[To my mind, "greed" is the same as sociopathy or psychopathy (what the shrinks call "anti-social personality disorder"), i.e., self-interest untempered by any moral commitments. It is, of course, what's rewarded and encouraged by untrammeled markets.]
September 27, 2008 / New York TIMES BELIEFS / Modern Market Thinking Has Devalued a Deadly Sin By PETER STEINFELS Greed, to put it mildly, is no longer good. Today, Gordon Gekko could not get away with the paean to greed that he delivered in the 1987 movie "Wall Street." Not after Alan Greenspan denounced "infectious greed" before Congress in 2002. Not when every third book about finance and corporate power has the word "greed" in the title. Not when the presidential nominee of the traditionally pro-business party is blaming Wall Street's greed for the current financial crisis. Denouncing greed, however, appears easier than defining it. Over the last three decades, the average compensation for chief executives of major American corporations has gone from 35 times the average pay of American workers to 275 times. That increase, it is suggested, or at least implied, constitutes greed. But what if the increase had "only" been to 100 times? Would that have signaled greed? What about 50 times? And why wasn't 35 times itself a sign of greed? If the economy were humming along rather than melting down or freezing up, would soaring executive salaries qualify as greed? Or would such a suggestion be itself condemned as class warfare? Greed is a notion, in fact, that comes positively bristling with religious and moral assumptions that modern culture does not quite know how to handle. Greed, a k a avarice, has long been ranked among Christianity's seven deadly sins. In some accounts, it is the deadliest, the "root of all evils," according to St. Paul. Similar judgments can be found in the other great religious traditions. But in the 17th and 18th centuries, European thinkers in search of political stability and order looked beyond the religious strictures that had manifestly failed to repress unruly rulers' passions for power, pleasure and possessions. Perhaps, it was argued, these passions could serve as checks on one another — and soon passions were being viewed, well, dispassionately. That is, they were re-envisioned as more rational "interests." Finally, pursuit of commerce and economic interests were generally supposed to tame and channel the wasteful pursuit of glory and domination that had bred wars and royal display. It was a remarkable mutation, described brilliantly by Albert O. Hirschman in "The Passions and the Interests" (Princeton, 1977): Greed disappeared and was reborn, domesticated, as self-interest. Greed did not really disappear, of course; it just became the province of moralists and novelists, like Carlyle and Dickens, and of preachers and politicians to this day. Those who dealt with economics, practically or theoretically, have preferred another concept. Don't look for "greed" in the indexes of most economic textbooks. When it does crop up in economics literature, the point is often to disabuse readers of their lingering sentimentality and soft-headedness. Last fall, a year after the death of Milton Friedman, a short clip from a 1979 television interview that the Nobel Prize-winning economist gave to Phil Donahue surfaced and was gleefully featured on the Web sites of libertarians and defenders of free enterprise. "When you see around the globe the maldistribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power," Mr. Donahue agonized, "don't you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism? And whether greed's a good idea to run on?" Mr. Friedman, a practiced debater, brushed past the question about ever suffering a moment of doubt about capitalism and went right to the matter of greed. "Well, first of all, tell me, is there some society that doesn't run on greed?" he said. "Do you think Russia doesn't run on greed? Do you think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us is greedy; it's only the other fellow who's greedy." "This is a world run on individuals pursuing their separate interests," he continued. "The great achievements of civilizations have not come from government bureaus," he said, proceeding to a defensible if wildly oversimplified case for free enterprise as the only way "so far discovered of improving the lot of ordinary people." Doing his best to bounce back, Mr. Donahue protested that free enterprise "seems to reward not virtue so much as the ability to manipulate the system." "And what does reward virtue?" Mr. Friedman parried. "Do you think the Communist commissar rewards virtue? Do you think a Hitler rewards virtue?" And so on. This may not have been Mr. Friedman at his most brilliant or thoughtful, but he certainly carried the skirmish from behind this phalanx of straw men. More important, his impatience with Mr. Donahue's resort to the vocabulary of greed and virtue was not idiosyncratic; it was reflective of modern economic thinking. He did not deny their existence, simply their relevance and their moral resonance. Despite all the current talk of greed, then, one wonders whether it is not a kind of specter, flitting in and out of sight, momentarily frightening and yet finally bereft of the religious and moral conviction that might give it body and weight in the nation's deliberations. In "Wall Street," Gordon Gekko may have sounded a bit like Milton Friedman when he said that greed "works" and "clarifies" and "has marked the upward surge of mankind." But he did not actually say, "Greed is good." What he said in the movie was "greed, for lack of a better word, is good." Economics has given us a lot of better words, from self-interest to incentive to profit. They do not mean the same thing as greed, but they have displaced it, obscured it — and certainly demoted it from being a deadly sin. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
