Greed

• 1. Introduction

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  Greed has a name in almost every language our species has ever spoken. The ancient Greeks called it pleonexia. The Sanskrit texts named it lobha. The Romans spoke of avaritia. And yet for all the labels, the thing itself remains slippery, contested, and surprisingly difficult to define. Is it a sin, a survival instinct, or simply the engine of economic life?

  Erich Fromm described greed as "a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction." That image, the pit that can never be filled, runs through nearly three thousand years of philosophy, theology, literature, and law. Plato wrestled with it. Dante assigned it its own circle of Hell. Karl Marx saw it as the beating heart of capitalism. And on the 18th of May 1986, an American financier named Ivan Boesky stood before graduates at UC Berkeley and declared, to their apparent approval, that greed is healthy.

  What made that moment possible? How did a concept condemned by Aristotle, Moses, and Aquinas end up getting a standing ovation at a business school? And what do psychologists, economists, and geneticists now make of the oldest of human appetites? The answers reach further back, and cut closer to home, than you might expect.

• 2. The Bottomless Pit

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  Psychologists define greed as an inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one needs. What makes it inordinate is a specific failure of the mind: once a genuine need has been met, the person reformulates a new want to take its place. Satisfaction never arrives. The desire simply shifts its target.

  This mechanism is what Fromm captured with his bottomless pit image. Research has since found that an individual's tendency toward greed can be measured as a personality trait. Studies using such measures have linked greed to specific financial behaviors: more aggressive earning on one side, and less saving and heavier borrowing on the other. Greed has also been linked to unethical conduct and to lower overall well-being in the people who exhibit it most strongly.

  Some researchers have gone further, proposing a genetic dimension. Studies suggest that people with a shorter variant of what has been called the ruthlessness gene, designated AVPR1a, may behave more selfishly than others. The science on this is preliminary, but it points toward a disquieting possibility: that the appetite for more may be partly written into some bodies from birth.

  Meher Baba, the Indian spiritual teacher, described greed as "a state of restlessness of the heart." He observed that partial satisfaction of desire does not quiet the craving but feeds it, increasing the flame rather than extinguishing it. That is the mechanism at work in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, where the narrator describes his uncle's obsession with maps of fortifications by saying that "the desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it."

• 3. Ancient Verdicts

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  The Greek satirist Aristophanes staged the problem with surgical precision. In his play Plutus, a man and his slave address Plutus, the god of wealth, and explain that while people may grow tired of the pleasures of love, music, or figs, wealth is different. A man with thirteen talents only wants sixteen. If he gets sixteen, he wants forty, or will complain that he cannot make ends meet. The number always rises.

  From the Persian Empire came the three-headed Zoroastrian demon Aži Dahaka, representing unslaked desire, a permanent fixture of the culture's folklore. The Sanskrit Laws of Manu declared lobha, greed, to be "the root of all immorality." Early Chinese texts, including the Shai jan jing and the Zuo zhuan, counted the greedy Taotie among the Four Perils threatening both gods and men. North American Indian stories often cast the bear as an emblem of greed, a creature whose appetite made it dangerous in communal societies where sharing was survival.

  The ancient Greeks and Romans frequently used accusations of greed as a racial insult, deploying it against Egyptians, Carthaginians, and any people whose customs struck them as foreign. By the late Middle Ages, the slur was directed primarily at Jews. This history matters: greed as a charge has always been as much a political weapon as a moral category.

  The Roman Stoic Epictetus described the greedy man as a person with a fever trying to drink his fill. The healthy man drinks and his thirst is gone. The feverish man feels a moment of delight, then grows dizzy, and is more thirsty than before. Jealousy clings to him, Epictetus wrote, alongside fear of loss, shameful thoughts, and unseemly deeds. Lucretius, writing earlier, traced the root of greed to the fear of death and poverty, forces that pushed people past the bounds of law in their chase for power.

• 4. Theology and Moral Accounting

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  In 389, Ambrose of Milan published his exegesis on the biblical story of Naboth, a man whose vineyard was seized by a greedy king. In that text, Ambrose wrote in Latin that the earth belongs not to the rich alone but to everyone. His argument was that our concern for one another is the very force that creates and holds society together, and that avarice destroys this bond.

  Two of the Ten Commandments, as recorded in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, directly address greed: the prohibitions on theft and on coveting what belongs to another. These commandments form moral foundations shared by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Unitarian Universalism, and the Baha'i Faith. The Quran warns against wasteful spending while also cautioning against becoming so miserly that one's hand is chained to one's neck. The Christian Gospels record Jesus warning his followers to be on guard against all kinds of greed, stating that a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

  St. Augustine, writing in the fifth century, located the problem not in gold itself but in the man who loves it perversely, abandoning justice for a thing incomparably inferior to it. St. Thomas Aquinas sharpened the charge: greed is a sin against God because it sacrifices eternal goods for temporal ones, and a sin against neighbors because one man cannot have more than his share of external riches without another man having less.

  Dante placed the greedy in the fourth circle of Hell in his Inferno, where misers and spendthrifts battle one another without ceasing. The guide Virgil tells Dante that these souls have lost their individual identities entirely. In the Purgatory, avaricious penitents lie face down on the ground, their posture a punishment for concentrating too much on earthly things. Geoffrey Chaucer, near-contemporary to Dante, took a more satirical angle: in the Prologue to the Pardoner's Tale, a corrupt churchman preaches against greed while being himself a walking embodiment of it, quoting "Radix malorum est Cupiditas" with a straight face.

• 5. The Philosophers Debate

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  Martin Luther aimed his sharpest language at the usurer, whom he called the greatest enemy of man after the devil. He wrote that the usurer and money-glutton would have the whole world perish of hunger and thirst so that he could have everything to himself and be regarded as a god by those who depend on him. Luther's imagery was vivid: usury is a great monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste to more than any legendary criminal, yet dresses himself in fine cloaks and golden chains to appear pious.

  Michel de Montaigne, writing around the same period, argued a counterintuitive point: it is not want but abundance that creates avarice. He observed that all moneyed men are covetous, and that fortune can never arm us sufficiently against herself. Baruch Spinoza took a more measured view. He believed that the masses were drawn to money-making above all other activities because wealth seemed to unlock every other good. But he did not automatically condemn this. People who truly understood the use of money, he wrote, fixed the measure of wealth by their actual needs and lived content with little.

  John Locke introduced a property-rights angle: unused property is wasteful and an offence against nature, because any person may only claim as property what they can actually use before it spoils. Whatever exceeds that, he argued, belongs to others. Jean-Jacques Rousseau compared the person in a state of nature, who can find food anywhere and has no need of greed, with the person in society who first needs necessities, then superfluities, then delicacies, then wealth, then subjects, then slaves, ending as a figure who has ruined multitudes and cut every throat until he stands sole master of the world.

  Adam Smith drew a precise distinction that would prove influential: the appetite for food is limited by the human stomach's capacity, but the desire for goods like housing, clothing, and furniture seems to have no limit at all. His famous line about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker, who supply our dinner not from benevolence but from self-interest, is often read as a defense of greed; Smith himself was more careful, and modern economic thought has spent considerable effort since then drawing the line between self-interest and avarice.

• 6. Capitalism and Its Discontents

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  Karl Marx identified what he called a Faustian conflict at the core of the developing capitalist: a war in the heart between the passion for accumulation and the desire to enjoy wealth. The capitalist differs from the miser, Marx argued, not in appetite but in method. The miser hoards and removes money from circulation; the capitalist throws it back in, seeking not a single profit but the never-ending process of profit-making. Both are driven by boundless greed for riches. One is capitalism gone mad; the other is a rational version of the same impulse.

  John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism observed that money is unusual among human desires because it is typically a means to other ends, yet in practice it becomes desired for its own sake, a part of what people conceive happiness to be. The desire for money goes on increasing, he wrote, even after every other desire it was meant to serve has faded.

  Max Weber linked the spirit of capitalism to Protestant ethics and the philosophy of avarice colored by utilitarianism. He noted that within Protestant thought, wealth was considered bad ethically only when it tempted a person to idleness or pleasure; acquiring it for its own sake, through disciplined labor, was another matter. John Maynard Keynes offered a grounding observation: private interest and social interest do not automatically coincide, and the world is not managed in a way that makes them do so in practice. That unresolved tension, between individual acquisition and collective well-being, is what continues to animate fundamental questions in economic thinking today.

  Pope Paul VI, in his 1967 encyclical Populorum progressio, called avarice in individuals and nations "the most obvious form of stultified moral development." Pope John Paul II's 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis extended the indictment beyond individuals entirely, declaring that nations and world blocs, not only persons, sin through greed and the thirst for power.

• 7. Greed Is Good

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  On the 18th of May 1986, Ivan Boesky stood at UC Berkeley's School of Business Administration and told graduating students that greed is all right, that it is healthy, and that a person can be greedy and still feel good about themselves. The speech became famous within months, partly because Boesky himself was charged with insider trading not long after delivering it.

  The 1987 film Wall Street drew directly on that address, giving the financier character Gordon Gekko the lines: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit." That monologue became one of the most quoted pieces of dialogue in American cinema of the era, and it framed a debate about markets and morality that the preceding three thousand years of philosophy had failed to settle.

  The pirate Hendrick Lucifer offers an older illustration of greed's costs. He fought for hours to seize Cuban gold, was mortally wounded in the battle, and died in 1627 just hours after the treasure was transferred to his ship. He never spent it. In 1558, the engraver Pieter van der Heyden had already given greed a visual form, producing an image of the vice based on drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Artists continued returning to the subject: Umberto Romano in 1950, Michael Craig-Martin in 2008, and Diddo in 2012 all produced works centered on avarice, suggesting that the subject has not exhausted its hold on the imagination.

  Goethe, who lived long before Boesky, had Faust confess near the end of his tragic play that the worst suffering wealth can bring is being rich and feeling that you lack something still. That line, spoken by a man who has bargained with the devil himself, may be the most precise definition of greed that literature has produced.