Got greed?

The Occupation Force apparently has a lot of messages for the Man, but one that keeps coming through loud and clear is its claim that Corporate Greed is at the root of most of the economic problems in our society. So I thought I’d do my bit to help fight the power by breaking down this claim and helping the Occupants refine the message.

The first thing to adjust is the Corporate part. Though it’s true that legally, a corporation is seen as a person, corporations really aren’t people. But there are lots of people who work for companies, lots of people who demand products from companies and lots of people who own companies. Not surprisingly, there are lots of greedy people in all of these groups. So we have a little problem in picking the greedy perp out of the lineup. Is the corporate behavior that we don’t like caused by the greedy employees who want higher pay and benefits, the greedy customers who want to buy everything as cheaply as possible or the greedy shareholders who want high profits? Isn’t it all of the above?

And let’s move on to the Greed part. Saying that greed causes economic problems is like saying that gravity is the root of all plane crashes—it’s sort of right, but not exactly helpful. The fact is that all of us are self-interested. That’s just part of our humanity—and it’s there, by the way, for a good reason. If you aren’t self-interested, you don’t live very long.

But what being self-interested really means is that we’re motivated to do things that make us feel better—physically, mentally, emotionally, heck, even spiritually (by the way, shout out to all the saints on All Saints’ Day, wooooooooo! You rock). The source of the problem isn’t our self-interest; it’s the list of things we include in the set of stuff that makes us happy. Turns out that, for many people, it’s a depressingly short list. Again, the problem isn’t necessarily that we care about Money, Mo’ Money, Powah and Bling—the problem is that there isn’t anything else on the list that comes close to balancing out these affections. In particular, we don’t seem to put much weight on other people’s well-being. Or we simply don’t understand how our own well-being depends on the efforts and well-being of other people.

Greed, to me, is self-interest that is unbalanced by concern for other people and which therefore faces no restraint—it’s simply self-interest that is out of control. And the big question that we need to ask is, how come we produce so many people whose self-interest is that unbalanced? It’s not like we’re born caring only about bling. Children acquire their understanding of their self-interest from watching and interacting with the rest of us. To use a Halloween analogy, children come to us and ask us to fill up their self-interest treat bags with all kinds of different candies, but everyone keeps giving them the 100 Grand Bars. Sure, the 100 Grand Bar is nice, but wouldn’t you want a few Pixy Stix to snort, too?

So we’re doing a pretty crappy job of imparting a balanced sense of self-interest in our kids. How did it get this way, and how can we fix it? Those are some of the questions that our Occupals should be asking.

Instead, they probably want to put the regulatory smackdown on banks and other corporations. Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to using our social institutions to create a counterbalance to unrestrained self-interest. But if the people running the institutions—regulators and lawmakers, pontiffs, pundits and professors—are hobbled by the same unbalanced self-interest as the people in these companies, do you really think we’ll get anywhere using this approach?

And finally, the whole idea advanced by the Occupilers-on, that Greed is the only cause, or even the main cause, of our economic problems is just a tad oversimplified. It’s clear to me that all of the Seven Deadlies are in on it. If you sift through the stories and public statements of regulators, bankers and ordinary people during the past decade, you’ll find them all. There’s Pride in our belief that market discipline and financial models were perfect, for example. And there was plenty of Sloth on the part of everyone who couldn’t be bothered to understand the contracts, do their due diligence or wonder whether house prices really can only go up. I’m sure that Gluttony and Lust played their parts, too, but I just don’t want to imagine certain government officials and bankers getting their freak on—oops, too late.