This is no surprise, because people watched Oliver Stone's 1987 "Wall Street" and took home the message "greed is good". Michael Douglas played his part all too well.
I‘m no expert in this area, but isn’t it by now an agreed-upon insight that a society of people working towards selfish interests end up unintentionally bettering circumstances for the society at large?
I think greed is good for society in the same way that nuclear reactions bring lots of energy. That is to say, it does, but left unchecked it brings destruction.
Up to certain point, but underlying scenario in this movie pretty clearly proves that lot of greed ends up being just greed. Moving numbers around and not actually producing much real value. Were greed to make money from MBS products really needed? Well there was lot of extra debt to spend on consumption, but clear example of it not lasting forever.
Speculation and gambling is greed and not useful sort. Building new factory because you think you can make money is much better sort of greed.
And what's the specific alternative you propose or claim superior in a practicable sense?
The notion of people working for their selfish interests in a way that fosters cooperation and improvement on a larger scale gets treated to caricature interpretation often, but under that, there is a lot of evidence for it. Go ahead and describe a contrary viewpoint.
If I set aside the unnecessarily confrontational tone of your message, modern China is a pretty good exemple than semi-planned economy with controlled competition can work to raise the standard of living of a population and is an alternative to free market capitalism.
The inability of free market capitalism to regulate its own externalities doesn’t really plead in its favour either but I can’t say other systems have fared better there.
Anyway, I would hazard that most people in the world don’t work strictly for their selfish interests anyway but rather for a mix of their family, community while trying to apply their own moral to the best of their ability to foster a better world. Therefore reducing free market economies to selfishness on an individual level seems misguided.
While somehow trendy amongst part of the American population nowadays, the Randian idea of selfishness being for the best is not actually supported by much.
It's pretty clear what I'm talking about: just what I wrote.
What is it with this topic that makes people needlessly agressive? I understand you disagree but I'm open to discussion.
To get back to my original point, I think modern China is actually pretty far from 'greed is good'.
It's an autocratic country where the central party has a tight leash on the economy and which doesn't hesitate to make CEOs disappear when they get too rich and powerful. Population movement is strictly controlled and central planning is very much alive and kicking in the more rural part of the country.
Even the housing market bubble was propped by state owned companies with state owned banks money which is why it's not exploding spectacularly.
Viewing China has a free market economy is a mistake. It's a mixed socialist market economy and under Xi that means a lot of socialism with a dash of free market.
The folks in the CCP are the ones getting rich. That doesn’t make it any less ‘greed is good’. It just adds the extra frosting of ‘government corruption’ on top.
That said gov’t can throw billionaires under the bus and use elements of the state to prop the system up may look nicer - but the average person still ends up losing/paying. We’ll see in a decade what that really looks like eh?
