“The Deal Professor,” Steven M. Davidoff, has a good piece at The New York Times website about the indispensability of finance to our economy. It briefly rebuts the view popularized in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street, in which financiers are portrayed as greedy parasites. I left a comment at the web page, noting that our documentary The Call of the Entrepreneur makes a similar case. I include the comment below, since it may not pass muster with the page’s comment moderator:
A documentary that explores the wealth-creating role both of the entrepreneur simpliciter and the finance entrepreneur in particular: The Call of the Entrepreneur. The film appeared on more than 80 PBS affiliates nationwide, including repeated airings in several major markets. And in what may be a first, it appeared both on PBS and Fox Business. I mention this by way of reassuring readers that the documentary isn’t screechy.
The one-hour film is a combination of narrative and expert commentary that many have found useful for explaining what entrepreneurs and merchant bankers bring to the economy, a particularly useful explanation for friends and family who wouldn’t read a lengthy article or book on the subject but will watch a documentary with high production values. It doesn’t pretend that there isn’t corruption or greed on Wall Street, but it does insist that these elements do not provide a full picture.
Full disclosure: I wrote the script for the documentary and am a fellow of the institute that created the film, The Acton Institute. The film is available at calloftheentrepreneur.com/. Also, the film doesn’t address the market distortions generated by Alan Greenspan and others, distortions that encouraged excesses in the financing world leading up to the economic crisis. Those issues are tackled at our web page on the economic crisis: acton.org/issues/economy.php/.
— Jonathan Witt
