On Gordon Gekko

The antagonist of the 1987 movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko, is quite possibly one of the most hated and still most loved figures in the fictional world. He's the embodiment of greed and shrewd tactics and shows no sense of real conscience. Yet after Wall Street hit the movie theaters, there was supposedly a huge surge in the amount of applications sent to business schools all around the US. Investment banking was where it was at. And apparently up until recently, nearly two decades later, investment banking was again very hot.

I personally think that Gekko is a very interesting character and that people should observe him more closely. He might also have some positive impacts on the world. If you think about it, Gekko was a hyper-competitive businessman who just had to go on winning. In a way, these are the alpha males of the world, in a sense. The bad guys in the phrase "Nice guys finish last." I'll offer the provocative opinion that the world needs people like that. Money makes the world go round and these guys make the money go round. Granted, there's a real danger that the money ends up piling in the hands of the Gekkos of the real world. But that could of course be offset by mechanisms like taxes. In fact, taxing people who make millions and millions over long periods of time more harshly than one-time winners and then the rest of us sound intuitively appealing. And why shouldn't it. But competition is good. Wars are less good, but they can still be classified as crises that enable the world to change, albeit in a forced way and driven by the few in power.

Now, let's approach this from the opposite aspect. What happens if the Gekkos disappear. Greed is dug out of world and everyone is satisfied with the average. In this regard the intuitive result is stagnation. Why in the world would you want the status quo to shake if you like how the things are. In a way, we're no longer moving anywhere, just staying in a single place. Or going around and coming back to the starting position. I have been led to understand that this is sort of similar to the view of life that is held by our friends in the far east. And don't get me wrong, if things were like this, if we lived in a world where everyone could be happy with what they have and where they are, things would be bloody marvelous, to say the least. But for some odd reason one way to look at and define your degree of satisfaction is to reflect yourself against your neighbors and your peer group, overall. And in this sense if everyone is equally happy, then everyone is equally unhappy. And someone is bound to be unhappy when they notice that they can't move up or down or get ahead at all because there is no longer a concept of getting ahead or winning. Must be a terribly boring world to live in.

So, enter Gekko & Co. They grab the money they can and fight each other to come out on top. What sort of effect does this have on the rest of us? Possibly quite little. Capital is moved around, some companies may fall, others won't. You can be happy with your job and try to get the raise next time you see your boss so you could maybe upgrade your housing a bit. Maybe treat yourself with a more luxurious car or that bottle of premium vodka. And you feel good with yourself, for a moment. For that small moment in your life you can get a taste of the high life. And then, to cite the lyrics of Here Comes Another Bubble, "... back to work you go again!" And, that's not necessarily a bad thing, since typically the journey is a lot better than the destination. The entrepreneurs behind different start-ups continuously demonstrate this point. And this is where the Gekkos come in. One could say that they, in a way, help facilitate the journey towards the "better" life. And when you hit your midlife, if you can look back and see that you've done lots of interesting things and actually lived and led a colorful life in the pursuit of the gold at the end of the rainbow, I guess that's better than just lying in the couch and cursing at Gekko and the greed he represents.

This is of course just a provocative view and I don't exactly completely sign it myself. But in a way, when kept in check and control with different mechanisms, greed is good. It's a powerful motivator, and getting it in line with the common good using different mechanisms and motivators may allow the rest of us to harness the relentlessness of the Gekkos and relieve the pain of the everyday life that the rest of us lead. Either that or I have to start adopting a Zen Buddhist approach to life.