Greed as a Cause (Epiphenomenon Fallacy)

Greed as a Cause

Whenever an economic crisis occurs, greed is pointed to as the cause, which leaves us with the impression that if we could go to the root of greed and extract it from life, crises would be eliminated. Further, we tend to believe that greed is new, since these wild economic crises are new. This is an epiphenomenon: greed is much older than systemic fragility. It existed as far back as the eye can go into history. From Virgil’s mention of greed of gold and the expression radix malorum est cupiditas (from the Latin version of the New Testament), both expressed more than twenty centuries ago, we know that the same problems of greed have been propounded through the centuries, with no cure, of course, in spite of the variety of political systems we have developed since then. Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now, published close to a century and a half ago, shows the exact same complaint of a resurgence of greed and con operators that I heard in 1988 with cries over of the “greed decade,” or in 2008 with denunciations of the “greed of capitalism.” With astonishing regularity, greed is seen as something (a) new and (b) curable. A Procrustean bed approach; we cannot change humans as easily as we can build greed-proof systems, and nobody thinks of simple solutions.1

Likewise “lack of vigilance” is often proposed as the cause of an error (as we will see with the Société Générale story in Book V, the cause was size and fragility). But lack of vigilance is not the cause of the death of a mafia don; the cause of death is making enemies, and the cure is making friends.