When greed isn’t good
|Decency, piety, patriotism, love: we’re all in favour of them, goodness knows. But when you have a business, an economy, or a nation to build, self-interest -and self-interest alone-is the cement that will keep it upright. Greed is an emotion you can count on. Samuel Bowles makes in his book ‘The Moral Economy: Why good incentives are no substitute for good citizens’ the case that appeals made to our self-interest can undercut instinctive moral impulses; and that when these impulses are weakened, crucial institutions work sub-optimally, if at all…We all invoke the cliché that ‘not everything has a price’, as an offhand rejection of economic analysis and an appeal to ore humane considerations. Bowles shows why we should instead treat the slogan as a basic premise of sound economic thought.
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