On Greed
Greed is one of the deadly vices in old-time Christianity. Not so much
in some of the newer interpretations seen among the fundamentalists in
the United States. I've read about churches where the sermons are all
about how Jesus will give the faithful more stuff in this life, too.
Does that remind you of the old Janis Joplin song about her asking God
for a Mercedes Benz and a color tv?
When did greed turn into a virtue? Probably quite a long time ago,
because capitalism does require it to be rehabilitated. But it's the
combination of greed and ignorance that has fueled the housing markets
crisis; greed mostly on the side of the sellers of loans and ignorance
mostly on the side of the buyers of loans, though not completely.
What IS greed? I'm sure there are good definitions to be found by the
click of the mouse, but I don't want to know what they are because
then this post would end right here. It's more fun to try to figure a
definition out of the pure air that floats inside my head.
The first aspect of my definition would be that greed doesn't really
apply to, say, a starving person's dreams about fantastically
excessive meals. That person is not being greedy; only starving. In a
similar vein, a poor person wanting to buy a modest house he or she
can't really afford is not greedy. Thus, wanting something very much
is not in itself a sign of greediness. We all have dreams and desires
and needs.
The second aspect then has to do with the inappropriateness of certain
dreams or desires. If you already have enough food and enough shelter
and so on but you still want more then you are probably greedy. Now,
this is not a definition from traditional economics course where a
consumer is always assumed to be on the road to ever higher levels of
consumption and only held back by the inevitable constraints of money
and time. But in reality people do sometimes sit down and say, in a
quiet and zen-like voice: "I have enough material possessions."
Note that the question of what is "enough" is not something easily
determined from the outside. But clearly one can have too many
cheesecakes and even too many Rolls-Royces. The sad part of greed is
that a genuinely greedy person will never be satisfied, by definition.
Perhaps that is what made the early Christians view greed as a vice:
it hurts.
How do greed and ignorance dance together, then? I pointed out those
two as the culprits in the housing market collapse. Ignorance in that
context has to do with three things: First, most mortgage-seekers have
very little understanding of interest rates and defaults and so on.
Those are hard topics to understand without some training. Second,
humans tend not to take the long view in general, and even less so
when times are hard right now, say. If you live in a crisis, you want
to struggle your way through that crisis and then think of the rest of
your life. But if life is nothing but a crisis after crisis, well, you
will live in the short-term by necessity. Focusing on the near future
makes things like balloon loans seem harmless, and an adjustable rate
mortgage something really helpful. But today turns into tomorrow and
so on, and suddenly you can't afford the new higher interest rates and
bankruptcy beckons.
Third, the mortgage lenders also suffer from ignorance. They may be
aware of their greed, at least some of them. But they may be ignorant
of the overall effects of their individual acts. It wouldn't matter if
one lender seduced borrowers into bad loans, but it does matter when
many, many lenders do that at the same time. The outcome is a lot of
people working in the lending industry losing their jobs.
If you watch commercials on television or ads on the net you know that
greed is encouraged every day of our lives. There is always a solution
to something that should bother you, and the solution is achievable by
just paying some money. It was only a few days ago that I learned I
could get a 500,000 dollar mortgage for less than a thousand a month!
Honest. Of course I didn't read the small print on the offer, and by
now the offer has disappeared into the Orwellian Memory Hole.
The short point of all these musings is that we have to decide how to
deal with greed. Is it the engine that drives the society? Or is it a
vice? And whose greed is it that matters here?
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Posted by: echidne / 9/01/2007 03:51:00 PM
Stolen Hope Blogging And Some Saturday Echidne Musings
From Phila.
Did you ever see the Woody Allen movie called Zelig? It's a
mockumentary about a man named Zelig in the 1920s America who
supposedly had the ability to mirror the people he was with. Thus,
when he was among gypsies he turned into a gypsy. When he was among
psychiatrists, he started talking like one, and when he was next to a
fat man he also became fat. Except that he didn't do any of these very
convincingly.
I think my writing is like Zelig, always trying to bend itself to some
rules but never quite making it. That's why I like this here blog. No
writing rules, heh.
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