While reading Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, I inadvertently noticed that bank president Nicholas Biddle preferred speculative capitalism—per Schlesinger, “Biddle and men like him were willing to take the chance of depression in exchange for the thrills and opportunities of boom”—for more or less the same reason that Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch) advised Conrad (Timothy Hutton) to cure his anhedonia by yielding to the dark throes of survivor guilt in Ordinary People (1980). (Perhaps the movie’s real subject was the overcoming of stagflation?)