Greed is Good?

Predictably The Economist’s 20 page special report on entrepreneurship in the magazine’s March 14, 2009 issue does its usual sales job in favour of the new “Global heroes”. On the first page they report on the oversubscribed conference of entrepreneurs in Bangalore, India, mentioning that many speakers “praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.” Then, summing up in the last paragraph of the report, they say, “The revolution for the current generation is the entrepreneurial one. This has spread around the world, from America and Britain to other countries and from the private sector to the public one. It is bringing a great deal of disruption in its wake that is being exaggerated by the current downturn. But it is doing something remarkable: applying more brainpower, in more countries and in more creative ways, to raising productivity and solving social problems.”

Of course The Economist has been trumpeting the wisdom of “free” trade and “free” markets since it was first published in 1843 and in spite of the many changes that have destabilized the creation of wealth and the growth syndrome, its editorial belief in that wisdom continues unabated.

A little more lip service really ought to be given to limitations on the unending idea of “more”, and on the possibility of building sustainable communities on the principle that “small can be beautiful”. Although The Economist has suffered many contrarians through its history on its favourite rocking horses, most have emphasized only other or different objectives of growth. The voices raised on behalf of slower growth, greater stability and less inequality have been weak and small. The entrepreneur is too restless to dwell much on “enough”.

Just a brief perusal of western literature on the subject of wealth reveals to what extent its accumulation has preoccupied our civilization since the beginning of history. Plato, in his Laws stated it was impossible to be good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time. Aristotle preached that money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest itself. Yet by the time of Adam Smith, it was held that a reasonable interest charge is a necessary rent for the use of money in making a profit. Today, most of the unseemly accumulation of excessive wealth is accomplished strictly by using other people’s money and not one’s own. Even the excessive consumerism of the very rich competing for the purchase of the largest homes in Monaco, the largest yachts and the most expensive hotels, is accomplished mostly on cheaply borrowed money while their own wealth continues to make excessive profits.

There is never enough and there never will be until all the ever scarcer bounties of the earth are exhausted. The rich will get fewer, and the poor, who will be always with the rich as biblically predicted, will increase until they too disappear along with the other used up bounties of the globe.

The hungry consumers too, created and managed by the entrepreneurs, will disappear and the rich will struggle for survival and eventually join the ranks of the poor. And that seems to me to be the eventual end of the perpetual growth syndrome indulged in by almost all forms of life on our poorly managed planet. May it then rest in peace!

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