The drunk schmoe theory of the financial meltdown

Everyone and their mother is linking to this Calvin Trillin op-ed from a few days ago, in which a martini-swilling guy "in a sparsely populated Midtown bar" volunteers his explanation to Trillin of why the financial crisis took place:  "The financial system nearly collapsed because smart guys had started working on Wall Street."  OK, I’ll ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Everyone and their mother is linking to this Calvin Trillin op-ed from a few days ago, in which a martini-swilling guy "in a sparsely populated Midtown bar" volunteers his explanation to Trillin of why the financial crisis took place:  "The financial system nearly collapsed because smart guys had started working on Wall Street." 

Everyone and their mother is linking to this Calvin Trillin op-ed from a few days ago, in which a martini-swilling guy "in a sparsely populated Midtown bar" volunteers his explanation to Trillin of why the financial crisis took place:  "The financial system nearly collapsed because smart guys had started working on Wall Street." 

OK, I’ll take the bait… I find this to be a pretty stupid argument. 

The alleged nub of the argument is what happened when the smart guys started displacing the schleps who used to be traders on Wall Street:

"When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness."

“So having smart guys there almost caused Wall Street to collapse.”

“You got it,” he said. “It took you awhile, but you got it.”

The theory sounded too simple to be true, but right offhand I couldn’t find any flaws in it. I found myself contemplating the sort of havoc a horde of smart guys could wreak in other industries. I saw those industries falling one by one, done in by superior intelligence. “I think I need a drink,” I said.

This has led to many nodding heads in the blogosphere about how smart people can be so dumb and greedy, etc. 

Except that, if one takes Trillin’s tale at face value, the problem isn’t the smart guys — it’s the fact that the dumb guys are supervising the smart guys.  They’re no less greedy than the smart guys… just less intelligent.  Even if one takes Trillin’s model as sound, it’s the combination of smart and stupid that’s the problem. 

Now, there are two directions one can go from that conclusion.  One could fire the smart guys so the dumb guys don’t get put in that position ever again… or one could hire smart guys for both management and operations. 

You make the call. 

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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