Greed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/greed-is-good-a-300-year-history-of-a-dangerous-idea/360265/

?n3o36m
Cartoon from a 1909 issue of Puck magazine. A caption read, "Dedicated to the states where child labor is still permitted." (Library of Congress

Among MBA students, few words provoke greater consternation than “greed.” Wonder aloud in a classroom whether some practice might fairly be described as greedy, and students don’t know whether to stick up for the Invisible Hand or seek absolution. Most, by turns, do a little of both.

Such reactions shouldn’t be surprising. Greed has always been the hobgoblin of capitalism, the mischief it makes a canker on the faith of capitalists. These students' troubled consciences are not the result of doubts about the efficacy of free markets, but of the centuries of moral reform that was required to make those markets as free as they are.

We sometimes forget that the pursuit of commercial self-interest was largely reviled until just a few centuries ago. “A man who is a merchant can seldom if ever please God,” St. Jerome said, expressing the prevailing belief in Christendom about the relative worthiness of a life devoted to trade. The choice to enter business didn’t necessarily deprive one of salvation, but it certainly hazarded his soul. “If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way then drowning,” Iago tells a lovesick Rodrigo. “Make all the money thou canst.”

The problem of money-making was not only that it favored earthly delights over divine obligations. It also enflamed the tendency to prefer our own needs over those of the people around us and, more worrisome still, to recklessly trade their best interests for our own base satisfaction. St. Thomas Aquinas, who ranked greed among the seven deadly sins, warned that trade which aimed at no other purpose than expanding one’s wealth was “justly reprehensible” for “it serves the desire for profit which knows no limit.”

[el_bryanto]

1. Interesting article

I don't know what the solution is or if there is one. Our economic system is based on self interest (if not greed) and so far alternative economic systems have been less than successful (at least when applied to an economy as large as ours).

And as for the argument that we as a society need to reevaluate greed and return it to it's place as a vice, I'd agree, but I don't know who is capable of doing that; who has a big enough megaphone to actually push us in that direction.

Bryant

[fasttense]

2. Well they said the same things about feudalism and slavery.

No other alternative economic/political (because the 2 are actually tied together) system had been successful.

How can you run a country without a king and serfs tied to the land? Who would farm if serfs and their off spring were Not forced to work the fields and give up large chunks of their produce to the king? How could a controlling government run if peasants were Not forced to labor 3 days out of the week on the kings land? Where would all the necessary labor come from if slaves were free men? How could this country grow food and cotton without slaves? Feudalism and slavery were the most efficient economic systems of the time.

I don't have the answers but I do have a lot of questions. There has to be an alternative.