Samuel Bowles — How the Deadly Sin of Avarice Was Rehabilitated as Self Interest

In the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1987, the New York Times headlined an editorial “Ban Greed? No: Harness It,” It continued: “Perhaps the most important idea here is the need to distinguish between motive and consequence. Derivative securities attract the greedy the way raw meat attracts piranhas. But so what? Private greed can lead to public good. The sensible goal for securities regulation is to channel selfish behavior, not thwart it.”

The Times, surely unwittingly, was channeling the 18th century philosopher David Hume: “Political writers have established it as a maxim, that in contriving any system of government . . . every man ought to be supposed to be a knave and to have no other end, in all his actions, than his private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, cooperate to public good.”…

The idea that base motives could be harnessed for the public good is what I term economic alchemy. And in Hume’s time it was definitely a new way of thinking about how society could be governed.…

Magical thinking that leads to the liberal paradox of reconciling social, political and economic liberalism, or to put it another way, reconciling homo economicus with homo socialis.

From there, it was a short step to thinking that while ethical reasoning and concern for others should inform one’s actions as a family member or citizen; the same did not go for shopping or making a living.

Evonomics

How the Deadly Sin of Avarice Was Rehabilitated as Self Interest

Samuel  Bowles

Samuel Bowles, is at the Santa Fe Institute, recently published The Moral Economy: Why good incentives are no substitute for good citizens and is one of the authors of The Economy, a free online introduction to economics by the CORE Project, He also wrote Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution, and with Herbert Gintis, A cooperative species: Human reciprocity and its evolution.

Here are a couple of relevant quotes from Keynes:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease…

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our godsfor a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

—as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.— First Annual Report of the Arts Council (1945-1946)

Attributed to Keynes:

Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.”

— Attributed by Sir George Schuster, Christianity and human relations in industry (1951), p. 109

Recent variant: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.— As quoted in Moving Forward: Programme for a Participatory Economy (2000) by Michael Albert, p. 128

Wikiquote

The Power Of The Wealth Lobby. It's Disgusting Hubris. Some Are Blind To It. Others See Wealth As Superior Wisdom.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

So what's it gonna be? Democracy by crowd wisdom, or oligarchy by idiocracy? If the latter, why not Central Planning by other means?

What if the aristocracy have no brains, just blind greed?

EU Ideologues “Crowd Out” Sanity

“[The EU’s leaders] ‘don’t want the [European Investment Bank] EIB crowding out private investment.’ "

Let me get this straight, they don't want aggregate options to crowd out prerogatives claimed by the few?

Why not?

They don't LIKE the tide of progress, change & evolution ... AND democracy?

Let's see 'em try to stop it! No matter how "successful" they are, it'll start up again after their tombstone is placed (if not before).

There's no stopping King Cahoots? We'll see.
2

Carrying on, what's an anagram for all the oligarchs? (Or for Neo-Gliberals.)

Eric Dolan — Pope Francis: Greed is an instrument of idolatry

Pope Francis: Greed is an instrument of idolatry (via Raw Story )

Speaking at daily Mass on Monday, Pope Francis condemned the worship of money. Though money itself was not inherently evil, Francis said the attachment to money lead to destruction of families, friends, and the self. “It leads you to idolatry, it…

---

1937 Essay by Then Senator Harry Truman

Greed, By Senator Harry S. Truman, Congressional Record, Bee. 20, 1937

reprinted in

American Affairs, JANUARY, 1946 Winter Number, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (p.6)

"ONE OF the difficulties, as I see it, is that we worship money instead of honor. A billionaire, in our estimation, is much greater in these days in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. No one ever considered Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead steelworkers, but they are.

We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundation is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and a dozen other similar performances. We worship Mammon; . . .

It is a pity that Wall Street, with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best law brains in the country, has not produced some financial statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation, they are still employing the best law brains to serve greed and selfish interest. People can stand only so much, and one of these days there will be a settlement. We shall have one receivership too many, and one unnecessary depression out of which we will not come with the power still in the same old hands. . . .

Our unemployment and our unrest are the result of the concentration of wealth, the concentration of population in industrial centers, mass production and a lot of other so-called modern improvements."

Frederic Bastiat on fraud

French economist, Frederic Bastiat, perfectly summed up the concept of fraud and how it is perpetuated with this quote:

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it" - Fredric Bastiat.

(h/t Roger Erickson)