Greed Is Good
Greed is good if it encourages service by offsetting its costs. Greed is bad if it draws people who want the compensation more than they want to serve.
The arguments against market-based or crowd-centered, emergent solutions can be basic and emotional. We are told that CEOs are “greedy.” Shareholders are focused on their dividends. Rich people don’t consume. Landlords will behave badly, mistreating their tenants to capture more pure rent. Sometimes this is even true. There are good people and there are bad people.
It doesn’t tell you whether these mechanisms are superior to the alternatives for allocating scarce resources (which are also vulnerable to the deplorable behavior of amoral individuals, something that is left out of the critical narrative for the sake of convenience, no doubt).
These pejorative commentaries about markets usually include by contrast an altruistic fantasy of a central planner (or central agency) making decisions in the collective interest. The linear thinking at work is that only mechanisms that consider the whole explicitly can deliver outcomes that serve it. It ignores the phenomenon of emergent behavior; it downplays the natural complexity of human systems.
At a more fundamental level, the arguments in favor of bureaucracy since the Weberian fantasy was first espoused, through the Wilsonian imposition, and into the present day all shun any understanding of human nature. Perhaps they find human nature too difficult to incorporate into their models. Some of them, the more cynical, believe that human nature is not immutable. Despite all the years of study, the development of the field of psychology, the cross-cultural similarities, the centuries of experience, there are some people who believe that human nature is something malleable. It is just a question of applying the right kind of torque, presumably. In this view, people are just vessels to be reshaped. There are those who believe they can be the ones to make it happen. Think of all the social engineering in our school systems, for example.
Or perhaps these fabulists just say these things to advance their own interests. The head of a planning agency seeks to impose rules. The head of a division sucks in resources that could have been used for other purposes within the company, like HR growing at the expense of research and development.
The truth is that greed is multi-dimensional because there are different types of currency that human nature seeks out.
Human beings seek out some combination of money, status, and power.
