The Politics of Dumb

Between "Dumb Money" and "Dumb Politics" There's a Lot of Dumb Out There

Last Friday I went and saw the movie “Dumb Money.” Judging by the box office returns I may have been the only one, even though it was a pretty entertaining film. I had read the Ben Mezrich book from which it was based, “The Anti-Social Network,” and remember vividly what had occured; confined because of COVID and angry at the powers that be, a mass of people following an online poster going by the name “RoaringKitty” start buying up shares of GameStop, driving the price skyrocketing and sticking it to hedge fund short sellers at the same time. It almost seems like a decade ago, but it was actually only two and a half years.¹

This post is only tangentially about the movie, although it has a lot to do with the GameStop kerfuffle. If you want a review, scroll down to the “Cultural Corner” section below. No, this post is about something much more profound, endemic and barely pointed to in the film.

There are a lot of dumb people out there.

We tend to look at successful people as smart. If you make money, and in some cases, a LOT of money, you must be some sort of genius. That’s not always the case. Sometimes they started out wealthy. Sometimes people get lucky. Sometimes people just rise to the moment. As Shakespeare said, “Some people are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”² As Bernstein noted in “Citizen Kane,” “It’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money.”³

The same goes with politics. We look at people who get elected as leaders or people to look up to— you know, we look at them as smart. But this is just false logic. Just because someone is well known, even famous, and represents people, does not make them genuinely intelligent, it just makes them popular. Quite often, they are quite dumb. This lack of brains has an outsize impact when placed under a microscope, and truly tarnishes every institution it touches.

Stupidity crosses districts, state lines, parties, financial status, social status, class, race, gender, and pretty much any other division you want to make. Humans are stupid creatures, particularly when we act socially. We flock together, move in unison, get caught up in fads, memes, trends, cults, and fall in line more often than stand apart. It’s often the one person questioning things standing alone who is ridiculed, mocked and labeled as stupid, only to be found out after the fact as correct. The results often aren’t pretty. A single person may be intelligent and rational, but people together can be crazy, psychotic, dangerous animals.

Just look at the last week; few would consider what is occurring in Washington with the “Shutdown about nothing” an act by leaders or the negotiating of some level of genius. It may in fact be the dumbest thing ever done by Washington, and D.C. has a very large history of doing and backing dumb things. The conventional wisdom is pointing to Matt Gaetz, the chief instigator of this shutdown, as a complete idiot.⁴ And yet, these kind of stunts get him re-elected time and time again. So the logic goes his constituents must be idiots and he is just giving them what they want. His supporters in Congress must also be complete idiots too since they continue to elevate this schmuck. This kind of nihilistic, burn it all down, political thinking, is endemic today.

As if that wasn’t enough stupidity to go around, on Monday he put in a motion to vacate the chair and put Speaker McCarthy’s Speakership for grabs again. That was actually the topic of our first post. It only took Republicans 15 separate votes to elect McCarthy speaker, the most ever. Throughout the whole process, Democrat Hakeem Jeffries received more votes for Speaker in one week than Pelosi received in 20 years as Democratic Leader. A motion to vacate hasn’t been tried in 110 years and has never succeeded, but the need for senseless stupidity is never far with Gaetz and the “Burn it all down caucus.”

But this isn’t the only instance of pop culture prodigiously puerile perpetrators, just the most consequential one. Also on Friday I saw liberals completely up in arms about Bill Maher. His crime? He had the audacity to interview Ron DeSantis on his talk show.⁵ I get that Maher is not well liked anymore by the more liberal crowd, but we used to appreciate having diverse viewpoints on panel shows and forums. To monitor social media this weekend and just watch the piling on it was kind of ridiculous. Liberals cried heresy! Social media has amplified our stupidity out there, and seems to expand it exponentially. The whole situation was just plain dumb.

Travis Kelce’s Jersey sales went through the roof, increasing 400%, and his following on social media increased 10x over the past week. Did he do something monumental, create cold fusion, invent a longer lasting light bulb or did he suddenly become an other-worldly player? Not really. He just started dating Taylor Swift. The amount of press attention to this development was incredibly infantile.

We can go on and on like this. All we ever hear is that Republicans are dumb. Democrats are dumb. NoLabels is dumb. MAGA is dumb. BLM is dumb. Trump is dumb. Schumer is dumb. MTG is dumb. AOC is dumb. So much of our politics isn’t driven by any issue or any real intellectual basis; it’s driven by emotion and the strong feelings we have for people and particular indoctrinated memes and soundbites. How do you even contemplate how to fix things or address problems when so much is wrapped up entirely in such irrationality?

We need to acknowledge all of this is occuring for reasons that we shouldn’t disregard. The biggest problem with labeling anything with which we don’t agree as “dumb” or “stupid” is that it allows us to discard every aspect of their opinions, even though there may be some merit to what is being said. That real people are greatly impacted by these results. That the most vocal, angry and irrational 10% on each side are skewing our political process only making things worse.

Until we start recognizing many of our problems and start working towards addressing and solving them, we’re all destined to be considered dumb by history. It starts with stopping with the pointing to everyone else and calling them dumb— when you point at someone else, there’s one finger towards them and three pointed back at you. Until we stop looking at politics as a zero sum, everyone else loses when I win bloodsport, and start realizing people represent and advocate for different interests, and that we need to start addressing problems at that level instead of the more personal ones, we’ll just continue being as dumb as lemmings going over cliffs. Our problems will inevitably result in our demise and it will be nobody else’s fault but our own.

I can think of nothing dumber than that.

PurpleAmerica Recommended Stories

As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of Michael Lewis. He has a new book out about cryptocurrency billionaire fraud Sam Bankman-Fried, called “Going Infinite.” He was in the process of interviewing him extensively when the whole FTX mirage fell apart and SBF was indicted for fraud.

Now, I’ve always thought cryptocurrency was completely dumb. You can read my post about it here. But here is someone who actually became a cryptocurrency billionaire, the richest person under 30 years old ever, by running the crypto exchange FTX. He was hailed as some sort of genius and the future. He donated generously to philanthropic and political causes. Turns out he was just a fraud. This is the danger we get into when we don’t consider that “smart people” may in fact actually be quite dumb.

I also want to give a shout out to the book, “The Anti-Social Network” by Ben Mezrich, which was the story on which “Dumb Money” was based.

The story gets into a lot of the financial aspects of what was actually occuring during this entire process, which is actually a little bit more complicated than a bunch of stonks and apes on WallStreetBets buying shares of stock and options.

Which serves as a nice lead into….

PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner

“Dumb Money” (2 1/2 stars, 6 out of 10). I heard someone last week in a review consider this film the bookend of “The Big Short,” the Academy Award winning film about the housing bubble and crash in 2008. There is some truth to that and it’s helpful to use that film as a point of comparison.

They both have numerous and compelling heros of sorts. These heros go against the conventional wisdom of the large institutional investors and on the strength of their insight alone seek to make large sums of money. There are pitfalls, and factors outside of their control at play, including the complicity of behind the scenes regulators and private actors, but in the end they are generally proven right.

That’s pretty much it for where the two movies align:

• The Big Short is about intelligent investors who see something, investigate it, the facts bear it out, and they succeed because of a continued belief they are right and everyone else is just going through the motions. They believe based on their research housing related securities should go down drastically. Dumb Money is about someone who may be an intelligent investor (it’s never quite clear) who suggests a stock he originally sees as undervalued, and takes a ride on a rollercoaster when small retail investors get on board to the point the stock is extremely overvalued and doesn’t stop.

• The Big Short is always conscious of the fact that for the protagonists to succeed, the entire economy has to collapse, which is not a good thing. As the economy begins to gyrate and people start losing jobs, we’re reminded of the horrible impact this has on actual people’s lives. Dumb Money is fixated on the price of a company that has been poorly managed, has huge expenses, is technically outdated and should be put out of it’s misery. That it isn’t is because of what, nostalgia? Sticking it to the hedge fund manager who is a jerk but invested correctly the way the market should react to it? We’re never given any insight at all how any of this plays out for the actual company who’s stock is at the center of all this. As for actual people’s lives, we’re given insights into the loneliness of the pandemic, but it’s more tangential than anything. They all have financial problems, but then they invest in a horribly run company. They SHOULD lose everything.

• The heros in the Big Short know what they are doing. Their actions make logical sense as they try to constantly re-assess and strategize based on what is happening in the market. The heros in Dumb Money are in fact, dumb investors sucked in by a fad. They devotedly follow a guy who may have had good intentions to improve the stock maybe $5 a share but then go overkill driving the price above $100. They have debts they can’t pay off, yet are constantly gambling on the RobinHood app watching the stock price constantly rise, and doubling down further. Other than RoaringKitty (Paul Dano) and a COVID nurse, I was hoping everyone else lost everything for their stupidity.⁶

• The Big Short had a great segment by a Nobel Prize winning economist describing the above as the “hot hand fallacy.” It also had some other great asides by Anthony Bourdain and (my favorite) Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining the intracacies of what is happening economically. Dumb Money offers no real insight at all about what is happening economically. It’s the movie’s biggest flaw, since that’s the best aspect of the story. Instead, they just turn it into a David v. Goliath tale with a bunch of twentysomethings upset at the world believing they are entitled to their success and that they want to stick it to the greedy hedge fund managers, promoted by “apes” on a reddit board for hollow likes.

• The Big Short smartly includes peripheral characters, often metaphors for the larger institutions they represent, providing further insight into what is happening by making the figurative literal. The housing market as portrayed by Jenga pieces. The practically blind and oblivious person at the ratings agency. The woman from the SEC flirting and wanting to “get in bed with” the big banks, trying to set herself up for her next job. Dumb Money has the pair of buffoon billionaires who created the RobinHood app, who want to “democratize finance” with free trades, explaining how they make money said under their breath as an offhand comment and quickly dismissed. This is a HUGE point, since later in the story it is a major reason for particular developments that upend those betting up the GameStop stock price, but its mentioned here as some kind of offhand comment to be quickly forgotten.

The thing is, Dumb Money is not The Big Short. It’s not even in the same league as it. The comparison was probably meant as a shorthand of “its fun and about finance.” That it is. Dumb Money is a fun movie. You really start to root for Paul Dano and his wife played by Shailene Woodley. Seth Rogan makes for almost too likeable a villain but he does add some fun to it. Sebastian Stan is a riot as one of the dumb RobinHood bros. It’s still hard to even fathom that the GameStop craze actually happened in real life but they do a halfway decent job of making it watchable. Unfortunately, they removed the parts about what made the whole event interesting, and focus instead on individuals (who you may or may not like) leaving only the emotional aspect of the story.

In short. They dumbed it down. A little too much.

And in that, “Dumb Money” is an apt title.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

“Stupid is as Stupid does.”— Forrest Gump

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. My hunch for why the movie bombed so much was because its hard to feel nostalgic for something so recent. The memory of the COVID shutdowns are still very fresh in people’s psyche, and it’s not particularly something people want to revisit.

2. Twelfth Night. (multiple citations in the story).

3. Greatest film of all time. I will die on that hill.

4. Gaetz has been around for years, and he is a complete idiot.

5. DeSantis looked like a fool with a suit and cowboy boots on, and just regurgitating canned lines the whole time. Nonetheless, you’d think Maher committed some horrible atrocity infecting liberal safe spaces by even having him on, to hear liberals tell it. I’ll also add, keeping with the theme of the post, everything DeSantis said was dumb. But here’s what bugged me— nobody focused on that, they focused on Maher for having him on.

6. That some of those focused on didn’t disheartened me immensely.