Affluenza
Affluenza:
An Essay on Greed
In American Finance and Culture
"You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."
Ivan Boesky:
Sentenced to prison for insider-trading, barred from dealing in securities, and ordered to pay $100 million in penalties, November 14th 1986.
Greed has been a topic of religious, socio-economic, and moral discussion for centuries. Anthropologists have assigned it as one of the “mean genes” in human nature because without it, hunter gather societies would have never proliferated and societies would never have developed. One of the seven deadly sins; greed is the cornerstone of the other six: lust, sloth, pride, anger, gluttony and envy. According to Adam Smith, the “father of free-markets”, greed is the driving force in a free market system where competition to attain the greatest value for an asset is tested through auction. Psychologists maintain greed is driven out of fear, that it is not hording resources for the sake of having more than our share, but rather, the fearful angst of being left without enough to satisfy over-stimulated needs. Yet, in American Culture, the preoccupation with money, and the greedy accumulation of as much of it as possible, is so pervasive that it has driven an extreme divide between the haves and the have not’s; it has created massive corporate corruption, mind boggling consumer debt and galactic proportions of national debt with escalating numbers of bankruptcies, government bailouts and overwhelming incidences of economic crime along with deceit and distrust in almost every daily economic transaction. As Gordon Gekko, the main character in Donald Stone’s movie “Wall Street,” triumphantly declared “Greed is good” and espousing about the free market system he bragged, “The richest one percent of this country owns half our country 's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to
An Essay on Greed
In American Finance and Culture
"You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."
Ivan Boesky:
Sentenced to prison for insider-trading, barred from dealing in securities, and ordered to pay $100 million in penalties, November 14th 1986.
Greed has been a topic of religious, socio-economic, and moral discussion for centuries. Anthropologists have assigned it as one of the “mean genes” in human nature because without it, hunter gather societies would have never proliferated and societies would never have developed. One of the seven deadly sins; greed is the cornerstone of the other six: lust, sloth, pride, anger, gluttony and envy. According to Adam Smith, the “father of free-markets”, greed is the driving force in a free market system where competition to attain the greatest value for an asset is tested through auction. Psychologists maintain greed is driven out of fear, that it is not hording resources for the sake of having more than our share, but rather, the fearful angst of being left without enough to satisfy over-stimulated needs. Yet, in American Culture, the preoccupation with money, and the greedy accumulation of as much of it as possible, is so pervasive that it has driven an extreme divide between the haves and the have not’s; it has created massive corporate corruption, mind boggling consumer debt and galactic proportions of national debt with escalating numbers of bankruptcies, government bailouts and overwhelming incidences of economic crime along with deceit and distrust in almost every daily economic transaction. As Gordon Gekko, the main character in Donald Stone’s movie “Wall Street,” triumphantly declared “Greed is good” and espousing about the free market system he bragged, “The richest one percent of this country owns half our country 's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to
Cited: Edmonson, Brad. “Dying for dollars.” American Demographics 9.n 10 (Oct. 1987): 14(2). Edney, Julian. Greed A treatise in two essays, New York: iUniverse, 2005 Rawls, John. A theory of justice, Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1971 Sherfin, Hersh. Beyond greed and fear: understanding behavioral finance and the psychology of finance, United States of America: Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College, 2000. Vilhjalmsson, R.,E. Sveinbjarnardottir, and G. Kristjansdottir. “Factors associated with suicide ideation in adults.” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 33.3 (Feb 1998): 97 Wall Street. Dir. Donald Stone. Perf. Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hanna. 1987 Videocassette. 20th Century Fox, 1989.