Wall Street Movie Essay

The movie Wall Street demonstrated how the dollar, the fundamentally scarce resource, is traded, utilised, and allocated in the stock market. The two main characters in the film, Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko, exploit this allocation medium by using inside information. The main focus of the economic aspects of the movie is how greed contributes to our society.

The stock market is a great tool in to-day’s economy. It allows companies to raise money much more easily, and also has great liquidity in the exchanges which reduce the time and effort of selling securities. The limitations of this system, on the other hand, is that it is similar to gambling. If one invests money into stocks of a certain company, it is almost impossible to predict whether one will gain or lose money in the long, or short run. Thus, many people have lost a lot of money in the stock market. If this system were applied universally to the economy, it would most likely actually detriment the economy. For example, real estate is not part of the stock market. If it was, then people could invest their house into a company, and then if the company started to lose price, the investor could lose their house. Universalising the stock market would probably hurt a lot more people than it would benefit.

Our economy is largely driven by the guiding principle of self-interest, which states that people will only undergo transactions that benefit them directly, and they will always pick the one that benefits them most if there is a choice. However, this is not enough to drive the optimal functioning of the economy. If personal self-interest were to be allowed to have complete control of the economy, one consequence could be the creation of economic giants such as Rockefeller that can take over the economy of the entire country. In a less extreme scenario, people would lie and double-cross each other in nearly every transaction to ensure they get the most out of the bargain. This is clearly an unesireable world to live in. The way to counterbalance it is by introducing a government which guides the nation in the proper course, and an accompanying set of laws imposed over economic proceedings that will return an economy threatened by the aforementioned consequences into relative equilibrium. Such resolution is evident at the end of Wall Street when Bud Fox’s illegal transactions are uncovered by the police and he is arrested and incarcerated. Otherwise, self-interest is a sufficient guiding principle for the economy within these legal restrictions. In fact, it is what assures that economic supply and demand returns to equilibrium in every possible scenario.

Thus, as long as it does not get out of hand, personal self-interest is a sufficient guiding principle for the optimal functioning of the economy.

The Transformation of the U.S. Economy

Everyone knows about the thirteen colonies that started the United States, and everyone realizes that we have come a long way since then. But what many people may not know is that our economy has taken leaps and bounds since the 1700s the size of star systems and galaxies. The United States’ economic progress is one of the most astonishing phenomena in economic history, but it wasn’t a coincidence. The reason we got this far is because of the occurrence of specific, fundamental changes that completely revolutionized the way we run the country’s economy between the 1700s and today.

At the onset of the 1700s, the (soon to be) thirteen colonies were finally beginning to settle in and develop a sense of unity and economy. Everything was in its beginning stages, however, and still at a very small scale, especially compared to today’s giant. The Gross Domestic Product of all the colonies combined at that time was around $500 million, and the per capita GDP was only about $500. This is because most of the population were not only farmers, making little money off the inefficient production of crops, but they were mostly self-sustaining, contributing little to the overall economy, and not often involved in the exchange of money for goods. Most of the colonies produced raw materials like fish, wood, meat, grains, &c., but every colony was very inefficient at producing these, since they were trying to fulfill their own needs by themselves rather than making what they make best, and trading. In addition, the governing body was very weakly involved in economic affairs of the colonies, not using its sovereignty to create a better productive and allocative efficiency, which would have benefited them immensely. For example, The Economies in the 1720’s states that New Hampshire “would produce hemp and flax if proper encouragement were given for it, and the people had good seed for the first sowing.” This is clearly a job for the government, but since it pledged not to be economically involved, it failed to provide the aid to get the colony started on this production. This is indeed quite a problem for the colonies, as most of the aforementioned report lists many products made by each colony, and immediately after lists many other products that the colony would be more suitable and effective making. Though they bring in a £200,000 surplus, the colonies could definitely use some organizational improvement to boost the economy, and that is exactly what they will get before the century is done.

One of the biggest influences between 1700 and 1800 that changed the economic organization of New England was the ratification of the United States Constitution, and the unification of the thirteen States. This created a centralized government among the States (rather than overseas) which could make decisions and enact changes a lot more efficiently than the British throne could. That, in addition to a steady increase of population due to a constantly expanding rate of immigration from Europe gave the U.S.’s GDP a nice 800% boost up to $4 billion. In addition, it is clear that this expansion is not solely the result of a greater population, because the per capita GDP also rose by 160% to $800 per person, meaning that individuals were overall better off in 1800 than in 1700. This can only mean that the “encouragement” mentioned in The Economies in the 1720’s that the colonies needed to produce the right materials to be more efficient was adequately provided to make the nation indeed more efficient. Upon further examination, we see that in the 1700s, “No mines are yet discovered [in Virginia], except iron, which are very common, but not wrought, for want of a sufficient stock, and persons of skill to engage in such an undertaking,” but in The Economies of the British North American Colonies in 1763 we see that Virginia is making £35,000 in iron bars and pigs. This is a clear sign of higher entity involvement, to organize and provide the sufficient stock and persons of skill to successfully start producing this export. Though the economy of the United States did expand between 1700 and 1800, it was still at a crawl compared to the revolution it would experience in the next century.

Comparing the U.S. economy in 1900 to that of 1800 is like comparing the wallet of a farmer to the wallet of an entire company. The Gross Domestic Product of the nation expanded seventy-three-fold during the 1700s bringing it up to $292 billion, and the per capita GDP went up five times to $3900 per person. This is an economic revolution of unprecedented magnitude, and it was due to several coinciding factors that created a very curious effect. The promise of free land in the United States created a competition for the best workers, which in turn made the States have the highest wages in the world. This, coupled with the freedoms of religion, politics, and especially economics, attracted an immense wave of immigrants that brought the population of the U.S. up fifteen times to 75 million people in 1900. The presence of this vast amount of producers and consumers, aided by stunning technological breakthroughs, such as railroads and steamships created the largest scale production processes in the world. When we take into account that the U.S. had created a corporate form of organization for its multitude of firms, and that they benefited from a massive import of capital from Europe, we see how the per unit cost also becomes extremely low—the lowest in the world. And finally, the presence of such a low cost drives the market size even larger. Suddenly, the improvements in the economy become linked in a circle, called the Virtuous Circle. Once the economy started doing rounds about this circle, it became completely transformed. No longer was the population so greatly concentrated on self sufficient farmers. National transportation networks and factory and assembly-line production methods made the products of these methods the dominant figure in the economy. Ultimately, the United States progressed from an agricultural nation to an industrial nation by 1900, but far more successfully than its European counterparts, as it now held a larger relative share of world wealth than any other country (38%).

Though the change of the economy between 1800 and 1900 seems tremendous, the next century brought about a transformation that was truly unbelievable. Between 1900 and 2000, the economy absolutely skyrocketed, bringing the GDP up 3,424% to ten trillion dollars, and the per capita GDP increased nine fold, up to $35,000 per person. There are many reasons for the occurrence of this, such as a continued increase of population and amount and intensity of land usage, and massive increases in government intervention and presence in the US economy. But probably the greatest force behind the economy’s transformation is the complete integration of oil into everything used by consumers in the United States. Oil was the driving force behind many revolutionary innovations in technology like cars, electricity, highways, and so on, which in turn helped to make everything unbelievably cheap and convenient and easy to make, expanding industry after industry ever more and constantly racking up the standard of living to new heights. All these advances thrust the United States out of the industrial age and into a level of post-industry. Except of course for the basic needs that are still depended on by the country, like farmers, electricity, and the like, the United States has outsourced a large portion of its manual labor to other countries, and instead taken on the role of an intellectual pedestal from which products are imagined and planned, and then made by other nations for us. As a result, we have become dependent on imported goods to satisfy our needs, because domestic production of these things (like toys or clothing) has virtually stopped.

It is difficult to foresee what the economy will be like in the future, but we can make some preliminary hypotheses in several different ways. The first is to look at the long run trends and expand them to our desired year of 2100. This would result in a GDP of somewhere around $250 trillion by 2100, and a per capita GDP of around $100,000. However, this is assuming that the US will follow the same development pattern as it has been for the previous three centuries. This is fundamentally flawed, because the only pattern that the United States has been following during this time is the miraculous invention of some new technology that revolutionizes the principal methods that we use to run our lives. And unless this standard is lived up to in the next 100 years, and on top of that, the previous inventions and resources persist, the economy may follow the aforementioned prediction. But it is common knowledge that there are many obstacles, the greatest of which is the end of oil, which undermines the persistence of (the most valuable) resources that allow us to run the economy so efficiently. In fact, current research is uncovering that the economic growth rate of the U.S. is slowing down at a very quick rate. Therefore, the nation seems to have two possible economic outcomes. The first is another genius invention or two that will allow us to stop relying on oil so much, but continue to use the products we use today at the same rate. This will ideally allow the economy to continue propelling itself upward as it has been doing in the past 2 centuries. The second is a slow decline of the economy and a long tumble of the United States from the throne of the world, because of the inability of the States to sustain themselves solely by borrowing (or stealing) other nations’ capital.

In conclusion, the history of the US economy is very impressive and worthy of honor. The country went from a loosely connected conglomerate of poor farmers to an economic giant dwarfing its neighbours in the world in the span of a few centuries. It went from being a purely agricultural society, to an efficient and effective industrial power with advanced assembly-lines and mass-production techniques, to a post-industrial society that tells the rest of the world how to make life better for its own residents, all through a few similar forces acting upon the economy, like ever-increasing population size, land use efficiency, and government intervention on the economy, and new and revolutionary inventions that provided us with new projects upon which to elaborate and keep up the upward momentum of the economy. The most important question to ask, then, is whether this trend will continue on into the future, or if the nation has finally reached a maximum and will now start declining out of prominence.

Keeping a Stable Society

For any nation, tribe, family, or any kind of group entity at all, there will always be someone who holds more power than others. However, in the vast majority of examples, the one who is in charge of that power does not use it the way they are meant to use it. They become corrupt, wasteful, and insensitive and the list goes on and on. So what is the right way to use power? Naturally, power should be used in a way that will benefit the society below it. And how can this be achieved? In order for power to benefit society, it must be used to keep society together, and to maintain content among the majority of its members.

If power cannot keep society together, it is not being used correctly. It seems like an easy task, to force everybody to obey you. But that is only part of the task: merely bringing the society together. The real challenge is to keep it that way indefinitely. A naïve outlook on the means of staying in power is that one has to live up to the virtues that one’s subjects expect. However, this is not true, as Machiavelli describes in his guide The Prince, “A man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.” The Prince character, on the other hand, navigates around this demise by thinking ahead, to his future. He realises that if he tries to exercise all the virtues that an ideal prince should have, he will eventually run out of resources. So instead, he is careful about choosing the right things to be virtuous about, and the right things to hold back on. For example, he is not generous, but by doing this, he saves money that in the future could be used to prevent tax increases. Thus, by starting out with little virtuosity, the Prince is able to increase his favorability with the rest of the people over time by thinking ahead. To get a better idea of what happens when the one in control is not as enlightened as Machiavelli’s Prince, we compare Big Nurse from the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. She was able to grasp power in the beginning by being the Administrator of the facility, but instead of looking ahead, she chose to pursue selfish goals through despotism. McMurphy, one of the patients, said that “[Big Nurse] is a ball cutter… people [like her] try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to” (57). Because of her lack of concern for the future, the Big Nurse is not able to keep her power through the end of the novel. Her subjects, after being enlightened by McMurphy of the Nurse’s evils, finally rebel, and her society falls apart.

The Prince was an example of suppressing virtues in order to keep society together in the long run. The Big Nurse was an example of a complete lack of virtues that would have helped keep the society together. A third outlook is the forced exhibition of characteristics that are perceived to be virtuous by the general public. George Orwell, in his autobiographical incident “Shooting and Elephant,” demonstrates that sometimes it is impossible to follow Machiavelli’s advice. At one point in the story, “I perceived … that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him.” This directly contradicts Machiavelli’s conclusion that if a ruler refrains from doing what the subjects expect of him, he will be able to keep them together better later on. Instead, Orwell is obligated to follow the natives’ expectations in order to keep peace. If he does not do as they expect, then he will lose his hierarchical standing amongst his subjects, and he will start to be looked down upon by them, which is more or less the equivalent of losing power, and bringing chaos to the society. In conclusion, one thing remains clear: forgetting about virtues that the ideal holder of one’s authority would have leads to the eventual collapse of society, thus failing the objective of a good ruler. If one does remember those virtues, however, then it becomes tricky to know when, or when not to display the virtues. This is why looking ahead and considering all possible consequences is such an important method of solving this issue: if the ruler can analyse what will happen either way, then he or she will most likely choose the correct path. Remembering virtues, and choosing wisely which to strive towards achieving and which to suppress, will guarantee that the society stays together, which is one objective of using power correctly.

Keeping subjects in order for the duration of one’s reign is one of the most important facets of a good ruler. However, is it enough? Say, for example, that the Big Nurse really did remember her potential virtues, and was just suppressing them, trying to follow Machiavelli’s teachings. Why did she still go wrong at the end of the novel? Her society did seem to be staying together, until McMurphy showed up, that is. The answer can be found in George Orwell’s reasoning: no matter how hard you try, you cannot keep a society together unless they are satisfied with your usage of power. Of course, Orwell’s subjects would probably much rather live independently of the colonizers, but for the moment, the situation is kept stable, because the subjects are satisfied with the ruler’s use of power. Orwell’s despotism succeeds while Big Nurse is unable to reach the same objective because her subjects gain the ability to admit how awfully unhappy they truly are under her rule. After McMurphy tries to persuade Harding, another patient at the ward, of how horrible the Big Nurse really is, Harding finally says “You are right … about all of it. … No one’s ever dared come out and say it before, but there’s not a man among us that doesn’t think it, that doesn’t feel just as you do about her and the whole business—feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul” (59). Once everyone else understood that they would have support from the other patients if they voiced their dislike about the Big Nurse, the Nurse’s power immediately dropped quite far. One on one, it is impossible to defeat the sheer mass of the Nurse’s authority, but together, it does not seem like such an impossible task any longer, and the patients begin to rebel. That is why a dictatorship based on negative incentive is a risky tactic to indulge in: if one’s subjects are unhappy, they can potentially realize that there is a possibility of changing the power structure, thus rendering one’s efforts at suppressing them useless. George Orwell realizes this point, which is why he acted the way that he did. Had he not done as the natives expected him to, he would have lowered his apparent power, showing weakness, and the natives would have seen that he is not so formidable after all, opening the door for rebellion. Contrary to this totalitarianism, McMurphy proves himself to be a benevolent leader, trying to make his followers feel comfortable around him. A great example is when, on one of many recurring meetings, the patients become bolder to do what they always wanted to do, encouraged by the presence of McMurphy. Chief Bromden says that “Now that McMurphy was around to back them up, the guys started letting fly at everything that had ever happened on the ward they didn’t like” (145). McMurphy, though he is a leader, does not employ the same tactics as any of the characters mentioned above to use his power. Instead of manipulating his subjects to stay submissive to his authority, he manipulates the environment of his subjects to create favorability for himself. For example, he shows the patients in the ward that there is still hope in the battle against Big Nurse, thus manipulating the atmosphere into a more comfortable state. This tactic is highly effective at keeping his followers satisfied, proving to be highly superiour to that of Big Nurse when every patient joined McMurphy’s side by the end of the novel, parting from Big Nurse’s control. McMurphy’s method of seeking out the needs and wants of his followers and acting to improve conditions for them based on this knowledge is the best way to use power to keep those under the authority mostly satisfied.

In conclusion, two most effective forms of power are evident. The first keeps the society together well, but is unstable concerning the satisfaction of the subjects, who might rebel against the authority for making their life miserable. The second keeps the subjects happy, but is rather weak in keeping the society together, because this happens passively. If the subjects suddenly decided to disband, there would be nothing to prevent them from doing so, as opposed to the first method discussed. So if the ideal way to use power to benefit society is to do both things very well: to keep society together, and relatively happy, then is it feasible to put the two aforementioned methods together? Unlikely, because while the Prince is manipulating his subjects (though not as overtly as most dictators), McMurphy is manipulating the environment around them. Now, if a ruler was to both manipulate the subjects and the environment at the same time, the two tactics would contradict each other, only making matters worse for the ruler. And, obviously, if the ruler were to do neither, he or she would not be a ruler at all. Therefore, a potential ruler is faced with a decision to either focus on keeping the society together, or keeping the followers happy, and it is crucial to make the right choice with respect to the circumstances. In practicality, there is no possible way to use power ideally, but it is possible to get close by choosing the right of two methods according to the type of society, and most likely, the unstable half of the tactic will not be a problem.

The benefits of learning Japanese

The Japanese language seems at first impossible. Not only does it sound and feel completely different from any kind of western dialect, but there three different writing systems! However, it is not as incredible a feat as it seems to learn Japanese. Learning this language is both extremely beneficial, and practical.

First of all, Asian languages make up almost a third of the languages spoken on the Internet. English takes up another third, and the European languages bundled together take the last. Japanese is the most prevalent language of all the Asian languages, so it is clearly an important language to know. But why does the internet matter when learning a language? There are a few reasons for this. Japan has the second largest economy in the world, which means that its residents are not stingy about what they buy. If you are a salesman, or someone wanting to get as many people to buy your product as you can, then investing in learning Japanese will increase your success as much as twofold, because you will be able to sell your product to all those Japanese-speaking consumers that were blocked off from you previously.

If you are not looking for business, then there is still a wide open door of opportunities to enjoy the benefits of learning Japanese. If, as stated previously, Japanese is the third most widely used language on the internet, then by learning Japanese, it will be possible to communicate with these people, who may potentially have radically different experiences and beliefs than people brought up in Western cultures. By bridging the language gap between you, the different parties can share their experiences and get a taste for what the culture on the other side of the world is like. Thus, even if business and making money is not your top priority online, learning Japanese can bring much excitement and many new experiences into your life.

Now we have arrived to the logistical reason why learning Japanese isn’t as hard as it seems. First of all, the Japanese writing system has a phœnetic alphabet, which can be used in place of all Chinese characters to help beginners. This alphabet is very helpful, because, unlike English words such as “acquiesce” or even “mice,” there is no ambiguity in how to pronounce a written Japanese word like there is in English. Secondly, Japanese grammar can be a lot simpler than English grammar. For example, the verbs only have present and past forms, unlike English, which has perfect, imperfect, pluperfect, future, &c. Similarly, the nouns do not have genders or plural forms, and the accompanying articles such as “a” or “the,” which are always impossible for English learners to master, are absent in Japanese. Overall, Japanese may look baffling when briefly glanced at, but most of it is quantity, and not complexity. Therefore, learning Japanese is a relatively easy task, especially compared to an ambiguous and almost completely random language such as English.

There is no doubt about it: one way or another, learning Japanese will make your life richer (in any sense of the word) and more satisfying. And since you now know that it’s not such a difficult task to learn it after all, why not go for it? There is nothing to lose in learning Japanese, and everything to gain. Bridge the gap between yourself and all those Japanese speaking people on the internet and all over the world in general, and make friends with people who you never thought you would be able to speak with before. And if you are really serious about learning that vocabulary, then try www.internetpolyglot.com, a website devoted to creating flashcards to aid the memorization process so you can get to using your new skill as fast as possible!