Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
You understand greed is not a feature off all people, right? It's a character flaw that some have, and tends to be magnified the more stuff greedy people acquire.
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Capitalism is a system in which the distribution of labour is incentivized by greed. It works precisely because people act in self interest. It also needs to be well regulated because people generally act in self interest. I’m of the belief there is no such thing as altruism, people just get a different kind of fufillment from being altruistic. It’s still all dopamine hits.
In general the types of regulations and redistribution methods that are employed by modern governments are designed around aiming people’s actions of self interest to drive behaviour. Perverse incentives show up all the time so regulation needs to be well crafted. But greed is certainly one of two main societal drivers. The other is social conformance. In highly collective cultures social conformance can be used to regulate greed in individualistic cultures regulation is required.
So I think Bo is correct in stating that greed should be the assumed outcome rather than a controllable variable in any kind of macro economic analysis.