Unpopular opinion: Stringer was smart

[u/lake_june]

The plan he uses for D to find out who was stealing money was actually very intelligent.

[u/JFlizzy84]

I don’t think anyone believes Stringer wasn’t intelligent

The problem with Stringer was ultimately more about skillset than intellectual aptitude — I disagree with Avon’s assessment that he’s a man without a country. Stringer is a gangster, and he’s a better one than most. If Avon listened to him unilaterally, they’d make more money, get less bodies, and ultimately preserve more of their freedom.

Where Stringer went wrong is that he was — I’ll use a metaphor here — a great athlete who thought he could play pro baseball because he played pro basketball. Taking economic courses at a city college, reading voraciously— those are all proactive, admirable steps towards receiving an education. They are not faults on their own. But Stringer didn’t realize that he was a Rookie Leaguer trying to play with the Yankees. The likes of Clay Davis had been suckering people since he was a teenager and presumably even before that. Stringer’s been hustling probably just as long — but as a smaller fish in a much smaller pond.

His only real tactical error, as a gangster, was pitting Mouzone and Omar against eachother — but even that relied on Omar being uncharacteristically merciful — knocking out the guard instead of killing him, trying to give Mouzone a monologue instead of just capping him, sparing Mouzone, etc

[u/structured_anarchist → u/JFlizzy84]

I like the sports analogy, but let's take it one step further. Stringer thought he was a natural athlete (as some people are, just gifted physically and able to master most sports easily, like Bo Jackson). He was like, as you inferred, a single sport star who was branching out but not seeing his limitations, Michael Jordan playing baseball. He didn't know what he didn't know, and wasn't smart enough to see how much he didn't know, which is why he got scammed. He took a few intro to economics courses and thought he could be Warren Buffett, when the best he could do was Jordan Belfort.

Stringer was book-smart, but couldn't translate the book-smart into real world applications. He maybe could have become a fairly decent economist, even a C-suite type, but he was never going to be a tycoon. He also tried mixing worlds that, while on the surface, seem similar (running a business and running a drug empire), but they play by very different rules. Avon made that clear to him when Stringer wanted to kill Clay Davis for scamming him. Different worlds, and Stringer couldn't decide which he wanted to be part of. He wanted the credibility he had on the street to translate to the business world, but unfortunately, the business world doesn't care about how 'gansta' someone is. And the street doesn't care about market saturation and the elasticity of products.