greed is good

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13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby1 Contents Cover About the Author Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction: 13 Bankers 1 Thomas Jefferson and the Financial Aristocracy 2 Other People’s Oligarchs 3 Wall Street Rising: 1980– 4 “Greed Is Good”: The Takeover 5 The Best Deal Ever 6 Too Big to Fail 7 The American Oligarchy: Six Banks Epilogue Notes Further Reading Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION 13 Bankers My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. —Barack Obama, March 27, 20091 Friday, March 27, 2009, was a lovely day in Washington, D.C.

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As Bianco put it, “What sets Salomon apart is the sheer scale on which it oper-ates in the markets, reflecting an appetite for risk unrivaled among financial middlemen.” Four years later, Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s memoir of his years at Salomon, would cement its status as the paradigmatic bank of the 1980s, the same decade that produced the original Oliver Stone Wall Street movie, with Gordon Gekko’s famous “Greed is good” speech. Looking back, however, Salomon seems so … small. When the Business Week story was written, it had $68 billion in assets and $2.8 billion in shareholders’ equity. It expected to earn $1.1 billion in operating profits for all of 1985. The next year, Gutfreund earned $3.2 million.3 At the time, those numbers seemed extravagant.

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* In the interest rate swap example above, the face value, or notional value, is $100 million. However, the amount of money that changes hands is much smaller; if, at the end of a given year, the floating rate is 7.25 percent, then the dealer only pays the company 0.25 percent (the difference between the floating and fixed rates), or $250,000. 4 “GREED IS GOOD” The Takeover Derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.… The vast increase in the size of the over-the-counter derivatives markets is the result of the market finding them a very useful vehicle.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert A. Sirico

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, creative destruction, delayed gratification, demographic winter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, informal economy, Internet Archive, liberation theology, means of production, moral hazard, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, profit motive, road to serfdom, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

All he can do is become a thief or a cream-skimming government insider. Under capitalism, he has another option: he can excel in a socially useful business. In this way, capitalism provides the greedy person a socially beneficent alternative to exploitation. Remember villainous business executive Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street? “Greed is good,” he claimed. Unfortunately, many real-life defenders of capitalism argue along the same lines. Greed, they claim, is the stimulant that drives the economy. And critics of the free market readily agree—they hate capitalism because they believe it fosters greed. I say a plague on both their houses.

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Greed is known as one of the seven capital sins because greedy people will go to great lengths to obtain their object, committing other sins on the way to getting what they want—even to the point of using fellow human beings as instruments, as though they were not creatures with intrinsic value and dignity, ends in and of themselves rather than the mere means to another person’s wishes. The opposite of the greed-is-good error is the notion that desire of any kind is wrong. But the capacity to desire is actually a good thing that’s built in to the human condition. To desire to live better than our ancestors, to give our children a better life than we have had, to be more comfortable ourselves than in the past—these are not immoral things.

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This snapshot of Francois Michelin does not, of course, disprove the existence of unprincipled Gordon Gekkos in the world of high finance and enterprise. But there is nothing in business or the market economy that mandates a selfish dog-eat-dog ethic. The Apostle of Selfishness We began this chapter with Gordon Gekko announcing that greed is good. As he goes on to say to the shareholders of the fictional Teldar Paper Corporation, “Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed—you mark my words—will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

—ANDY GROVE Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Introduction Part One: A Brief History of America Chapter 1: Land of the New: America from 1600 to 1865 Chapter 2: Land of the New: An Economic History from the 1770s to the 1970s Chapter 3: Approaching Peak New: The 1960s Part Two: Turning Point Chapter 4: The 1970s: An Equal and Opposite Reaction Chapter 5: The 1970s: Liberalism Peaks and the Counterrevolution Begins Chapter 6: The 1970s: Building the Counter-Establishment Chapter 7: The 1970s: From a Bicentennial Pageant to a Presidency Chapter 8: The 1970s: Neoliberal Useful Idiots Part Three: Wrong Turn Chapter 9: The Reagan Revolution Chapter 10: Raw Deal: What Happened in the 1980s Didn’t Stay in the 1980s Chapter 11: The Rule of Law Chapter 12: The Deregulation Generation Chapter 13: The Culture of Greed Is Good Chapter 14: How Wall Street Ate America Chapter 15: Workers of the New World, You Lose Chapter 16: Insecurity Is a Feature, Not a Bug Chapter 17: Socially Liberal, Fiscally Conservative, Generally Complacent Chapter 18: The Permanent Reagan Revolution Chapter 19: The 1990s: Restrained and Reckless Part Four: Same Old Same Old Chapter 20: Rewind, Pause, Stop: The End of the New Chapter 21: The Politics of Nostalgia and Stagnation Since the 1990s Chapter 22: Ruthless Beats Reasonable Chapter 23: Winners and Losers in the Class War Chapter 24: American Exceptionalism Part Five: Make America New Again Chapter 25: Winners and Losers (So Far) in the Digital Revolution Chapter 26: How the Future Will Work Chapter 27: This Strategic Inflection Point Chapter 28: What Is to Be Done?

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In the evolving American social contract, the balance among the competing demands of liberty and equality and solidarity (or fraternité) worked pretty well for most of the twentieth century, the arc bending toward justice. But then came the ultra-individualistic frenzy of the 1960s, and during the 1970s and ’80s, liberty assumed its powerfully politicized form and eclipsed equality and solidarity among our aspirational values. Greed is good meant that selfishness lost its stigma. And that was when we were in trouble. The best test of a morally legitimate social contract is a thought experiment that the philosopher John Rawls named the Veil of Ignorance in 1971, just as modern American ultra-individualism exploded. The idea is to imagine you know nothing of your actual personal circumstances—wealth, abilities, education, race, ethnicity, gender, age; all those salient facts are veiled from you.

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A problem with leveraged buyouts and other private equity takeovers, and with financialization in general, is that so often the main point isn’t to create enterprises of lasting value, enabling particular businesses (or American capitalism or American citizens) to prosper for the long term. It is to obtain those fees, the vigorish, and to score by making this deal, and then another deal, and another, because greed is good, kill them all, and let the invisible hand sort it out. As I was beginning this book in 2017, I noticed that big, familiar retail chains were all going under—Toys “R” Us, Payless, The Limited, Gymboree, and many more. Then I noticed that each of them had been subjected to a leveraged buyout, finally choked and smothered by debt piled on by temporary private equity owners.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Still today, as always, trade and betterment are threatened by the scorn of priest, knight, gentleman, poet, or thug, from Green to neo-Nazi. And now too they are threatened from within the bourgeoisie itself by a foolish pride—pride, the master sin against the Holy Spirit—that elevates trading prudence to the exclusion of other virtues. The threat appears as the crudely “neoliberal,” “greed-is-good” theory of behavior, encouraged by some economists and by all inside traders. The theory is the modern descendant of the Machiavellian moment of Il Principe and then the Hobbesian-Mandevillean-Benthamite notion that it’s enough to have prudence only—the restless stirring for gain, utility, self-interest.30 But profit maximization is not in itself an ethic.

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For example: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”8 But in his other published book one can find hundreds of pages in praise also of other virtues, especially temperance or, in the unpublished Lectures on Jurisprudence, justice. And even in the Wealth of Nations, I have noted, unless one is precommitted to seeing its implied hero as merely a confused precursor to Karl Marx’s Mister Money Bags or Paul Samuelson’s Max U, one can find a good deal of ethical judgment more grown-up than “prudence suffices” or “greed is good.”9 “Max U,” remember, is a little joke, referring to the Maximization of Utility under Constraints that Samuelson laid down as the monopolistic principle of modeling in economics in his modestly entitled PhD dissertation and then book, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947). Max (such a man, I venture to say, would be more sensible if he became Maxine) is literally a sociopath, reducing every experience to his own pleasure.

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Smith in the Theory did not believe, as his teacher Hutcheson did, that in achieving social peace and prosperity we can depend on natural benevolence—we would call it genetically hardwired cooperation (for which, by the way, in case you don’t believe the evidence of four millennia of poetry, drama, religion, novels, proverbs, folktales, philosophy, theology, and history, there is by now a good deal of recently gathered positivistic experimental and observational evidence). Nor did he believe, as many economists still understand him to do, in a fuzzy version of Mandeville’s hardwired opposite of cooperation, a macho competiveness, greed is good. Against inherited niceness or nastiness, as I have noted, Smith repeatedly emphasized in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as he did also in The Wealth of Nations, that during their lives people change, shaped by society and, it may be, by their own impartial spectator. In the phrase appropriate to a time of apprenticeships, people were “brought up to a trade.”

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

In Canada, the Vancouver Sun newspaper—Vancouver’s largest, most popular daily—published an op-ed on the ethics of shopping titled “Shop till you drop: It’s a moral imperative.”17 Nonetheless, Gilder did not realize that the capitalism he beatified had changed. He confounded late consumer capitalism and what he saw as its celebration of altruistic avarice (greed is good!) with early entrepreneurial capitalism and its celebration of altruistic asceticism (work is holy!). Gilder was singing hymns to saving and investing, while Christians were busy spending and consuming. He applauded the virtue of inventiveness and capital creation, while it was the virtue of product-less mergers and acquisitions and need-generating marketing and branding that were defining the new spirit of consumerism.

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The new ethos wants us to believe it is good in itself. This postmodern consumer-capitalist gospel is precisely the one found in the proliferating “how-to” texts of today’s consumerist canon where being rich is defined by spending heartily, and conspicuous consumption is no longer a vice but a virtue. Jonathan Hoenig’s book Greed Is Good, whose title is borrowed from Stone’s film, is an example, carrying the whimsical but telling subtitle The Capitalist Pig Guide to Investing. Hoenig counsels investors to accept that while “greed has been much maligned in our culture…[i]n the game called life, the object is to make yourself happy.”

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(the largest carpet manufacturer in the world which has committed to using only reusable or recycled materials), and Starbucks have all grasped the civic possibilities of marketing along with the marketing possibilities of charitable giving. Corporations understand that good citizenship pays, and that modifying their products and practices in order to attract customers who may otherwise avoid them or seek out rivals is not only a prudent civic practice but good business as well. Their motive may be greed, but that’s the point: greed is good in this domain, not because the greedy are posturing narcissists like Michael Douglas’s character in the movie of that name, but because greed can be made an engine of responsible social service, allowing producers to make a profit when they respond to socially responsible demands by consumers.

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street by Jonathan A. Knee

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business logic, call centre, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, deal flow, discounted cash flows, fear of failure, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, if you build it, they will come, iterative process, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, proprietary trading, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, technology bubble, young professional, éminence grise

Why should we be surprised that bankers fell all over each other on the way out of one set of doors and through the other? To be fair, some version of this explanation is by far the most popular not only among the general public, but also among bankers themselves. Yet there is something unsatisfactory about this theory—let’s call it the Greed is Good theory after the famous Michael Douglas line from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. If the theory were true, it would suggest one could simply get bankers to stay by paying them more. And this is precisely what the major investment banks tried to do. They began gingerly with a variety of “quality-of-life” initiatives that tried to emulate the imagined work environment at Internet companies.

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All Goldman Sachs employees received significant stock grants at the time of the IPO that would be forfeited if they left the firm within three years. The incremental compensation plans of other banks, no matter how generous, were no more than a fraction of the payoff that the Goldman IPO represented to those who stayed with the firm. If the Greed is Good theory were true, one would have expected dramatically lower personnel turnover at Goldman Sachs— even ignoring that Goldman has had lower historic turnover anyway. But Goldman experienced the same attrition rates as its peers. This happened despite the fact that Goldman had instituted one of the more generous incremental compensation plans (on top of the IPO stock distribution) to stem the exodus of bankers.

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For if Goldman couldn’t hang on to its people by using the stick of taking back its IPO largesse, how could others ever afford a carrot big enough to do the job? What can explain the odd group dynamic that first drew these over-achievers to banking and then to the Internet? At the time, I groped for a theory less simplistic than Greed Is Good but more persuasive than, say, mass hysteria. Surprisingly, I stumbled onto a clue in the journey of personal self-discovery embarked on by Al Gore, who then was in the midst of his unsuccessful quest to succeed Bill Clinton as president of the United States. After his disastrous 1988 presidential run and his son’s near-fatal car crash, Al Gore had a midlife crisis.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

If companies were turbocharged to maximize profits, it would jolt the whole country and the whole world into growth. To get there, all you had to do was prioritize profit. A pithier version of Friedman’s big idea soon swept through the culture, expressed by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: “Greed is good.” The effect of shareholder primacy was to drive a stark line between a company’s shareholders and its stakeholders, defined as every other party affected by its business and including its employees, its community, its country, its customers, and the environment. Under the new model, shareholder profits came first and foremost, and any significant investment in other stakeholders became a liability.

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To put it bluntly: Richard Feloni, “The Economist Joseph Stiglitz Explains Why He Thinks the Late Milton Friedman’s Ideas Have Contributed to Rising Inequality in the US,” Business Insider, March 13, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/joseph-stiglitz-milton-friedman-capitalism-theories-2018-3. In an interview with the New York Times: “Greed Is Good. Except When It’s Bad,” New York Times, September 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/dealbook/milton-friedman-essay-anniversary.html. 181 members of the Business Roundtable: “Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans,’” Business Roundtable, August 19, 2019, https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans.

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Larry Fink: Climate Crisis Will Reshape Finance,” New York Times, January 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/business/dealbook/larry-fink-blackrock-climate-change.html; Amy Harder, “JPMorgan Chase to Pull Support for Some Fossil Fuels,” Axios, February 24, 2020, https://www.axios.com/jp-morgan-fossil-fuels-support-4b755a24 -d57c-4d8b-8424-a401e994ec89.html. Hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb: “Greed Is Good. Except When It’s Bad,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/dealbook/milton-friedman-essay-anniversary.html. in the midst of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic: Carmen Reinicke, “Amazon Sees $83 billion in Market Cap Erased after Quarterly Profits Shrink,” Business Insider, May 1, 2020, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/amazon-stock-price-erasing-billions-market-value-post-earnings-coronavirus-2020-5-1029155310.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

Even though Paul McCartney’s conventional platitude carried a whiff of irony, especially given his experience of sudden fame and fortune, while McCoy’s song goes on to imagine ways in which he will use his wealth to benefit others, the contrast here does seem to suggest a shift in cultural attitudes. Even so, when in the 1987 film Wall Street the real estate speculator and corporate raider Gordon Gecko declares that “greed is good,” we the audience understand by convention that the man who says this is bad; and we are duly satisfied when, at the end of the film, we see the bad man who says that greed is good carted off to prison. It seems that our culture is still torn between accepting acquisitiveness as a necessary condition of economic growth and denouncing it as an undesirable character trait that bespeaks false values and encourages unethical conduct.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

This chapter explores how our morals are linked to our emotions, how they evolve, and how things can go wrong.1 WANTS AND ‘OUGHTS’ The glib supporters of capitalism who argue that the end justifies the means invoke Adam Smith’s famous proposition in The Wealth of Nations that the pursuit of self-interest leads to the common good. ‘Greed is good’ became the intellectual underpinning for the zeal of the Reagan–Thatcher revolution. Smith’s proposition is a valuable corrective to the naïve notion that an action is good only if well-motivated. But modern economics, which The Wealth of Nations launched in 1776, is built on a character who is utterly despicable.

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ISIS used narratives strategically to take societies back to the twelfth century. Our leaders could use them to better purpose. SOFTWIRED OBLIGATIONS We started with the moral deficit facing modern capitalism: a society can do without morality because self-interest will get us to the nirvana of mass prosperity. ‘Greed is good’ because the stronger the appetite, the harder will people work, and so the more prosperous we will all become. We have come a long way from that proposition. We are social beings, neither economic man, nor altruistic saints. We crave esteem and belonging, and these underpin our moral values. Around the world we hold six such values in common, none of which is generated by reason.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The other is that millions of tenuously middle-class voters are conned into pushing Wall Street’s own twisted greed ethos as though it were their own. The Tea Party, with its weirdly binary view of society as being split up cleanly into competing groups of producers and parasites—that’s just a cultural echo of the insane greed-is-good belief system on Wall Street that’s provided the foundation/excuse for a generation of brilliantly complex thievery. Those beliefs have trickled down to the ex-middle-class suckers struggling to stay on top of their mortgages and their credit card bills, and the real joke is that these voters listen to CNBC and Fox and they genuinely believe they’re the producers in this binary narrative.

…

Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain. This is pure social Darwinism: self-interest is moral, interference (particularly governmental interference) with self-interest is evil, a fancy version of the Gordon Gekko pabulum that “greed is good.” When you dig deeper into Rand’s philosophy, you keep coming up with more of the same. Rand’s belief system is typically broken down into four parts: metaphysics (objective reality), epistemology (reason), ethics (self-interest), and politics (capitalism). The first two parts are basically pure bullshit and fluff.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

After World War I, the United States beggared its returning veterans. After World War II, we sent them to college. Wartime technologies such as digital computing were put into the public domain so that they could be transformed into the stuff of the future. The rich taxed themselves to finance the public good. In the 1980s, though, the idea that “greed is good” took hold in the United States and we turned away from prosperity. We accepted the idea that what was good for financial markets was good for everyone and structured our economy to drive stock prices ever higher, convincing ourselves that “the market” of stocks, bonds, and derivatives was the same as Adam Smith’s market of real goods and services exchanged by ordinary people.

…

But the key lesson is one we have seen again and again. The design of a system determines its outcomes. The robots did not force a human-hostile future upon us; we chose it ourselves. The 1980s were the years of “corporate raiders” celebrated by Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie Wall Street, who so memorably said, “Greed is good.” The theory was that by discovering and rooting out bad managers and finding efficiencies in underperforming businesses, these raiders were actually improving the operation of the capitalist system. It is certainly true that in some cases they played that role. But by elevating the single fitness function of increasing share price above all else, they hollowed out our overall economy.

…

See also regulations government as a platform, 133–35, 149–50 Code for America, 138–44, 147, 148–49, 187, 222 and elites understanding technology, 146 federal government, 147 Gov 2.0 Summit and Expo, 128–31 healthcare.gov crisis, 118–19, 146 local governments, 138–42 need for reinvention of applications, 143 NSF Digital Library Program, 132 R&D grants, 132 requirements for, 135–37 “Government Data and the Invisible Hand” (Robinson, et. al), 130 Government Digital Service, United Kingdom (UK GDS), 144–45, 168–69 GPL (GNU Public License), 25 GPS, 83–84, 131, 176–77 Gray, Mary, 166 “greed is good” choice in 1980s, xxv Green, Hank, 289, 316 Green, Logan, 77, 183 Green Bay Packers, 244 Green Mars (Robinson), 96 Griffith, Saul, 66, 326–27, 363–64 Grossman, Nick, 189 Guardian, 214 Guarino, Dave, 141–43 Hagel, John, III, 341 Hagiu, Andrei, 196 Ha-Joon Chang, 134 Haldane, Andrew, 175 Halevy, Alon, 155–56 Hammerbacher, Jeff, 156, 169 Hanauer, Nick, 196, 250, 257, 264–65, 267, 268, 300, 368–69 Hanrahan, Jim, 43 Haque, Umair, 248–49 “Hardware, Software, and Infoware” (O’Reilly), 9–11, 13–14 “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” vector, 37–40 Harvard Business Review, 24, 156, 196, 204 Hassabis, Demis, 167, 234 healthcare.gov, 118–19, 146 Hedlund, Mark, 287 Herbert, Frank, 76 Hewlett-Packard (HP), 79 Hickey, Dave, 313 Hidden Figures (film), 301 Hill, Steven, 184, 196 Hillaker, Harry, 209 Hillis, Danny, 44 HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), 166 Hoffman, Reid, 36 Hoffman’s Law, 36–37 Honor, 332–33 Hooke’s Law, 327 Hotwired (online magazine), 81 household debt, xxi Howard, Jeremy, 168 Hsiang, Mina, 148 Huber, Jeff, 353–54 Hugo, Victor, 355 Humans of New York (Stanton), 370–71 Human Spectrogram, 222 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 44 Hwang, Tim, 332 hybrid artificial intelligence, 234–36 IBM, 11–12, 136 idea meritocracy, 223 Ignorance (Firestein), 340 Immelt, Jeff, 303 independent contractors, 190–92 indie.vc model, 286 industrial revolution, xxiv Inequality for All (documentary film), 265 inflation, 239 information, 66–67, 89.

Money: Vintage Minis by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, DeepMind, European colonialism, Flash crash, Ford Model T, greed is good, job automation, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lifelogging, low interest rates, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Ponzi scheme, self-driving car, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Yet Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism. Smith taught people to think about the economy as a ‘win-win situation’, in which my profits are also your profits. Not only can we both enjoy a bigger slice of pie at the same time, but the increase in your slice depends upon the increase in my slice.

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

This opposite side of the coin has been argued in Andrei Shleifer and Lawrence H. Summers, “Breach of Trust in Hostile Takeovers,” in Corporate Takeovers: Causes and Consequences, ed. Alan J. Auerbach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 33–68. 30. Brian Hindo and Moira Herbst, “Personal Best Timeline, 1986: ‘Greed Is Good,’” BusinessWeek, http://www.bloomberg.com/ss/06/08/personalbest_timeline/source/7.htm. 31. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball, p. 320. 32. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball. 33. FDIC v. Milken, pp. 70–71. 34. Alison Leigh Cowan, “F.D.I.C. Backs Deal by Milken,” New York Times, March 10, 1992. 35. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 291, fig. 8.5, and p. 292, fig. 8.6. 36.

…

“The 15 Ronald Reagan Quotes Every Business Leader Must Know.” Accessed January 16, 2015. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234547. Hickman, W. Braddock. Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience. Princeton: National Bureau of Economic Research and Princeton University Press, 1958. Hindo, Brian, and Moira Herbst. “Personal Best Timeline, 1986: ‘Greed Is Good.’” BusinessWeek. http://www.bloomberg.com/ss/06/08/personalbest_timeline/source/7.htm. Hirschman, Elizabeth C. “Differences in Consumer Purchase Behavior by Credit Card Payment System.” Journal of Consumer Research 6, no. 1 (June 1979): 58–66. “History in Review: What Really Happened to the Shah of Iran.”

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Silicon Valley has always had a core Ayn Rand libertarianism underneath its hippie patina: It justifies their sense of freedom from any costly social responsibility for the downsides of their products and services. As Jonathan Taplin, Jaron Lanier, and other Silicon Valley critics have written, the tech titans may tend to vote left, but the strong libertarian bias in digital culture cuts right. Theirs is an eighties-style “Greed is good” ethos overlaid with the contempt of a youthful generation of CEOs who’ve never seen government do anything much more ambitious than cut taxes. All of this has resulted in a self-interested and shortsighted “disrupt everything” mentality. It’s much easier, of course, to break things than to fix them.

…

Neoliberalism on Steroids As powerful as the network effect is, to understand the seemingly unstoppable growth of the platform companies like Google or Facebook, you also have to look at how much the politics of Silicon Valley changed between the era of hippie idealism represented by Steve Jobs, and the libertarian epoch of Peter Thiel and his ilk. “It was a titanic shift,” says Roger McNamee, who has worked in tech for more than forty years. “While the rank and file in Silicon Valley is liberal, the top people at the top firms tend to believe that greed is good.” How could they not? Ever since the 1980s, most of American business has been subscribing to the trickle-down “markets know best” doctrine popularized by the so-called Chicago School of economics. The Internet platforms in particular have benefited enormously from the Chicago School’s antitrust philosophy, which maintains that as long as products are cheap or free, there’s no monopoly issue.

Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, Apple II, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, break the buck, buttonwood tree, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, financial repression, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Potemkin village, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tontine, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

The modern-day equivalent of this sentiment can be found in the musings of Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont and former Democratic presidential candidate, whose stump speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign condemned Wall Street relentlessly. “Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today,” he said in January 2016. And then he paid homage to one of the most recognizable cultural touchstones about modern Wall Street when he referred to the famous “Greed is good” scene in Wall Street, the 1987 Oliver Stone film, where Gordon Gekko, played with oleaginous glee by Michael Douglas, lectures Bud Fox, his young and aspiring apprentice (played by Charlie Sheen). “So, to those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear,” Senator Sanders continued.

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist by Ray C. Anderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centralized clearinghouse, clean tech, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, Easter island, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invisible hand, junk bonds, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, music of the spheres, Negawatt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, precautionary principle, renewable energy credits, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, urban renewal, Y2K

This credo is at the heart of the world view that I’ve already written about—the fundamentally flawed paradigm, the mind-set that underlies the industrial system—and I suggest that that same mind-set also underlies the global financial system. I further suggest that Gordon Gekko’s fictional proclamation in the film Wall Street, “Greed is good,” is as widely accepted as Friedman’s credo, one hand-in-glove with the other, throughout the high-flying financial world. That’s a real double whammy! So, with trillions of dollars seeking instant gratification in short-term profits, with the financial industry coming up with ever-more esoteric and risky ways of satisfying that demand, with a ratings industry turning a blind eye to risk and stamping triple-A on too many pieces of paper (because if one agency didn’t, another would), something had to give, and it did.

…

See global climate change global-warming effect, net zero glue God’s currency Goethe Gonen, Ron Google Gore, Al An Inconvenient Truth Gorman, Mary government failure of, to solve environmental problems mandates from power of, to effect environmental change Grant, Ulysses S. Great Dane Trailers “greed is good” Green, John C. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions effect on global warming effect on other planets (such as Venus) measuring of reduction of volume of green investors Greenlist green power, generation of, on-site green products, can’t be made from brown companies Greenspan, Alan greenwash Gretzky, Wayne grid, “off the” grid parity Grosclose, Frank gross domestic product, distortions of Gustashaw, Dave habitat Habitat for Humanity Haft, David Hansen, James Hart, Gary Hart, Stuart Hartzfeld, Jim Hawken, Paul Blessed Unrest The Ecology of Commerce Hawken, Paul, Amory Lovins, and L.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Many companies also adopted a more ruthless approach to labor unions, using illegal tactics to thwart organizing efforts. And the compensation of CEOs and other executives began its skyward climb. The next chapter of the story is well known. Corporate values shifted sharply in the 1980s, the “greed is good” era in which vast pay inequities and frequent downsizing became normalized. Conspicuous consumption by corporate chieftains and Wall Street big shots—frowned on in the early postwar decades—returned on a grand and gaudy scale. The new business stars of the moment were brash figures unembarrassed by their mean streaks, such as Donald Trump and Carl Icahn.

…

Although Plato envisioned the Guardians as eschewing all material desires and living at a remove from worldly concerns, the modern version of his ideal has looked a little different: first, you make a boatload of money or are born to it, and then—keeping your multiple homes and perhaps your private jet—you turn to doing some good in the world. If oligarchy is government by the rich, for the rich, the contemporary Platonic ideal is about something else: rule by the rich on behalf of the common good, as they define it. This new noblesse oblige is spreading fast, and although it is a big step forward from the “greed is good” ethos, it is still deeply troubling. There are books about American life that describe what is happening, and books that suggest what should happen. This has mainly been the former kind of book. Obviously, however, the trends described so far have weighty implications for those trying to change the direction of public policy and politics.

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

The mood around the country turned decidedly anti–Wall Street as the junk bond scandals hit the front pages of newspapers. An October 1987 Newsweek cover queried, “Is the Party Over? A Jolt for Wall Street’s Whiz Kids.” In December 1987, audiences in movie theaters listened to Gordon Gekko, the slimy takeover artist played by Michael Douglas, proclaim the mantra for the decade in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: “Greed is good.” A series of popular books reflecting the anti–Wall Street sentiment hit the presses: Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, Barbarians at the Gate by Wall Street Journal reporters Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, The Predators’ Ball by Connie Bruck, Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. The quants were licking their wounds.

…

At the time, the quants were known as rocket scientists, since many came from research hotbeds such as Bell Labs, where cell phones were invented, or Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb. Wall Street’s gut traders eventually proved to be no match for such explosive brainpower. Michael Lewis’s Wall Street classic, Liar’s Poker, exemplified and exposed the old-school Big Swinging Dick trader of the 1980s, the age of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good.” Lewis Ranieri, the mortgage-bond trader made famous in the book, made huge bets based on his burger-fueled gut. Michael Milken of Drexel Burhman for a time ruled the Street, financing ballsy leveraged buyouts with billions in junk bonds. Nothing could be more different from the cerebral, computerized universe of the quants.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

It was the creation of a new form of human. ‘Economics are the method,’ said Thatcher, ‘but the object is to change the soul.’ And about that she was right. The most reliable way to change masses of selves, of course, is by changing the ways by which they have to get along and get ahead. The gamification of society triggered the ‘Greed is Good’ era, which represented a staggering transformation from the self of the anti-materialistic, communalistic hippies that had grown out of the mid-century’s more collective economy. This new and intensified form of competitive individualism meant less support from employers and the state, which, in turn, meant more and more pressure placed upon the individual.

…

And the new president endorsed like-minded friends, nominating a secretary of state, a secretary of labor and a director of the CIA who were all avowed fans of Rand and her ideas. Trump was, in many ways, a definitive creature of the neoliberal, self-esteem, celebrity era. A sumptuously narcissistic self-publicist, he’d initially become famous during the ‘Greed is Good’ 1980s only for his fame to become supercharged when he starred in the immaculately neoliberal reality show The Apprentice, which turned business into a ferociously competitive game in which losers suffered the public humiliation of a boardroom beat-up and his catchphrase, ‘You’re fired!’ But while his television profile was an important component of his rise to the heights of power, any true understanding of it would be incomplete without an account of one of his most effective tools: the echo chamber and sounding board of social media.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Private enterprise replaced communal action as the preferred way to change society. The free-loving flower children of the 1960s’ “Love Generation” had given way to the self-centered “Me Generation” of the ’80s and ’90s. Bob Dylan’s call to action “The Times They Are a-Changin’” had been superceded by Gordon Gekko’s mantra “Greed Is Good.”21 The national battle for civil rights for minorities was replaced by a demand for smaller government, states’ rights, and more individual rights. By the early 1990s, Taylor’s rule, showing the trade-off between interest rates and the rate of inflation, named after the Stanford economist John Taylor,22 came to replace the Phillips curve, the trade-off between employment and inflation, as the equation of choice for those running the economy.

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Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (2005–6). 16 Ben Bernanke, remarks at “A Conference to Honor Milton Friedman,” University of Chicago, Chicago, November 8, 2002. 17 Michael Kinsley (1951– ), American political journalist. 18 Michael Kinsley, “Greenspan Shrugged,” The New York Times, October 14, 2007. 19 Greenspan, Age of Turbulence, p. 68. 20 George H. W. Bush (1924– ), ambassador to the UN, director of the CIA, and 41st president of the United States (1989–93). 21 The “Greed Is Good” speech by Gordon Gekko, the hero of Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street, was based on a commencement address at the University of California, 1986, by the convicted inside-dealing stock trader Ivan Boesky, who said, “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” 22 John Brian Taylor (1946– ), American economist and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University. 23 George H.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

John Gutfreund, chairman of Salomon Brothers, one of the most aggressive investment banks of the 1980s, said successful traders must wake up each morning "ready to bite the ass off a bear." 8 Lester Thurow, economist and former dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management, offers intellectual support for this materialist perspective "Wealth has always been important in the personal pecking order, but it has become, increasingly, the only dimension by which personal worth is measured. It is the only game to play if you want to prove your mettle. It is the big leagues. If you do not play there, by definition you are second rate." 9 In the most extreme versions of the American business model, it is a mistake to deplore materialism and regard selfishness as a vice. Greed is good: nice guys finish last. The rambling but strident philosophy of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan's former mentor, proclaims the virtues of selfishness under the title objectivism. 10 The logical conclusion of extreme individualism is that concern for others is an emotion that can properly be called on only to the extent that we feel it spontaneously.

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Adaptive behavior is determined by social and business values we impose on each other-the phenomenon of contagious reputation (chapter 19) is a good example-and the prevailing values of a market economy are key to its success. This is an important part of the explanation of why Norway and Switzerland are rich states and Kenya and Indonesia are not. The maxim that greed is good has set back the cause of economic development in the East, undermined the legitimacy and performance of the market economies of the West. There is no substantive difference between the pyramid schemes that crippled the Albanian economy in the mid-1990s and the stock market bubble of 1999-2000.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

The competition ideologues have made it seem as though we must choose between competition and communism, or, as the choice is ever more frequently being described today, between competition and socialism. But the concept of competition they’ve been peddling for the past forty years—one drained of any ethical or moral content—isn’t the only or even the best form of competition for purposes of creating a healthy, prosperous, and just society. Indeed, as we’ll see, it is often the worst. Greed Is Good. Greed Is Right. Greed Works. President Ronald Reagan told the nation in his first inaugural address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Competition and markets were his answer, and the concept of competition he was espousing was the narrow one espoused by Milton Friedman and his cohorts at the University of Chicago.

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Will countries with greedier citizens deliver greater prosperity? And should we, as a society, elevate greed and use it to define ourselves? In answer to all of the above: Absolutely not. Competition, Collaboration, and Fairness Can Coexist While many people, not just the Chicago School jurists, quote Adam Smith to justify their belief that “greed is good,” far fewer consider the Scottish economist’s other important book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In this book, Smith praised the virtue of prudence—“The care of the health, the fortune, and the rank and reputation of the individual”—but only when it “is combined with many greater and more splendid virtues—valour, extensive and strong benevolence, a sacred regard for the rules of justice.”

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

Dunlap was spared possible civil and criminal suits only after he agreed to pay penalties and restitution of fifteen million dollars.10 The history of the last two decades is littered with fallen idols who, like Dunlap, stridently asserted the primacy of wealth. Gordon Gekko, the antihero of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, famously proclaimed: “Greed is good.” Gekko was partly based on Ivan Boesky, a notorious corporate raider of the 1980s, who was reported as telling a class at Columbia: “I want you to know that I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”11 Soon after, Boesky went to prison, convicted of insider trading.

Working the Street: What You Need to Know About Life on Wall Street by Erik Banks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, borderless world, business cycle, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, fixed income, greed is good, junk bonds, old-boy network, PalmPilot, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, telemarketer

Have you ever watched the evening business news and seen all of those people in yellow jackets, packed shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor of some exchange, screaming and waving at each other, faces red and purple—looking either absolutely elated or wildly panicked? Do you remember the movie Wall Street—all the money changing hands, the “greed is good” speech, the little companies buying the big ones, the 4 | W o rk i n g t h e S t re e t “inside information” circulating between good guys and bad guys, the eight-panel cutaway shot of the trading floors with high-powered executives earning and losing millions? For many of you, these TV and movie scenes represent Wall Street—and they make it seem so complicated and unintelligible.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

No, Greenspan was not naive. Along with most of the business world and government, he believed that markets self-corrected. We could see it at work in the street markets. We were taught it at business school. It was that clever device by which selfishness became justified, even if the maxim of ‘greed is good’ was going a bit too far. Adam Smith, the godfather of economics, said it, so it had become a hallowed truth, almost the foundation stone of capitalism. So how could it all have gone so wrong? Let us be clear from the start: Adam Smith did not say that the ‘invisible hand’ would allow self-interest to work for the good of all.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

As they came of age, the environmental movement was going mainstream; pioneering social entrepreneurs were popularizing the idea of “doing well by doing good,” with forerunners like Paul Hawken of Smith & Hawken, Ben & Jerry’s, and Anita Roddick of the Body Shop popularizing a new ethic of corporate social responsibility. Meanwhile, celebrities like Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and George Clooney were popularizing a new ethic of individual engagement, making it cool to be socially engaged. The excesses of Wall Street, the dot-com boom and bust, and the mentality that “greed is good” began to change the scope of the American Dream for many Millennials coming of age. Even as they saw their parents working harder and spending less time at home in order to afford the big house, three cars, and all the accoutrements of success, they were mostly turned off by these status symbols and began to challenge existing paradigms of success.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

But the consensus among the business press and dozens of very bitter former executives is that the overriding cause of Sears’s malaise is the disastrous decision by the company’s chairman and CEO, Edward Lampert, to disaggregate the company’s different divisions into competing units: to create an internal market. From a capitalist perspective, the move appears to make sense. As business leaders never tire of telling us, the free market is the fount of all wealth in modern society. Competition between private companies is the primary driver of innovation, productivity and growth. Greed is good, per Gordon Gekko’s oft-quoted imperative from Wall Street. So one can be excused for wondering why it is, if the market is indeed as powerfully efficient and productive as they say, that all companies did not long ago adopt the market as an internal model. Lampert, libertarian and fan of the laissez-faire egotism of Russian American novelist Ayn Rand, had made his way from working in warehouses as a teenager, via a spell with Goldman Sachs, to managing a $15 billion hedge fund by the age of 41.

Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century by Adam, Georgina(Author)

BRICs, Frank Gehry, greed is good, high net worth, inventory management, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

That has continued to develop, ultimately leading to an identification of the artist with a gallery that has become today’s ‘branding’. One significant element that changed the contemporary art world, and which set the stage for what would happen in the twenty-first century, was 1980s prosperity and Wall Street. This boom period of ‘greed is good’, the catchphrase from the 1987 film Wall Street, washed into the art market as into other sectors. This was a period of outrageous speculation, art funds and highly leveraged buying by the Japanese, particularly between 1987 and 1990. While the focus was still mainly on Impressionist painters such as Van Gogh and Renoir, the heightened interest in art and the huge prices it was achieving also impacted on the contemporary market.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Atlas Shrugged is sometimes said to be the most widely read book of the twentieth century, trailing only the Bible.54 Rand had a genius for quotable, controversial aphorisms: “Nobody has ever given a reason why man should be his brother’s keeper” and “Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights.”55 Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” from the 1987 film Wall Street simply echoed Rand. Rand’s libertarianism was so accessible that it became virtually biblical to successive generations of conservative political leaders—from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to Alan Greenspan and former speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan.

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., 267–68 government regulation: “big government” as polarizing issue, 84–85 financial regulation, 61–62 in the first Gilded Age (late 1800s), 4–5 New Deal programs, see New Deal Progressive Era, 74–75 unions and, 50, 52 “Grand Expectations” (Patterson), 301 Grange, 116, 118, 120, 121 Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 174 Great Compression, see Great Convergence (1913–70) Great Convergence (1913–70), 38–39, 299 educational innovation and, 47–48 financial regulation and, 61–62 gender equality/inequality and, 247–49, 281–82 Great Migration and, 219–25 income equality/inequality and, 35, 52–53, 211 international factors and, 45–46 minimum wage and, 62–64 New Deal programs and, see New Deal origins in the Progressive Era, 38–39, 46–48, 285–86, 288 of politics/political parties, 70–71, 76–84, 88, 90–91, 98, 102–3 public economic policy and, 54 racial equality/inequality and, 227–36 regional equality/inequality and, 44 social innovations and institutional reforms, 46, 54, 59–61, 65–66, 74–76 taxation and, 54–55, 56–59, 65 technological change and, 48 as term, 33, 358n26 timing of, 33, 281 unions and, 49–51, 53–54 wealth equality/inequality and, 37 Great Depression: causes of, 291 economic policies in, 173–75 education during, 250–51 financial regulation and, 61–62 GDP growth per capita, 22–23 political parties and, 76–77 social solidarity vs. isolation and, 119–21, 127, 134, 142, 156, 157, 295–96 unions and, 50, 51 see also New Deal Great Disruption, The (Fukuyama), 188 Great Divergence (mid-1970s–), 40–44 financial deregulation and, 62 “foot off the gas” phenomenon, see “foot off the gas” phenomenon health measures and, 41–44 income equality/inequality and, 35–36, 53 intergenerational economic mobility, 41, 42 international factors and, 45–46, 296–98 minimum wage and, 63–64 of politics/political parties, 6, 16–17, 84–108 public economic policy and, 54 racial equality/inequality and, 239–42, 243 regional equality/inequality and, 44 reversal of social innovations and institutional reforms, 46–47, 54, 55–61, 65–68 taxation and, 55–58, 61, 65 technological change and, 48 as term, 35 unions and, 51–54 Greatest, The (film), 306 Greatest (Silent) Generation, 66, 138, 147–48, 152, 160–61, 234–35, 252, 262–63, 272–73 Great Leveling, 39, see also Great Convergence (1913–70) Great Migration, 207, 213–14, 219–25, 229, 244, 419n77 Great Recession (2008–2009), 24, 61, 142, 214, 310 Great Society initiatives, 60, 82, 85, 102, 190, 233, 236–39, 300, 375n38 “Greed is Good” ethos, in first Gilded Age (late 1800s), 5 Greenfield, Patricia, 197 Greening of America, The (Reich), 305 Greenpeace, 123 Greenspan, Alan, 187 gun violence, 328 Guthrie, Woody, 305 Habits of the Heart (Bellah), 137 Hadassah, 118, 119, 121, 323 Halley, Janet, 264 Halpin, James, 168 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 232 Hanifan, L.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Given how pervasive the theme of insatiable desire is in modern-day depictions of finance, it begs the question: Does this theme of insatiable desire reflect an idea grounded in finance? It is tempting to conclude that in fact finance is all about the individual pursuit of more. After all, when Gordon Gekko of Wall Street says “greed is good,” isn’t he actually framing a key insight of economics—that the pursuit of self-interest in some settings can lead to good outcomes? In fact, the most fundamental idea of finance questions the pursuit of more. It is an idea so foundational that it is often not taught and just left unsaid—as I have done so far.

Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad---And Surprising Good---About Feeling Special by Dr. Craig Malkin

Bernie Madoff, dark triade / dark tetrad, greed is good, helicopter parent, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Ronald Reagan, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, work culture

Four centuries after Aristotle, Christian teachings added a negative fillip: making too much of oneself constitutes the sin of pride (and a quick path to hell). Excesses of the self underlie other sins—sloth, greed, gluttony, and envy—as well. Down through the centuries, the debate raged, engaging philosophers from Thomas Hobbes (self-love is part of brutish human nature) to Adam Smith (self-interest benefits society, aka “greed is good”). It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century, however, that the debate entered into the circles of medicine and psychology and the word narcissism first appeared. In 1898 pioneering British sexologist Havelock Ellis described patients who’d literally fallen in love with themselves, sprinkling their bodies with kisses from their own lips and masturbating to excess, as suffering from a “Narcissus-like” ailment.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

Having already taken a detour into the bleary world of recreational drugs, many of the more spirited Boomers now turned to gurus, meditation, and cults: politics was a bummer; if we really wanted to change the world we should change our heads first. Other Boomers steered toward the stock market and scrambled up the corporate ladder. They got jobs, made money, and discovered that “greed is good.” By the end of the decade it was apparent that the Boomers were divided, with some upholding the Earth Day vision, others honing their skills as right-wing radio talk show hosts, and the rest just trying to get by. Another Fork in the Road Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president (born in 1946), elicited high hopes among his generational peers feeling battered by a dozen years of Reagan/Bush.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

If we (or, more likely, our computer) pick these numbers until their sum exceeds 1, the average number of picks we’d need would be e, about 2.718. The ubiquitous e also happens to equal 1 + 1/1! + 1/2! + 1/3! + 1/4! + . . . , the same expression my professor was writing on the board many years ago. (Inspired by a remark by stock speculator Ivan Boesky, Gordon Gecko in the 1987 movie Wall Street stated, “Greed is good.” He misspoke. He intended to say, “e is good.”) Many of the formulas useful in finance are consequences of these two formulas: A = P(1 + r)t for annual compounding and, for continuous compounding, A = Pert. To illustrate how they’re used, note that if you deposit $5,000 and it’s compounded annually for 12 years at 8 percent, it will be worth $5,000(1.08)12 or $12,590.85.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

The stock market allocates precious capital to companies it thinks can maximize profits and starves those that can’t. In other words, the stock market is democracy’s half-evil henchman, whose tool is the size of the carrot, not the use of the stick. The tenets of capitalism’s great economists, from Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand to Joseph Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction and Gordon Gekko’s Greed Is Good, are all powerful concepts, but it’s profits and the stock market that carry out the dirty work. No Five-Year Plans. All men are created equal, but a few of you need to be canned and retrained so progress can happen again. New industries get funded and start hiring again. But which ones? The ones with the best prospects for profits.

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own by Garett Jones

behavioural economics, centre right, classic study, clean water, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, hive mind, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, meta-analysis, prediction markets, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, social intelligence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Prisoner’s dilemmas are everywhere, and they’re the precise opposite of Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand,” in which individual greed leads to a positive group outcome. Invisible hands and prisoner’s dilemmas are both at work in the world: sometimes, as Gordon Gekko said in the movie Wall Street, “Greed is good,” and sometimes greed creates misery. In this and the next chapter, we’ll see how greed can create misery, and we’ll see how higher-IQ groups are just a bit more likely to find a way to cooperate, a bit more likely to avoid the prisoner’s dilemma. The Real Prisoner’s Dilemma First off, let’s go back to the source—the classic economic example of when greed is bad.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Inverting the title of William Wyler’s Oscar-winning film of 1946, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich surveyed the period and called it The Worst Years of Our Lives.5 If Wyler’s Best Years had seemed to capture the essence of the immediate postwar period, its 1980s counterpart was Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, released in 1987. Stone’s film centered on a cutthroat business executive, Gordon Gekko, who operated on the principle that “greed is good.” In comparison with Trump’s real-life brashness and extravagance, the celluloid Gekko looked like a piker. Like Gekko, however, Trump embodied values that seemed, at least for a moment, to express something essential about the United States. In October 1989, People magazine took a stab at explaining Trump’s standing in contemporary culture while hinting at its potential political implications.

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

The famous eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith claimed that people were “not very frequently under the influence” of spite, and that even if it did occur we would be “restrained by prudential considerations.”5 Much later, in the 1970s, the American economist Gordon Tullock claimed that the average human was about 95 percent selfish.6 In the “greed is good” era of the 1980s, many may have believed that this estimate was on the low side. Economists viewed humans as a creature called Homo economicus—a being that acted rationally to maximize its self-interest. Self-interest was typically, though not always, understood in financial terms.7 Yet, as I will discuss in Chapter 1, back in 1977 a groundbreaking study found that people were often quite happy to turn down free money.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

With sufficient repetition, the action associated with the dopamine release becomes habit. In the case of cocaine, we call it an addiction. In the case of monetary gain, we call it capitalism. Our most fundamental reaction to monetary gain is hardwired into human physiology. Apparently, we know it instinctively: greed is good. To explore this notion of greed further, let’s return to Tversky and Kahneman’s prospect theory from chapter 2. The two psychologists discovered that not only are we fearful, risk-averse creatures when it comes to gains, but we are also greedy, risk-seeking creatures when it comes to losses.

…

FINANCE AND THE GORDON GEKKO EFFECT Part of the challenge in thinking about fairness in finance is culture. We don’t usually ask whether a market transaction is fair or not—as long as two mutually consenting adults agree to an exchange, that seems fair enough. But the culture of Homo economicus can sometimes be taken to the extreme, as reflected by one of the most famous lines in movie history: “Greed is good.” In fact, this is a slight adaptation of Michael Douglas’s actual line in the 1987 movie Wall Street, in which Douglas plays the sleazy yet charismatic financier Gordon Gekko. “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Douglas’s performance is riveting and one might wish that typical corporate meetings were as dramatic.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Think Bigger, Way Bigger,” 13 May 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 54 The names of the Wall Streeters: Matthew Vadum, “Goldman Sachs Government,” 16 Oct. 2008, www.spectator.org. 55 The finance industry has 70 former members of Congress: Public Citizen, “Stop Congress’ Revolving Door of Corruption,” www.citizen.org. 56 This includes 33 chiefs of staff, 54 staffers of the House: Arthur Delaney, “Big Bank Takeover: Report Blames Revolving Door for ‘Too Big to Fail,’ ” 11 May 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 57 Five of Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd’s: Kevin Connor, “Big Bank Takeover: How Too-Big-to-Fail’s Army of Lobbyists Has Captured Washington,” Institute for America’s Future, 11 May 2010, www.ourfuture.org. 58 Of course, the revolving door spins both ways: Arthur Delaney, “Big Bank Takeover: Report Blames Revolving Door for ‘Too Big to Fail,’ ” 11 May 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 59 On the mining front, former Massey chief operating officer: Brad Johnson, “Don Blankenship’s Record of Profits Over Safety: ‘Coal Pays the Bills,’ ” 8 Apr. 2010, www.thinkprogress.org. 60 At the time of the Upper Big Branch accident he was: Ibid. 61 And President Bush named Massey executive Richard Stickler: Ibid. 62 Stickler had such a lousy safety record: Ibid. 63 That’s what happened when Bush put Edwin Foulke: Stephen Labaton, “OSHA Leaves Worker Safety in Hands of Industry,” 25 Apr. 2007, www.nytimes.com. 64 Earlier in his career, while serving as chairman: Ibid. 65 Then there was Bush’s choice of Mary Sheila Gall: “Mary Sheila Gall Named to Chair CPSC,” 20 Apr. 2001, www.consumeraffairs.com. 66 In her ten years on the commission: Lizette Alvarez, “Consumer Product Safety Chief Sets Deadline to Resign,” 9 Aug. 2001, www.nytimes.com. 67 She even adopted a “Let them eat marbles” stance: Hearing on the nomination of Mary Sheila Gall to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, U.S. Senate, 25 Jul. 2001, www.gpo.gov. 68 And while I’m all for slapping warnings: Matthew Robinson and Daniel Murphy, Greed Is Good: Maximization and Elite Deviance in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 94–95. 69 Thankfully, the Senate refused to confirm Gall: Caroline E. Mayer, “Senate Panel Rejects Bush’s Choice for Consumer Job,” 3 Aug. 2001, www.sfgate.com. 70 Undeterred, Bush filled the slot with Harold Stratton: Daphne Eviatar, “Toy Story,” 3 Jan. 2008, www.thenation.com. 71 Following the money once again: Center for Responsive Politics, “Pharmaceuticals/ Health Products: Long-Term Contribution Trends,” 1990–2010, www.opensecrets.org. 72 In return, the Bush administration served up: Marc Kaufman, “Former FDA Chief Illegally Held Stocks,” 17 Oct. 2006, www.washingtonpost.com. 73 And, if you want to see “overly cozy” run amok: Charlie Savage, “Sex, Drug Use and Graft Cited in Interior Department,” 10 Sep. 2008, www.nytimes.com. 74 We saw how all those former Senate and House staffers: Brian Beutler, “Do Baucus’ Ties to Health Care Industry Compromise His Reform Efforts?”

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Regardless of the financial maneuver, the operational strategy was similar: shut or sell weak divisions, lay off workers, cut wages, break unions (where they existed), speed up the Hne, get the profit rate up. The moral philosophy of this period was nicely summed up by Oliver Stone's Gordon Gekko, channeUng the most famous inside trader of all time, Ivan Boesky: "Greed is good." Unfortunately, these maneuvers usually involved lots of debt, and the debt load proved crippHng by decade's end. So there was a shift of strategy toward shareholder activism. Led by large pension funds, particularly the CaHfornia PubHc Employees Retirement System (Calpers), institutional investors drew up hit lists of saggy companies, and pressed management to shape up or ship out.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

When the doors open onto the top floor, I walk into an empty gray-carpeted suite with windows looking down on the mini city and across the water to bluffs in the distance. In front of one window, four metal chairs are aligned side by side facing out to the Reykjavik harbor. Visiting a place like Iceland and thinking about money is different than doing so in a megalopolis like New York or London. There, everything is money. Not necessarily in the “greed is good” sense, but in the way that a cityscape is entirely manmade. Virtually every square inch of it involves economic activity, and in each office, apartment, restaurant, gallery, and bar, commerce is king. In a place like Reykjavik, though, you can look right past the city onto inhospitable wilderness.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

In Britain in the last twenty to thirty years that has all been the wrong way round. There was a kind of reverse takeover, in which City values came to dominate the whole of British life. There needs to be a general acceptance that the model has failed: the brakes-off, deregulate or die, privatize or stagnate, lunch is for wimps, greed is good, what’s good for the financial sector is good for the economy model; the “sack the bottom 10 percent,” bonusdriven, “if you can’t measure it, it isn’t real” model; the model which spread from the City to government and from there through the whole culture, in which the idea of value has gradually faded to be replaced by the idea of price.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

Greenspan gave us low interest rates. They dubbed it “lower for longer.” But this was really just lighter fluid on a fire. It told people to get greedy. I’m not talking about everyday risk taking and speculation, normal human greed. I’m not even talking about Gordon Gekko in the ‘80s. This is much more than “greed is good.” I’m talking about steal as much as you can, and if you’re wrong, we’ll bail you out. I’m talking about too big to fail and moral hazard. I’m talking about Rihanna playing to a bunch of hustlers at a mortgage convention boondoggle. “Does that mean that Greenspan caused it?” Jerry asks. I don’t think it’s the best question he could have asked.

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Next time you’re in your local shop, look around at the crates of tomatoes, cartons of milk and piles of newspapers. How did they get there? Because the shopkeeper decided to buy them in order to sell them to people like you who want them. No one – not the government, not anyone – told the shopkeeper what to do. It’s tempting to think of Smith’s idea of the invisible hand as ‘greed is good’. This would be a distortion of it, though. Smith saw that commercial society involved a range of good human qualities. Bakers and butchers are often nice to other people. They feel sad when their friends get ill or lose money. That’s how people develop a sense of right and wrong. Commerce wouldn’t work very well if people were totally selfish all the time: bakers would lie about the weight of their loaves and brewers would water down their beer.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

In the past three chapters I’ve looked at entrepreneurs and investors who are trying to build worker-friendly companies with cultures that are more inclusive and create opportunities for a wider range of people. But how can their ideas spread into the wider world of work? To do that, you need to create a movement. You need to develop a new generation of young people who are not brainwashed with Milton Friedman’s greed-is-good doctrine, and will push back against it, and demand that workers should share in the wealth their labor creates, and stand on equal footing with investors. You need to create a new ideology—a new form of capitalism. In the next chapter, I’ll tell you about people who are doing that, under the banner of what’s called the social enterprise movement.

Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star by Tracey Thorn

Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, East Village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Live Aid, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, University of East Anglia, young professional

It’s not possible to say that you watched not a second of the wedding, and that you were dismissive of Live Aid, without sounding like a complete killjoy outsider, but many of us simply lived an entirely different set of experiences, which seem to have gone unrecorded and unwritten about, so that it’s as though they never happened. Scenes which I never witnessed in my life – yuppies chugging champagne in City wine bars, toffs dancing in puffball skirts to Duran Duran – have now become the universal TV shorthand used to locate and define the era. In place of the supposed ambition and Greed is Good ethos, within the world of the alternative band we still adhered somewhat piously to the altruism of the benefit gig. In the mid-1980s we had our own causes, and the benefit gigs were many and various. In 1984 I had sung vocals on a track called ‘Venceremos’ with Simon Booth’s Working Week, in support of Chilean opposition to the Pinochet regime.

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

The Spanish monarchy, for instance, eventually outlawed the enslavement of native populations in the Americas in the New Laws of 1542. Yet those demurrals were limited, to say the least. The age of global empire was also an age of monumental cruelty, with ruthless greed built into the emerging capitalist order. By the eighteenth century, a new ideology was taking form, especially in Britain, that “greed is good” (to use a recent summary formulation), because greed spurs a society’s efforts and inventiveness. By giving vent to greed, the logic goes, societies can best harness the insatiable ambitions, great energies and ingenuity of their citizens. While greed by itself might be unappetizing and seem to be antisocial, the unleashing of greed could in fact lead to the common good.

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

At the Goldman interview, I got into an argument about racism and raised my voice. Neither called me back. I settled on a position as a stockbroker with the brokerage firm Citibank Vickers. I thought the job would be the most exciting in the world. All of us in that generation had watched Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the blockbuster Wall Street memorably declare, “Greed is good.” But I soon discovered that being a broker wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. In Hong Kong, at least, it was about who, not what, you knew. If you had well-heeled contacts, you could make it. But as a junior broker with a limited social circle, I was always waiting for my boss to toss me trades that were too small or too tedious for him to execute.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

It suffered from the flaw that in a society marked by an uneven distribution of income favouring a numerically small elite, the rich had plenty of spending power to satisfy their desires, but not enough buying power to dynamise the economy to its full potential to raise real incomes.8 The German sociologist and economist Werner Sombart nonetheless argued two centuries later that luxury played an important part in the development of capitalism. 9 And Mandeville’s point has trickled down through history. To name just one example, Gordon Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ speech in the film Wall Street clearly descends in a direct line from the author of the fable. The Fable of the Bees was not universally admired by other Enlightenment thinkers. Adam Smith could not bring himself to accept the extremity of Mandeville’s paradox, in which vice was a necessary condition of prosperity.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

There was even a raiders’ gala—a posh annual conference hosted by the deal-making firm Drexel Burnham Lambert for all the big names in restructuring, known as the “Predators’ Ball.” For many critics, and a great many more traumatized former employees, the corporate raider perfectly captured the “greed is good” zeitgeist that overran American corporate culture in the 1980s. But to an emerging school of conservative economists, the raider was nothing less than an economic savior. Raiders had appeared because share prices were falling, and share prices had fallen in part because the companies were being mismanaged.

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

When push comes to shove, we recognise “that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it”. People are not inherently selfish, according to Smith, but inherently social. Thy bloody and invisible hand The true meaning of that famous phrase, “invisible hand”, is also interesting. Many pundits use the phrase to encapsulate a supposed “greed is good” philosophy. That argument rests on a number of profound misunderstandings. First things first: Smith mentions the phrase “invisible hand” just three times in his entire published output. On each occasion the phrase is used in a completely different context–and never to mean what it means in the popular understanding.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

His success proved that there was another way to do business, offering further evidence that Welchism was not a winning strategy. And a couple years after Unilever rebuffed Kraft Heinz, reflecting on the deal, Polman couldn’t help but gloat. “Since then, their share price is down 70 percent, and they now face legal issues around reporting,” he said. “Our share price is up about 50 percent. Some people think greed is good. But over and over it’s proven that ultimately generosity is better.” Polman was an outlier when he took over Unilever, one of the few CEOs willing to question the status quo and set ambitious targets to reduce the harm his company did to the world. Yet today Polman is one of many. Over the past decade, he has been joined by a diverse array of CEOs who have found different ways to push back against Welchism, an effort that extends from the European headquarter of Unilever to the techno-utopian campuses of Silicon Valley.

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

To be sure, these are big ambitions, but if the broad mass of employed people do not believe they want to join a union or entertain the idea of trade unionism as a force to help achieve what Hobbes called ‘commodious living’, then they are more easily seduced by the populist appeals of the far right and hard left against cooperation and sharing power in Europe. More and more of the evangelists of the deregulated, society-destroying, ‘greed-is-good’ and survival-of-the-fittest economic model are now running around telling us there are real problems with unequal distribution, poverty and the revolt of voters who have lost confidence in traditional parties of government. But moving to a new paradigm demands new forms of political and labour movement organisation.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

A state of shock is produced when a story is ruptured, when we have no idea what’s going on. But in so many ways explored in these pages, Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination—the logical end point—of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the one percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protecting.

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Dr. Paul Babiak, Dr. Robert Hare

business process, computer age, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, fixed income, greed is good, job satisfaction, laissez-faire capitalism, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, risk tolerance, twin studies

Some who have faltered may have experienced a weakened moral sense of “right” in the face of excessive temptation and easy access to power. Others may feel justified in reaping the rewards in proportion to the size of the organization they lead, arguing that their extravagances seem excessive only to those who have little hope of being so rewarded. Still others have embraced the self-serving mantras that “greed is good” and that success at any cost to others is justifiable and even desirable. But another group exists, one whose behaviors and attitudes are potentially much more destructive to the organization and its employees than those noted above who are motivated by greed or big egos. This group, the subject of this book, displays a personality disorder rooted in lying, manipulation, deceit, egocentricity, callousness, and other potentially destructive traits.

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

air freight, airport security, banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, Edward Snowden, greed is good, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, large denomination, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Stuxnet, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, WikiLeaks

He usually came up short but that didn’t stop him from playing blackjack on a nightly basis, racking up unwieldy debts that eventually led to his 2010 arrest for bouncing more than $1 million in bad checks at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Gambling is how he met his first backer, Warren Trepp. Trepp got rich in the biggest casino of them all, Wall Street. He had been Michael Milken’s right-hand man in the heyday of Milken’s famous Beverly Hills trading desk during the “greed is good” era of insider trading in the 1980s. When a hungry federal prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani went after Milken for insider trading, he tried to get Trepp to roll over on his boss. Trepp refused, even in the face of a threat that he would be charged himself if he failed to cooperate. Milken went to jail, but Giuliani never could nail Trepp.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

By 2006, the richest 1 percent gobbled up 23 percent of national wealth.16 In the United States and the United Kingdom, the success of the free-market reforms of the 1980s was closely associated with a boom in the financial services industry, which was swiftly reflected in house prices and popular culture. In the States, the boom was captured in the film Wall Street, with its catchphrase “greed is good,” and in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which stood at 950 on the day Reagan took office, reached a peak of over 2,700 in August 1987—before the stock-market crash of October of that year.17 Some of Reagan’s critics on the left never accepted that his economic policies had succeeded.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

For one thing, there are no ads to be seen anywhere in the America pictured in those political commercials, no billboards, no product being sold except Reagan. That’s not America anymore. Reagan’s decade may have been that of supply-side economics, but it was also the decade of demand creation. Yuppies were made, not born. “Greed is good,” chirruped Wall Street’s Ivan Boesky. The message of Reagan’s first inaugural ball and Nancy’s $15,000 dress was clear: It’s cool to consume and flaunt it. The tone of ’80s advertising echoed the sentiment: “Treat Yourself. You Deserve a Break Today. You’re Worth It.” Look out for number one.

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, Drosophila, epigenetics, Extropian, financial engineering, Future Shock, gravity well, greed is good, haute couture, heat death of the universe, hive mind, margin call, mirror neurons, negative equity, phenotype, plutocrats, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, telepresence, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing

The dress code is similarly over the top, as Huw realizes when she notices the djinni is wearing an antique Armani suit. She’s no expert on haute couture: she realizes she probably ought to recognize the designer of the cocktail dress the scanner selected for her, but she’s too busy fighting with the insane footwear to care about such minor details. Mid-1980s: Greed is good. It seems a fitting context in which to discuss the identity of a person or persons who might be trying to steal a planet’s worth of computronium. The whole thing is so massively, monstrously over the top—like a nuclear aircraft carrier tricked out as a private yacht—that it takes Huw a moment to realize that she and the djinni are alone.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

Those firms that have a clearly defined purpose beyond profit maximization, where it is clearly understood that the purpose of the firm is not to make shareholders rich, but to build great products in the service of the social good—these are the firms that have the courage and the skills to navigate transformation. Redefining the purpose of the firm is central to reimagining capitalism. What exactly this means and what it might look like in practice is the subject of the next chapter. 4 DEEPLY ROOTED COMMON VALUES Revolutionizing the Purpose of the Firm Some people think greed is good. But over and over it’s proven that ultimately generosity is better. —PAUL POLMAN, RETIRED CEO OF UNILEVER1 On January 12, 2015, in a packed hotel ballroom in Jacksonville, Florida, Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, announced that beginning in April the firm would be paying a minimum wage of $16/hour.2 Aetna was one of the largest health insurance companies in the world, and his move made headlines.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Current levels are about three times what they were when Ronald Reagan became president. Goldberg was in the ballpark of the right question: why were the networks freaking out about it back then, and not before or after? Among other reasons, reporting on homelessness in the Reagan years was a popular means of decrying the “Greed is good” era. Talking about the issue became a way of showing you cared. This was satirized by Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho. His deranged killer Patrick Bateman, while dining at an upscale restaurant called “espace,” interrupts everyone’s overpriced dinner to give a speech about all of the things the news tells him to care about.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Why worry about being censured by your state's medical society for taking kickbacks to prescribe certain drugs when those groups are more interested in protecting the interests of doctors than of the general public? Why worry about being thrown out of baseball for using steroids when neither of the major leagues has mandatory drug testing? Growing temptations to cheat have been all the more seductive given the trumpeted morality of the free market. If competition is good—if even greed is good—than maybe questionable cutthroat behavior is also good. In principle, few Americans embrace the idea that "might makes right." In practice, this idea now flourishes across our society, and much of the new cheating is among those with the highest incomes and social status. The Winning Class's clout inevitably has produced hubris and a sense that the rules governing what Leona Helmsley called "the little people" do not apply to them.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

air freight, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, computer vision, corporate governance, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, endowment effect, financial innovation, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, IKEA effect, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Murray Gell-Mann, payday loans, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair

The scary thought is that if we did the experiments with nonmonetary currencies that were not as immediately convertible into money as tokens, or with individuals who cared less about their honesty, or with behavior that was not so publicly observable, we would most likely have found even higher levels of dishonesty. In other words, the level of deception we observed here is probably an underestimation of the level of deception we would find across a variety of circumstances and individuals. Now suppose that you have a company or a division of a company led by a Gordon Gekko character who declares that “greed is good.” And suppose he used nonmonetary means of encouraging dishonesty. Can you see how such a swashbuckler could change the mind-set of people who in principle want to be honest and want to see themselves as honest, but also want to hold on to their jobs and get ahead in the world? It is under just such circumstances that nonmonetary currencies can lead us astray.

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

he said in a recent Time magazine interview. Knowing what we do about the state of the American retirement system, he has a point, if not the solution. Kiyosaki’s not howling at you for being in debt like Suze Orman, Dave Ramsey, and David Bach are. He’s howling at you for being in the wrong sort of debt. Greed is good, he tells us. “The problem I sense today,” he writes in Rich Dad, Poor Dad, “is that there are millions of people who feel guilty about their greed. It’s an old conditioning from their childhood. Their desire to have the finer things that life offers. Most have been conditioned subconsciously to say, ‘You can’t have that,’ or ‘You’ll never afford that.’”

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

Survey evidence on charitable giving, and laboratory studies of behaviour in games such as the Ultimatum Game, both show economics students becoming more selfish over the duration of their courses.56 If this kind of intensive exposure to the Homo economicus doctrine increases selfishness, there may well be a similar, albeit milder, effect on people with more limited exposure to the doctrine. Does reading The Economist or Freakonomics make you more selfish? Although exposure to the doctrine from just watching television news is much more limited, the effect may be exaggerated because by that stage the doctrine is caricatured, becoming simply ‘Greed is Good’.57 Unfortunately, in the absence of research studying the impact of the doctrine as presented in the mainstream media, these questions cannot be answered directly. But there is evidence on a related issue. Some constitutional frameworks and legal systems both presume and affirm that citizens can be trusted to act responsibly, cooperate and not always put their narrow self-interest above the common good.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

The rapid increase in hostile takeovers, in which a company is taken over against the will of the existing management, changed the whole corporate culture in the US. Many of those taking over were ‘corporate raiders’ only interested in asset stripping (namely, the sales of valuable assets, regardless of the impact on the long-term viability of the company), immortalized by Gordon ‘Greed-is-good’ Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street. To avoid such a fate, firms had to deliver profits faster than before. Otherwise impatient shareholders would sell up, reducing the share prices and thus exposing the firm to greater danger of hostile takeover. The easiest way for companies to deliver quick profit was through downsizing – reducing the workforce and minimizing investments beyond what is necessary for immediate results, even though these actions diminish the prospect of the company in the longer run.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

CHAPTER 10 I LOOK FORWARD ‘SELLING ENGLAND BY THE POUND’ ‘It is difficult, if not impossible, to combine the citizens’ rights and interests and the private enterprise’s interests, because the private enterprise aims at its natural and justified objective, the biggest possible profit.’ Joseph Chamberlain ‘Greed is good.’ Gordon Gekko The Upper Derwent Valley, Derbyshire. A fine, calm, April evening, the air warm and still, the kiss of breeze very welcome. The journey up here out of Manchester through the city’s weekday rush hour is never something you’d call pleasant; smothered in the damp armpit or bulky backpack of a fellow traveller on a stifling privatised train, or tail to tail in the fuming cars that crawl through the winding bottlenecks of the A57 to Glossop and Sheffield.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

By 2010, the five largest foundation funders had contributed $17.3 million to what was essentially a job bank for conservative judges.20 As Jane Mayer writes in Dark Money, this level of funding allowed the Society to grow “from a pipe dream shared by three ragtag law students into a professional political network of forty-two thousand right-leaning lawyers.”21 A major element of the conservative judicial philosophy honed by the Federalist Society was the legal equivalent of the “greed is good” zeitgeist of the time: inflating money into something grander than dollars and cents. If money was just money, using it to influence the political process was tawdry. But if money was speech, efforts to restrict it were unconstitutional violations of Americans’ First Amendment rights. As such, virtually all restrictions on the amount of money that could be spent on politics should be abolished, the theory went.

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Martha Banta

Albert Einstein, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

CONTENTS Introduction Note on the Text Select Bibliography A Chronology of Thorstein Bunde Veblen THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS Explanatory Notes INTRODUCTION Veblen’s Pivotal Work ‘Everyone’ appears to acknowledge the importance of The Theory of the Leisure Class, for has not Veblen’s 1899 analysis of the socioeconomics of affluent American societies introduced into the vernacular provocative terms such as ‘conspicuous consumption’ still operative in a world that embraces the notion that ‘greed is good’ and celebrates the Donald Trumps and the Paris Hiltons who clutter our ‘pecuniary culture’? The question remains how well Veblen’s study is really ‘known’—both for what it represents within the range of his own long career and in the newly defined disciplines he guided into the modern world that have had a major impact upon our understanding of the relations between business, industry, and social mores.

Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, East Village, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

A serious, hardworking Republican boy bound for Harvard, Yale, or, in the worst scenario, Princeton. That’s me. I’ll be funny only when it’s called for. No more clowning around. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I have just seen Oliver Stone’s Wall Street with my family, and the lessons were clear. Don’t trust outsiders. Don’t get caught. Focus only on wealth creation. Greed is good. I also think I have a trump card: the $280,000 colonial my family has just bought in Little Neck. Packed in my school bag, just in case, I carry an engineer’s report testifying to our new house’s value, including a photograph of the house in the morning sun, its southern exposure swaddled by a row of hyacinths.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

While most traders earning multimillion bonuses no doubt think of themselves as upstanding citizens, the rest of us find it hard to find many shining examples of virtuous behavior on Wall Street or in the City of London. In the notorious words of cinema villain Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas in Wall Street), “Greed is good” is the motto of the markets, but not of Main Street. Likewise, the cartoon “rational economic man” is a selfish being, whereas real people make choices motivated by the moral sentiments of Adam Smith and illuminated by modern evolutionary biology. But does the immorality of the financial markets and the all-out free market ideology they embody in fact corrupt the rest of the economy?

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

The blind worship of strong private property rights has allowed many abuses. Broadly, it is an excuse for the rich and powerful to steal public assets and then claim they are the "wealth creators." It has been the plank for many a coup, invasion, and even genocide on grounds to stop "socialist" regimes and their "mad" policies. It blessed the "greed is good" mantra that eviscerated business ethics in the last decades. It protects the patent system from scrutiny and gives it space to grow. It is the curtain that hides the malevolence of the Para-state. And it is fundamentally and powerfully wrong. Wealth does not come from creating more private property.

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

In a few short months, I’d learned plenty about how the investment banking world really worked. While in training at DLJ, my class of newly minted MBAs had watched the 1987 movie Wall Street. The corporate raider Gordon Gecko, played by a sleek Michael Douglas, was our role model. We adopted his mantra: “Greed is good.” We believed it, having arrived on Wall Street at the height of the dot-com mania. Yahoo went public, making instant millionaires of those who held its stock. Clients begged to buy into the next big thing. After a few years I was working with hedge funds, mutual funds, and wealthy individuals.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Robert Bork and the Chicago crew forced upon us a great forgetting, shattering our capacity to rein corporate power in. It was a breathtaking trick: convincing us that monopolists are good, regulators are bad, and that captured markets are “free.” For forty years, we’ve lived in the Chicago School’s funhouse upside-down land, where greed is good and hourglass-shaped markets make us all better off. By focusing enforcement on “consumer harm,” Borkian antitrust explicitly exempts harms to everyone else from consideration: harms to workers, suppliers, and the environment are all more or less out of scope. And since consumer harm is calculated with incredibly complex (and functionally useless) economic models that can only be created and interpreted by experts in a narrow (and functionally useless) branch of mathematics, we have all been excluded from the debate over market concentration and corporate power for forty years.

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The age of the corporate raider had begun. I LIKE TO tell my students that private equity is a tale of two Gordons. The first Gordon is Gordon Gekko. In this lens, private equity firms and their managers are real-life versions of Oliver Stone’s immoral banker from the movie Wall Street. They believe that “greed is good,” that all is fair in love and business, and that, in the free market, avarice is a competitive advantage. The Gordon Gekko view of private equity is a morality tale about those who create nothing and yet take everything. The second Gordon is Flash Gordon. Seen in this light, the realm of private equity is not the immoral world of Wall Street.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Lake Charles produced the airplane fuel that brought me there and the gasoline I was getting around on, and much of this was produced by companies close by. To prepare for my journey, I re-read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a Tea Party bible lauded by the conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh and former Fox News television commentator Glenn Beck. Rand describes serving the needy as a “monstrous idea.” Charity, she says, is bad. Greed is good. If Ayn Rand appealed to them, I imagined, they’re probably pretty selfish, tough, cold people, and I prepared for the worst. But I was thankful to discover many warm, open people who were deeply charitable to those around them, including an older, white liberal stranger writing a book. Given its liberal reputation, I worried about telling people I taught at U.C.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Assuming a 3 percent commission, your agent can make $8,400 for doing virtually nothing or $9,600 for doing many weeks of work. Which would you choose? On the buy side or the sell side, your agent’s most powerful incentive is to get a deal done, whether it is at a price favorable to you or not. Economics teaches us how to get the incentives right. As Gordon Gekko told us in the movie Wall Street, greed is good, so make sure that you have it working on your side. Yet Mr. Gekko was not entirely correct. Greed can be bad—even for people who are entirely selfish. Indeed, some of the most interesting problems in economics involve situations in which rational individuals acting in their own best interest do things that make themselves worse off.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Brierley started a share-market tip sheet and began investing in the share market when he was still a teenager, and in 1961, while still in his twenties, he registered his own investment company. He soon discovered the value of agitating boards to realise value by breaking up their companies. By the 1970s, he’d matured from a pesky corporate gadfly to a feared asset stripper and corporate raider, wrote Yvonne van Dongen in a May 2011 feature on Brierley. ‘In the “greed is good” 1980s, he was recast more favourably as an entrepreneur, made a knight of the realm and chairman of New Zealand’s largest bank, Bank of New Zealand,’ van Dongen noted.3 Brierley Investments had become the largest company in New Zealand, with investments in 300 companies including Galeries Lafayette in Paris and Air New Zealand.

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

“The trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander,” said Samuelson, referring to Greenspan’s early devotion to the absolutist free marketeer Rand, the patron saint of unbridled, selfish capitalism. “You can take the boy out of the cult, but you can’t take the cult out of the boy. He actually had instruction, probably pinned on the wall: ‘Nothing from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is good.’ ”35 And although “at bottom Greenspan was an okay character. That’s different from Rand and [Arthur] Burns—both despicable human beings,” Greenspan had displayed recklessness when, “after 1996 [and] clear signs of a stock bubble he (rashly?) refused to engage in any preventative against-the-winds policies. … He had no reason to believe that after the bubble burst he could effectively take corrective action.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Typically, there may be restraints in their dealing directly with the agency from which they came. But they can give advice to their corporate colleagues about what to say to whom—and let their presence be felt in a variety of other ways. This is an arena where what is required above all else is the right norms and ethics. And the greed-is-good ethic of twenty-first-century American capitalism works against creating the right norms. An ex-public official, especially one with further political ambitions, should worry that accepting a large check from Goldman Sachs in exchange for a short speech might look unseemly. And this might be especially so for an ex-secretary of treasury or state or the president.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

A more definitive portrait of modern finance would probably be the movie Wall Street, which had a profound effect on the city’s business culture, although probably not the effect its heavy-handed lefty director Oliver Stone expected. While the rest of America understood Michael Douglas’s iconic Gordon Gekko character as a villain, and saw his famed “greed is good” speech as incisive satire, many aspiring Wall Street traders sincerely thought—and still think—that Gekko was the movie’s hero. In the early 1990s, Wall Street saw a massive influx of young Gekko wannabes who thought waiting any amount of time to get fabulously wealthy was for losers, or at the very least for people who had never read Sun Tzu.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

Our demand to get our most urgent needs met is what makes the goods profitable. Smith’s Invisible Hand was one of the first introductions of the revolutionary concept of “spontaneous order,” which we discussed in Chapter Two as today including biological evolution, the Internet, language, and social norms. The misunderstanding is that Smith believed “greed is good,” which triggers revulsion against his Invisible Hand on the left. Some on the right have the misunderstanding that Smith gives a blanket endorsement to all profits by the existing businessmen. Actually, Smith held many negative views about both the rich and businessmen. In his first classic, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, Smith spoke of the rich as a “few lordly masters,” consumed by “vain and insatiable desires,” not to mention their “natural selfishness and rapacity.”9 As for businessmen, Smith in The Wealth of Nations spoke of “the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit, of merchants and manufacturers,” which sounds like something he had personally observed in Glasgow.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

By the end of their second semester, however, students shifted to “business manager mode,” placing more emphasis than before on maximizing shareholder returns and less on producing high-quality goods and services—a change that, the survey said, reflected “the powerful place shareholders occupy in the first-year curriculum.” Business schools teach, quite literally, that greed is good, and that rational self-interest is economically and socially beneficial. But if there is anything that the last few years of economic crisis, recession, and slow painful rebound have taught us, it’s that the conventional economic wisdom doesn’t always work. THE MORALITY OF BUSINESS EDUCATION An increasing number of business educators at top schools are concerned not only that MBA programs are churning out number crunchers without consciences, but that the programs themselves no longer uphold the mission of America’s top universities, which has always been to preserve, create, and transmit knowledge to advance the public good.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Individuals and entrepreneurs persist in developing new drilling and completion technologies because it’s in their interest to do so. The more they produce from the properties on which they lease or own the minerals, the more money they make. When it comes to getting oil and gas out of the ground, private ownership of mineral rights provides proof positive that greed is good. Without greed—the greed that springs from individuals owning the minerals beneath their feet—the vast oil and natural-gas fields in Texas, California, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and other states would likely remain underdeveloped. Increased domestic gas production—as well as more domestic oil production—will mean more royalty payments to average Americans.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

CHAPTER FOUR INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED Public Relations and the Disconnect from One Another The Self Is the Source “We’re trained in our society to give, but to feel uncomfortable taking or receiving. But if you don’t take, you are denying another person from giving.” Three of the women smile and two others half-nod, glazed over. But the younger one in the corner still appears unconvinced by the life coach leading the session. “What’s that really mean, Eileen?” Amy asks. “Greed is good?” “Well, sure,” answers Eileen, a middle-aged and middleweight woman in a chocolate-brown pantsuit. She doesn’t appear to realize that Amy was quoting from the movie Wall Street. “That’s not how they put it, but yes. We have to learn to accept the bounty that life offers. It’s the key to seeing self as source.

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

Leach was the master of price-tag framing, showing viewers some of the lavish residences, luxury vehicles, and exotic travel destinations enjoyed by the world’s wealthiest people.93 At the end of each episode, Leach wished his viewers “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” As that tag line suggests, the lifestyles of the rich and famous shown on Leach’s program were nothing more than “wishes” or “dreams” for the typical viewer. However, the series supported one of the key tenets of the gospel of materialism—namely, “Greed is good,” as stockbroker Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) declares in the 1980s film Wall Street. During the economic crisis of the 2000s, in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Michael Douglas reprises his role as Gordon Gekko, who emerges twenty years later from prison and seeks to rebuild his career and repair his relationship with his daughter.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

Yet Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism. Smith taught people to think about the economy as a ‘win-win situation’, in which my profits are also your profits. Not only can we both enjoy a bigger slice of pie at the same time, but the increase in your slice depends upon the increase in my slice.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

For it fundamentally changed how we saw each other and the obligations to each other that we felt, with its valorising of qualities such as hyper-competitiveness and the pursuit of self-interest, regardless of the wider consequences. It is not that humans are essentially selfish – research in evolutionary biology makes clear that we are not.52 But with politicians actively championing a self-seeking, dog-eat-dog mindset, and ‘greed is good’ (the maxim Gordon Gekko famously uttered in the 1987 movie Wall Street) serving as neoliberalism’s bumper sticker, qualities such as solidarity, kindness and caring for each other were not only undervalued, but deemed irrelevant human traits. Under neoliberalism we were reduced to homo economicus, rational humans consumed only by our own self-interest.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

It signed a large lease for more than 120,000 square feet at 222 Broadway, where its own offices would sit alongside space rented by members. The boxy lower Manhattan building was where Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street—the 1980s critique of corporate avarice—was filmed. (Neumann’s office was down the hall from where Gordon Gekko proclaimed that “greed is good.”) Growing bigger meant the company was burning through the Benchmark cash. Neumann had left the task of additional fund-raising until perilously late in the process. By this time, WeWork had one or two months of cash—at most—left in its accounts. Fund-raising is always a high-wire act for money-losing startups, and Neumann was habitually late to lots of things, so this wasn’t terribly out of character.

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The pursuit of income equality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum.’13 The audiences for Caryl Churchill’s verse play, Serious Money, which opened at the Royal Court in spring 1987, were notoriously swollen by the City types that the drama satirized, who all loved it. The crooked American financier Ivan Boesky, who told an audience at Berkeley University that ‘greed is healthy’, was seen as the voice of the times in the USA. In 1989, Gordon Brown wrote an assessment of Thatcher’s record, to which he gave the title ‘Where Greed is Good’. Yet, having grown up in reasonable comfort, and having married a rich man when she was young, Mrs Thatcher herself was not greedy; the political historian, Mark Garnett, who is a long way from being a Thatcherite, concluded that ‘a verdict of “greedy” could only be brought in by a jury which was biased against her for other reasons’.14 It would be an exercise in futility to try to measure whether the British were more or less greedy after 1985 than in other periods since the war.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Mercantilism said that exports made you rich and imports made you poor, a fallacy mocked by Adam Smith when he pointed out that Britain selling durable hardware to France in exchange for perishable wine was a missed opportunity to achieve the ‘incredible aug mentation of the pots and pans of the country’. Marxism said that capitalists got rich because workers got poor, another fallacy. In the film Wall Street, the fictional Gordon Gekko not only says that greed is good; he also adds that it’s a zero-sum game where somebody wins and somebody loses. He is not necessarily wrong about some speculative markets in capital and in assets, but he is about markets in goods and services. The notion of synergy, of both sides benefiting, just does not seem to come naturally to people.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn and Ivan Boesky, made headlines by taking significant stakes in businesses in a practice known as “greenmail”; either the existing management would buy them out at a profit, or another predator would use their stake as the basis of a deal. The process was dramatised in the film Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, proclaims that “Greed is good.” The main function of the takeover wave was to break up conglomerates and force companies to focus on a single industry. (The argument was that conglomerates were inefficient; shareholders could get the benefits of diversification by investing in a wide range of companies.)30 The value of takeover deals in the US in the 1980s was $1.3trn and 28% of the country’s largest 500 companies in 1980 had been bought by the end of the decade.

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day