{"id":192336,"date":"2009-04-11T19:46:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-12T00:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/11\/the-other-matt-has-a-good-point-about-our-societal-values\/"},"modified":"2009-04-11T19:46:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-12T00:46:00","slug":"the-other-matt-has-a-good-point-about-our-societal-values","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/11\/the-other-matt-has-a-good-point-about-our-societal-values\/","title":{"rendered":"The Other Matt Has A Good Point About Our Societal Values"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew Yglesias makes a very good point about how we view virtue in our society<\/a>, specifically that the people at senior levels in the finance giants are not good people<\/span>.<\/p>\n

These are people who are millionaires many times over, and are set for life, and still continue to believe that the only way to induce them to do good is to offer them the opportunity to earn millions more.<\/p>\n

In any sane society, this is both evil and insane, as Charlie Sheen’s character so ably noted in the movie Wall Street<\/span>, “Just how many yachts do you need to water ski behind?”<\/p>\n

Now there\u2019s a decent argument out there, familiar from Adam Smith and the whole tradition of economics, that a world full of greedy people isn\u2019t necessarily quite the disaster that pre-modern ethical thinkers would have thought. This is all well and good. True even. But it\u2019s a sign, I think, of a kind of sickness running through American society that we\u2019ve lost the willingness to just say clearly that ceteris paribus<\/span> [all things being equal<\/span>] greedy behavior is not virtuous behavior. In the spirit of decency, of course, we recognize that none of us are without sin. It would be crazy to try to condemn everyone who\u2019s ever done anything greedy to the gallows. But the fact still remains that greedy behavior is not admirable behavior and that, as Krugman says, it\u2019s very unlikely that the \u201cbest\u201d young people were going into finance. And to say that they\u2019re not necessarily good people need not entail that they\u2019re criminals. Simply the fact that the <\/span>best<\/span> people are people who aren\u2019t primarily driven by greed.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis original<\/span>)<\/p>\n

He’s right. What was presented as a statement of perversion in the movie, “Greed is Good,” by Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko character, is now in many places, including, I think, in the minds of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, is considered to be a big truth.<\/p>\n

These are people who are grossly overpaid, and demand gross overpayment, for jobs that involve far less risk, than those of a policeman, or a fireman, or, at a somewhat smaller pay scale, pro football player.<\/p>\n

The idea that their all encompassing greed is a good<\/span> thing indicates that our society’s values are warped, and possibly broken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew Yglesias makes a very good point about how we view virtue in our society, specifically that the people at senior levels in the finance giants are not good people. These are people who are millionaires many times over, and are set for life, and still continue to believe that the only way to induce …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[969,1004,1003],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evil","category-finance","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}