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During the 1993-94 academic year, as a visiting professor at the Kennedy School and resident faculty member at Quincy House, I discovered facebook. At the start of the year, the house published its facebook: a softcover booklet with pictures of and biographical information about all the students there, as well as lists showing the students by categories such as roommate groups, first names, birthdays, home towns, and majors. I thought it was a great way of helping the students connect with one another, and evidence of what I found was a much more friendly and caring attitude on the part of the College than when I was an undergrad there in the late 60s.

Flash forward to 2003. Most of the houses’ facebooks are now online, and Harvard’s more entrepreneurial computer geeks are thinking about how to join them up into a college-wide facebook and then scale up from there. And I’m sure there were students at other universities with facebooks working on the same idea.

Such was the origin of the renowned social networking website Facebook, as chronicled in Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires and the Fincher-Sorkin movie The Social Network. I just saw the movie, and liked it very much, in particular because the creators used a very clever narrative strategy.

In The West Wing, Sorkin privileged dialogue over plot, emphasizing policy wonk speak about a set of issues in play, and often unresolved, in any given episode. In The Social Network, Sorkin didn’t try to recreate computer geek speak, which would have left most of the audience baffled. The plot structure revolved around two conflicts, the one between Facebook inventor Mark Zuckerberg and the brothers Winkelvoss about whether he had stolen their idea, and the other between Zuckerberg and his initial partner Eduardo Saverin and the validity of the agreement forcing the latter out of the company. The two conflicts are conflated in a legal deposition-taking, so that the history of Facebook unfolds in flashbacks, with the conflicts portrayed as they happened and then discussed by the protagonists afterwards. This approach has stimulated considerable critical and audience discussion about which of the conflicting parties were justified in either a legal or a moral sense. It is a great example of narrative multi-vocality, conflicting stories presented in a given text.

Thinking about the movie has led me to formulate (at least as a first cut) an entrepreneurial narrative genre, which I’ll describe in terms of both the players and events. The genre’s hero is the entrepreneur, the person who has a new idea and attempts to put it into practice.

One important issue is the entrepreneur’s motivation. Is (s)he doing it for intrinsic reasons, namely to realize an idea and make the world take notice? Is (s)he trying to get rich, particularly if there is a family to support? In Zuckerberg’s case, there was no family and, initially at least, money didn’t seem to matter to him. The intrinsic satisfaction and subsequent renown from building the best social networking site did. The film also makes clear that, in the company of women, he was an aspie-loser-geek, so doing something so impressive that a Victoria’s Secret model would gladly show him her secrets was an important motivator.

Competition is an important element of the entrepreneurial fable. Smart people (for example Newton and Leibniz on calculus) are simultaneously working on the same problem, and entrepreneurship is often a race against the competition for first mover advantage. So Zuckerberg was competing against the Winkelvossim, whom he had contact with, and all the other social networking entrepreneurs at Harvard and elsewhere whom he didn’t have contact with, but whom he knew were also trying to scale up their facebooks.

The mentor is another key character. In Zuckerberg’s case, the mentor was Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who held out to Zuckerberg the attractions of Silicon Valley, in particular access to the leading VCs, as well as the lifestyle that attracted the Victoria’s Secret models (though Zuckerberg was more interested in the sex than the drugs). Parker didn’t remain a mentor for long, but he was in the right place at the right time.

If Parker was in the right place at the right time, cofounder Eduardo Saverin wasn’t. When Zuckerberg went to the Valley for Facebook’s first summer, Saverin stayed in New York. When Zuckerberg, with Parker’s help, could see that venture capital funding was the way forward, Saverin visited the salons and even pounded the streets of New York trying, without much success, to sell advertising. Saverin represents the initial partner who doesn’t understand the company’s evolving opportunities and strategic direction, and who is thus left behind.

So the archetypal story is that the entrepreneur gets the idea and starts to work on making it into a product or service. Along the way, (s)he finds the resources, fights off the competition, benefits from the advice of a mentor, dumps the clueless partner, and realizes the entrepreneurial dream. My hypothesis is that this pattern fits the first chapter of many other entrepreneurial narratives (Microsoft, Apple). But that remains to be demonstrated.

I haven’t met any of the four candidates for Toronto City Council in Ward 25 (Don Valley West), so I’m judging mainly from the messages on their websites. Jaye Robinson stands out, particularly because of her work on public-private partnerships in Toronto’s Economic Development Department. She understands how municipal government can work creatively with the private sector. I was also impressed by MP Rob Oliphant’s recent endorsement of Jaye.

Tanya Hostler has run a low-key campaign, without signs or flyers – at least that I’ve noticed. That’s unfortunate, because she too has a background in municipal public administration and lots of good policy ideas.

The incumbent, Cliff Jenkins, as well as the fourth candidate, Joanne Dickins, are both believers in lower taxes and less government. That may play well with those well-off voters in Ward 25 who have no need of municipal government because, as much as possible, they purchase services privately (for example education and recreation). But other voters in the ward do. I, for one, make considerable use of public recreational facilities, and don’t want them to deteriorate. Unlike Robinson, Dickins and Jenkins have no conception of how government can be used creatively to improve the quality of life.

I did have one non-encounter with Cliff Jenkins. Some years ago, I had the city replace the water pipe to my house and, intending to replace the pipe leading from the property line to the house, I paid $100 for a new water meter. In any event, I changed my mind about replacing the second pipe. The city water department called me a few weeks later and threatened to fine me if I didn’t return the meter immediately and, to add insult to injury, refused to refund the $100. I wrote a blog post about it and sent Jenkins an email. He didn’t respond. I consider constituency service the first responsibility of a councilor. Jenkins failed on this score. I wouldn’t vote for him under any circumstances. But what’s better this time is that I have not only a reason to vote against Jenkins but good reasons to vote for Robinson.

I saw Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about American public education, “Waiting for Superman,” at the cinema recently because of its relevance to a chapter of my forthcoming book Governing Fables. The chapter deals with transformational teachers in inner-city public high schools and discusses stories of those who succeed (“Stand and Deliver” and “Freedom Writers”) and those who fail (“Cheaters” and “Half-Nelson”). My preference is to screen a movie on the computer at home where I can take notes, rather than in a darkened cinema, but Waiting for Superman is not yet available on DVD.

Waiting for Superman attempts to do too much, by telling too many stories. There are 5 stories of children attempting to be admitted to successful charter schools. One of the heroes of the charter school movement, Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, is featured. Finally, educational reformer Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington D.C. public schools is also profiled. Since one of the issues Rhee takes on is tenure for incompetent teachers, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is presented as what the New York Times calls “a demonic opponent of change.”

The movie ends on several rather sad notes. As any economist would predict, there is excess demand for successful charter schools, and the law requires that excess demand be dealt with by publicly-held admissions lotteries. Of the five students presented, one is successful in the lottery, a second makes it on the wait list, and three are unsuccessful. Michelle Rhee proposes a contract that pays substantial bonuses to the most effective teachers, but the proposal fails in collective bargaining. Rhee begins the movie looking young and dynamic but by the end appears to have aged two decades. Indeed, following the defeat of Mayor Adrian Fenty, she decided to resign.

The movie was produced by Jeffrey Skoll’s activist Participant Media and, consistent with Skoll’s approach, ends by interspersing with the credits text urging the viewer to take action. The actions suggested include parents writing their school boards to demand great teachers, volunteering their time, or donating money. All of this strikes me as well-meaning, but it is not clear that it would have much impact.

To go back to the movie, my criticism is that, by attempting to tell so many stories, it doesn’t tell any one of them in sufficient depth. First, there are many successful charter schools, but also many that, by any standard, aren’t doing any better than the public schools they seek to challenge. So what differentiates the successful charter schools from the unsuccessful ones?

Second, was Michelle Rhee a successful reformer or did she crash and burn? Were her tactics – in particular the closing of schools and firing of teachers – warranted, or an unproductive shock and awe campaign?

Third, was Randi Weingarten being demonized because the plot line demanded an adversary? The New York Times, at least, suggests that Weingarten is more flexible than the film suggests. Any one of these stories could have been investigated – and presented – with more depth and nuance.

Much should be done to improve public education in the US. It is not clear to me that breaking teachers’ unions is the best way to do that. Reducing class size, coping with the effects of poverty, and making better use of technology are all part of the answer. All these, of course, require additional resources. The resources made available by foundations and by the Race to the Top initiative are part of the solution, but a real initiative would require support on a much greater scale. And it is not at all clear to me that the US is ready or able to make such a commitment.

Oliver Stone is a bold man, first to attempt a sequel to as successful a film as Wall Street, and second to choose as its subtitle (even if it is a reference to the original) a phrase so open to parody.

The original Wall Street was so successful because it caught the business zeitgeist of the mid-Eighties perfectly. Insider trading, while it got headlines in the business pages, wasn’t at the top of public consciousness. But Stone put it there through the creation of the character Gordon Gekko, and Michael Douglas breathed life into the part. Gekko was of course a crook, but he was such a compelling crook. A. O. Scott in the New York Times described Gekko as a mix of “leonine bombast and reptilian cunning” and hence, “one of the heroic villains of modern pop culture.” Ironically, though Stone’s intent was to produce a cautionary tale, Gekko became a role model for many of the college graduates flocking to the financial services sector.

Stone and Douglas took an esoteric phenomenon and given it a fascinating personification. Stone also gave a reasonably clear account of the mechanics of insider trading and corporate predation. The challenge in making a sequel was to both explain and personify the market meltdown of 2008. But the difference between 1987 and 2008 is that the events of the latter year, while much more esoteric in their origins, had consequences that were much more widespread and therefore captured public attention to a much greater degree. Thus, the explanation would have to be more complicated and the authored personification would have to compete with people already in the public eye (Fuld, Cayne, Blankfein, Paulson et al).

Stone’s route into the crises of capitalism is through the interplay of mentor and protégé. The center of the story in Wall Street, you’ll remember, was young stockbroker Bud Fox’s search for a mentor and Gekko’s search for a protégé who would uncover insider information and identify targets for predation. And the movie is resolved in Fox’s attempt, ultimately successful, to exact revenge on his false and exploitative mentor.

In Money Never Sleeps, the issue of mentorship becomes more complicated because young investment banker Jake Moore (Shia LaBoeuf) has three serial mentors. The first, Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) is a true mentor, ultimately brought down, and driven to suicide, when his eponymous investment bank fails. The second, Bretton James (Josh Brolin), President of Churchill Schwartz, the investment bank that brought down Zabel’s, proves himself a false mentor, and Moore’s goal becomes the exaction of vengeance on him. The third is Gordon Gekko. Gekko and Moore are linked because Moore is living with Winnie, the daughter who rejected Gekko while he served time.

Gekko is released from prison and, banned from trading, returns to public consciousness by writing a book denouncing the greed that was previously his rubric and predicting financial collapse. Gekko, however, is itching to get back into the money game and exploit the volatility of that extraordinary period to make a second fortune. Ultimately Gekko succeeds by, so it appears, becoming a false mentor yet again, tricking his daughter – with Moore’s unintended collaboration – out of the inheritance that had been set aside for her in a Swiss bank. But here things are not as they seem, and Gekko proves himself the true mentor to both his daughter and son-in-law, and is rewarded by the restoration of his family.

Wall Street ended in tragedy, with both mentor and protégé brought low, while Money Never Sleeps is a comedy, with the mentor and his two protégés – daughter and son-in-law – reunited and exalted. The market meltdown serves as the background for this essentially domestic fable. It provides the context for the destruction of the true mentor Zabel, the rationale for Moore to exact revenge on the false mentor Bretton James, and the opportunity for Gekko to prove himself the ultimate true mentor.

New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, in his recent review of Money Never Sleeps, regrets that Stone never attempted the harder task of explaining the market meltdown and near-depression by enlightening his audience about the housing bubble, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. Stone is a film-maker, not a finance professor, so he would have to do this by creating characters who could personify this story in the way Gekko personified insider trading and corporate predation. So far, the author who has done this most vividly in print is Michael Lewis, in The Big Short, which focuses on the prescient few who saw the financial cataclysm coming and mode fortunes playing the short side of the market. Nocera is thus right in predicting that Money Never Sleeps will not become the zeitgeist movie that Wall Street was. We still await it.

Nonetheless, if accepted on Stone’s terms, namely as a movie about mentorship, Money Never Sleeps is enjoyable entertainment. Adding to the fun are the intertextual references to Wall Street, most notably Charlie Sheen’s cameo appearance as the prosperous Bud Fox, and the visual depiction of the glittering world of New York’s super-rich, epitomized by an extended scene at a charity ball focusing on the extravagantly jeweled earrings worn by the trophy wives.

Sequels rarely surpass the original – Godfather II is the only one that readily comes to mind that did – but in their inevitable intextuality they can be appealing, and this one certainly is. The grade: B +.