There is a major, dangerous, misunderstanding of the relationship between greed and wealth. For those whose net worth falls within the bottom 50% or so (in the USA this includes those with a net worth less than about $120,000) the definition of “wealthy” seems to be having a net worth of more than a million dollars (“millionaires”). Perhaps this has escalated to more like $2,000,000 given the recent inflation of housing prices and other things. For this group of people, anyone with over perhaps $20,000,000 is incomprehensibly wealthy and therefore they must be “greedy” (otherwise why would they have accumulated so much wealth?).
The idea of “greed” or “greedy” describes an insatiable appetite for something, often money, power or both. This definition does not include the evaluation of how much a person has, it is referring to the insatiable desire to have MORE. It seems to be based upon an opinion of one’s self that their “worth” as a human is based upon how much stuff (or power) they have. When judging themselves they always come up short, so they always need more. Greed has nothing to do with how much a person has accumulated, be it very a small amount resulting in living in poverty or very large fortune and living in grandeur.
Greed is a state of mind. Several traditions refer to this unfortunate person as the hungry ghost. It is not possible to determine if a person is greedy or not based upon their accumulated wealth, or lack thereof. Perhaps greed, or generosity, can be judged by observing a person’s actions – but even that is not guaranteed. As they say about a lot of things, “it all depends.”
I think this is an important question because it is related to our understanding of the “proper” way to treat capitalism, private property, and charity. Important questions for society are, “How much should a person be able to accumulate, and how much poverty should they be forced to endure?” Does Society (meaning the combined opinions of us all) have a responsibility to control either of these limits? We speak as if compassion dictates that there should be some sort of bottom “safety net” (even though there are many very large holes in that net). What is almost never discussed is the possibility for a “cap” of some sort on how much a person should be allowed to accumulate. In the 1950’s a type of “cap” was partially implemented by very steeply progressive income tax rates with a top tax bracket of 91%. Of course, since there weren’t many in this income bracket and the presence of many “loop holes” in the tax codes, the upper income bracket that didn’t actually result in higher income taxes for anyone, but it was in interesting concept. What it did accomplish was a re-definition of “income” versus other types of revenue, such as “capital gains” to avoid being in the high tax bracket. A way to avoid “income” taxes is to avoid having an “income,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding the benefits of an income.
Assuming that “greed” isn’t necessarily related to income or accumulated wealth, and allowing for the possibility that wealthy people aren’t any more prone to being greedy than poor people, what could be causing some people to become very rich? If, perchance, they aren’t driven by greed – what are they being driven by?
What if the problems with the great income disparity and the associated insanity that is driving us to environment ruin and wars are just the consequences of (or symptoms of) shared opinions? Maybe those dysfunctional opinions are simple, such as the idea that “economic growth” is always the best goal (it is always “good”), and that it is our duty to make as much as possible. What would happen if we changed those opinions to others?
An interesting thing about opinions is that they are not real, there is no THING needed to change opinions, they are just dreams in our mind – they are our best (or current) guess about how things work. Opinions can be, and often are, changed in the blink of an eye – no natural resources, no energy, and no greenhouse gases required. If so, what might these shared opinions be, and how could they be changed to something more sustainable, equitable, beautiful … fun? How can we do good and have fun without resorting to war, poverty or the destruction of the environment?
Some shared opinions include: (1) Growth is good, normal and required for a successful economy. (2) In order for an economy to work, everyone needs to be striving to maximize their returns on their investment/work/effort. The idea is that a healthy economy is based upon a give-and-take where goods and services are traded on the “invisible hand” of supply and demand with everyone having the responsibility to strive to get the best “deal” as is possible.
What if supply and demand mentality is the shared opinion that causes the plethora of problems we see all around us? What if we changed that opinion to the opinion that all development, changes and actions need to be based upon something else, perhaps achieving consilience in our decision making processes?
Consilience
In science and history, consilience is the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can “converge” on strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own. (Wikipedia)
What if everyone impacted by decisions had to agree that it is in their best interests to do so? What if things had to be desired, affordable, safe, environmentally sustainable, in alignment with evolution, and otherwise an agreed upon “good thing”, something at least as good without it and preferably better. In this model workers would have to be protected and compensated fairly, profits would remain “reasonable”, prices would be “affordable”, the environment would be protected and improved, etc. What if this had to be a unanimous decision rather than one based upon who has the greatest power, or possibly a simple majority resulting in everyone being in agreement that it is for their better good?
I realize that this is a rather utopian, unreachable goal – the organisms on the earth did not evolve to maximize every living entity. Some get eaten and some eat, but this has evolved in a way that is balanced on the large scale even if not quit so balanced at the individual level. What humans are currently doing is not balanced at any level, either for the individuals or the global community of organisms – or the global environment. However, I think it could make a huge difference even if it can’t actually be accomplished, just using this idea as a goal might be sufficient. I don’t offer it as a prescription, but rather as an alternate goal to always attempting to maximize profits. I think of this as a goal closer to the idea of “first, do no harm.” Of course, many decisions don’t have a “no harm” alternative, including the alternative of doing nothing. So at some level there is a risk assessment and acceptance aspect to this approach.
Conceptually, informed individuals are the ones to decide if the risk is acceptable. However, there is a major problem built into this in that the scope of doing harm is far greater than directly harming people, and even when the subject is limited to individuals they are seldom informed, and individuals do not represent all of the people impacted by a decision. In a practical sense, proxies must be used to represent those without a voice (such as the environment beyond just humans), those who have insufficient access to information, and those who don’t know how to understand or interpret the information that they do have. “Informed decisions” making that depends upon those being impacted is not possible. Therefore, simple risk acceptance approaches are limited to an extremely small subset of the decisions.
Our current approach of acting as if anything is acceptable as long as it violates no laws has been shown over the course of human history to not work. For example, the extremely low cost of petroleum based fuels is the result of a “free” resource (buried oil), fact that the price of oil does not include the total costs created by things such as pipeline leaks, air pollution and global warming. If the price of these fuels included the true cost that society pays for their use (now and in the future), then they would not be economically viable and we would have found other, less costly, solutions. Expecting laws and regulations to properly manage risks, degradation and human suffering is a fool’s errand. They are always too late, to limited, and too easy to violate. Expecting regulations to achieve timing and correct outcomes from the point of view of universal consilience results in an expensive and frustrating exercise of continually chasing one’s tail. I am not suggesting that we should remove all regulations and let industry and individuals do whatever they would like, I am suggestion that they are a necessary minimum but that meeting them does NOT necessarily mean that the proposed “project” is acceptable, cost effective, or desirable from the point of view of the global (or local) community.
Achieving universal consilience will be difficult and time consuming. It will undoubtedly put restrictions on the ability to make large profits. One big problem is that it depends upon the “good will” of those involved in making decisions. That is where the idea of having a new “opinion” comes into play. In order to work, the decision makers all need to be of the opinion that the goal is to maximize the benefits and minimizing the costs, to all affected parties. It won’t work if it is a struggle for everyone to get the most that they can, it only works if it is a struggle to find a solution the benefits all.
Science can help assess potential impacts, and help understand the associated risks/benefits, which inform the process of achieving consilience. However, science can never know enough to cover all of the important considerations. Science does well with those things that science knows about in terms of measurements, data collection, theories and calculations/predictions, but these only work in few very narrow areas of consideration. Not only that, but because science is basically the creation and checking of theories – it is often wrong in the details, and sometimes wrong in the big picture as well. That doesn’t mean it is useless – it just means that the answers should be taken with a grain of salt – they provide the best understanding that we have at that moment in time, subject to change should new information be found. My point is that if we are to solve the apparently existential problems facing humanity we need to find a new criteria for deciding what to do other than maximizing profits for those making the decisions. We need to find a way to come up with a new opinion – an opinion that moves us toward globally sustainable and fair solutions, rather than what has been the norm for hundreds of years in many cultures (but not all of them). There are many, many examples of cultures that have successfully operated under the opinion that sustainability and equity are the obvious criteria for decision making. It is within the ability of the human animal to operate in this way, we just need to change our opinion of what is best and “good”.