For Friday’s family pizza/movie night, we finished watching the 1978 Superman starring Christopher Reeve. It’s one of my favorite movies, so I was nervous it would feel too outdated to the kids, but phew, they approved!
My older kid likes rocks and crystals, so he loved the “programmable” sunstone that acts as a telecom, computer, and data storage in the Fortress of Solitude. My younger kid was pre-inclined to like the movie because he knows his middle name, Kalil, was derived from Superman’s Krypton name, Kal-el, with an Egyptian twist.
My love of the movie is not just nostalgia, but the myth. The struggle Superman lives with. The tension between power and restraint. He is explicitly told by his biological father, Jor-el, not to interfere with the human course of history. When Lois’ car is swallowed by the fissure, Superman, accepting that he cannot revive her, is torn. The wise father’s warning weighs heavily on the man of steel, but is ultimately overwhelmed by Superman’s mortal emotion — the pain and regret of allowing his Earth-native step-father to die of a heart attack within earshot of him on the farm.
Superman’s response is profoundly human. He rationalizes his step-father’s words, “you must be here for a reason”, to mean “I should save Lois”. A goal that’s hard to argue against as bad, yet conveniently flatters Superman’s romantic self-interest.
He’s not a god.
That’s the first moment in the film when he’s wearing the cape that he’s relatable to the rest of us messy creatures. (Clark’s dramatized bumbling makes him cringefully-relatable and Reeve’s portrayal of the awkwardness is, as the kids say, “S-tier”)
There’s more to love in this movie. Namely Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. He’s a magnetic mix of wry humor, brazen arrogance, flowery proclamations, and dapper style. From the ornate, booby-trapped Grand Central station lair, complete with an indoor pool, to the most elaborate master-villain plot to…make a killing on real estate.
Wait, what?!
The imbalance is breathtaking.
The feat of imagination required to subdue Superman with kryptonite, hijack 2 warheads, one as a backup plan to distract Superman in New Jersey, and the other to send CA into the Pacific by triggering the mother of earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault…so Luthor’s central valley land purchases would become valuable resorts on the new waterfront “Costa del Lex”. Really. This is the long game.
You have to laugh.
Have you ever seen Lex and Trump in the same room?
(Ok, calm down)
The self-proclaimed “greatest criminal mind of his time”, Lex mobilized earth and sea for something that barely rises above a CA political scandal.
[The plot echoes the early 1900s corruption and land speculation around CA water rights. The “water wars” were also the backdrop for another film I love, this one, 4 years earlier than Superman — Polanski’s Oscar darling, Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson.]
Really, if Trump did nothing but use the presidency to make his family billions in crypto pumps and bribes, it would be quite Lex. You re-arranged humanity to…make a quick buck??
Ya know what, when I put it that way, it seems British historian Arnold Toynbee was almost right. “History is just one damn [real estate scheme] after another”.
In related news, we were shaken awake last Monday at 3 am by a 4.3 earthquake. The number betrays the experience. It was in Berkeley, less than 15 miles west of us. It was the strongest quake I’ve ever felt, although I’ve only been in CA for 13 years. [I couldn’t feel the large Napa quake from where I lived in SF shortly after moving West.]
The silver lining: doing math at breakfast before school. We talked about the Richter Scale. I explain the difference in relative strength by saying that the number represents the quantity of zeros. So a 7 has 3 more zeros than a 4 (1000x stronger).
Related: What I learned about earthquakes from Nate Silver’s “Signal and the Noise”
“Reality is messy” 4th grader edition
This pic is from a tweet saying, “Honestly some of the best life advice I’ve ever heard.”
I’ll stop short of ranking life advice, but this one was timely because it was a not-so-subtle lesson in what I was trying to teach my 4th grader.
Here’s the backstory:
His class has an economy. Fake money you can earn for achieving certain goals. You can use the money to bid on monthly auction items which are provided by the students themselves. Your kid is now looking around the house for stuff they can sell.
You also have to make “rent” on your desk which is a way to force students to participate in the capitalism of the classroom economy. (The idea that a CA public school teacher might not be Marxist must be a narrative violation, but I’m reporting from the field that there’s more to reality than memes.)
So what happened?
Max came home upset and complaining about how the day’s auction went down. One of the kids paid a price far higher than anything has ever traded. (The auction item was a Labubu — I only know what that is because of South Park).
Max says it’s “unfair” because the other student apparently discovered the website that the teacher buys the fake money from and bought a bunch of it himself.
My immediate internal reaction was “great, this is an opportunity to talk about lots of important stuff” but first I had questions.
Did the teacher notice this increase in the money supply?
I got no satisfactory answer from Max on this, casting doubt on his allegation. But if the allegation is imagined, I’m probably raising a supervillain. The irony tracks.
Isn’t a Labubu worth more than the amount of classroom money it garnered at auction once you adjust for the price it costs to buy the classroom money online?
Almost certainly.
Whatever kid sold the Labubu might need an economics lesson. Or they stole a siblings’ toy and arbed the fact that the COGS were $0.
In any case, the inconclusivity of the answers don’t materially affect the conversation I had with my kids.
1) Address Max’s sense of justice
Look, if the kid really bought currency online, it is wrong because it’s not in the spirit of the rules. If the teacher thought fine print was necessary, this would have been covered. We’ve talked about values recently. Disagreements often come from the different weights people assign to certain values. In our household coat of arms honesty, in its many forms, is a chief value. Cheating a game that isn’t about winning but educational is poor form. It’s one thing to find disagreeable edges when that is part of the meta, but this is not the wild.
I don’t judge the alleged perp either because discerning between a clever gotcha and anti-social behavior is so clearly difficult that we can fill a daily Matt Levine column about high-profile examples in finance on a daily basis.
Max, your sense of fairness is well-calibrated. I don’t want to dismiss that.
Yet, you can’t let the injustice paralyze you. Instead, given what we know, how can we turn this situation to our advantage?
2) Diagnose the situation
What do we know if Max’s version is correct?
- The money supply is larger than the teacher intended but the situation was left unaddressed.
- If the money supply keeps growing, especially because of one kid who can easily be traced to as the source, it will break the classroom economy.
- The teacher will need to intervene. Interventions would likely include better tracking of the money supply to get it under the desired control (I’ve spoken to the teacher in the past and know they regretted how loose the money supply was in the first year they did this).
In other words, money is temporarily oversupplied. It is “cheap”. You get a lot of it per good sold. If the money supply tightens, it becomes more valuable. How do you buy money while it’s cheap?
3) Give the market what it needs — stuff
Sell this kid what they want. Not Labubus, of course, since that would require arbing yourself but maybe 3-D print Labubu accessories. Or find out what else the kid is into. You gotta move fast because the money isn’t likely to stay this cheap.
Later, when taking the older kid to hoops I brought up his brother’s school drama. I set-up the situation and he immediately understood that you wanna just make this kid a customer while the getting’s good.
Being a bit older, I could explain to him that this was “inflation” or too much money chasing too few goods. That in the real-world, this is a signal to be an entrepreneur and create “supply”.
An excessively cheap cost of capital, the flipside of high valuation, also summons scammers and frauds. The market’s lack of fiscal discipline and TINA mentality was bidding for a story in the late 2010s, and there will always be unscrupulous opportunists eager to fill the order.
Some people will become crusaders against injustice. To do it well, you need fortitude and focus. The focus thing is key. Specialization even. A sign of a true crusader is what it costs them. You might disagree with Snowden, but the price was real. Getting rich under the banner of a justice crusade rightly puts the burden of “is this a grift?” on the crusader.
[“Keyboard” crusaders are everywhere. It’s human. They get the “likes” from people who already agree with them for free. For words. But this activity is amplification, not crusading, especially if they are on to the next crusade just as easily. I take it more seriously when the crusader is a specialist and not donning the “constitutional scholar” costume while their legs go numb on the toilet.]
The beauty of capitalism, notwithstanding its distortions and backdoors, is that it allows pro-sum, pro-consumer crusades without the temptation of weaponizing ethics.
We are in a strange place as a society where large swaths of people are sus of any profit while another swath is sus of do-gooding, but it’s because the well of profit and the well of do-gooding have both been poisoned by a minority who blend in.
Acknowledging that neither is ever perfectly pure is an adaptive act to rise above the numbing cynicism.
Even Superman was conflicted.