, I want to tell you, you are the single biggest reason I got into the business. I watched Wall Street, and I wanted to be Gordon Gekko.” The film’s equally perplexed screenwriter, Stanley Weiser, has made the same point, in a different way. “We wanted to capture the hyper-materialism of the culture,” he said. “That was always the intent of the movie. Not to make Gordon Gekko a hero.”

Are today's teenages similar or even more apt to look at Gekko as a hero? In someways today's generation, the "echoboomers", are a paradox. They are focused on community service, being environmentally responsible and less concerned with race, ethnicity and religion than any generation before them.

At the same time echoboomers are more obsessed with status signaling that getting in to an elite college provides. Some older generations speculate that all of the positive selfless attributes in the previous paragraph are simply tailored to secure the selfish goal of getting in to the right school.



Just possibly this next generation of "echoboomers" will not be end of civilization, nor its savior. They will be different and that is what is most unnerving to their parents and grandparents.

Adults have worried for thousands of years that the next generation will be the end of us. I believe that facing new challenges, they will find new ways to succeed, and take their place as adults and soon enough begin the process of worrying about the next generation. And hopefully this process will continue for another thousand years or more.