Definition Of Greed

Everybody is using the term, greed in reference to business these days. So I have a simple question: What is the definition of greed as it pertains to private enterprise? There must be millions of people who can answer my question.

The definition of greed is pretty simple -- it's wanting more than you need.

I think we refine the definition of greed to justify our own unnecessary desires. Pete Singer (the bioethicist) would probably say that anything above what we need for basic subsistence is greed. Religion calls greed for food "gluttony". Greed to accumulate things (hoarding) is considered a mental disorder. But greed to accumulate things that don't climb up the walls of your house (Beanie Babies or rare coins) is "collecting".

And I believe greed in business to the extent that you can own the big house, drive the big car, wear the fancy clothes, and bedeck your family in jewels is called "success". But I believe when one reaches a certain pinacle of success, one thinks one "needs" the big house, big car, big hair, big necklaces, etc.

Where does greed come in when it relates to private enterprise? I think that's easy, too, if one approaches it from an ethical standpoint. Enterprise which enriches lives (even if it's selling a product to make some aspect of life easier, even if it's frivolous (my uncle once invented a donut dipper, something that would allow you to dip even the last morsel of donut into your coffee, without scalding your fingers)), enterprise which provides jobs, enterprise which shares with the community, enterprise which provides salaries to raise people to self-sufficiency, enterprise which honestly pays its taxes and obeys laws and regulations, enterprise which does no harm to the environment, enterprise which learns from mistakes and remakes itself into something better -- that is not a greedy enterprise.

And yes, I recognize that quite often, that this is sort of enterprise exists only in one's dreams.

The definition of greed is pretty simple -- it's wanting more than you need.

Where does greed come in when it relates to private enterprise? I think that's easy, too, if one approaches it from an ethical standpoint. Enterprise which enriches lives,... enterprise which provides jobs, enterprise which shares with the community, enterprise which provides salaries to raise people to self-sufficiency, enterprise which honestly pays its taxes and obeys laws and regulations, enterprise which does no harm to the environment, enterprise which learns from mistakes and remakes itself into something better -- that is not a greedy enterprise.




Yes but how do you define need? Need has to be defined in relation to a period of time. Almost everybody has more than they need at any given moment. Most of us have way more than we need for the next month. But very few now possess everything they will need over their entire lifetimes. So, at any one point, how much is too much to have?

Most people might settle for the definition of need as being what one needs over their entire lifetime because it is obvious that need cannot continue beyond death. So one might say that if a person already has enough money to last a lifetime and they still want more, they are greedy. But the problem with wealth is that it can be lost through such things as crime, wars, disasters, and market downturns. So if you have enough wealth to last a lifetime, wouldn’t it be better to have twice that much in case you lose some of it?

Beyond the problem of determining the time period over which need should be established, is the problem of determining the need rate of consumption from moment to moment. Consider a short time period of one hour for example. Some people live in mansions and some live in shacks. People living in mansions are fulfilling a much greater amount of need in that one hour than those living in shacks. The people in mansions have a greater need, so to service that greater need; can they have more wealth than people living in shacks before they (the people in mansions) are considered greedy?

But I asked the question about the term greed being applied to business because it is currently very fashionable to do so. You mentioned the attributes of a business that would define it as non-greedy. But curiously you left out the one attribute that you say defines personal greed; that is, wanting more than you need. Are you saying that corporations can want to earn as much as possible and actually do so without being greedy as long as they enrich lives, share with the community, provide salaries to raise people to self-sufficiency, honestly pay their taxes and obeys laws and regulations, do no harm to the environment, and learn from mistakes and remake themselves into something better?

Are you saying that corporations can want to earn as much as possible and actually do so without being greedy as long as they enrich lives, share with the community, provide salaries to raise people to self-sufficiency, honestly pay their taxes and obeys laws and regulations, do no harm to the environment, and learn from mistakes and remake themselves into something better?

I am. But I need to qualify this by saying that I'm thinking of small businesses at this point -- I think it's VERY difficult for large businesses (especially publicly held corporations) to live this kind of less-greedy life, because public corporations must answer to stockholders who want -- what else? -- for their investment to grow (they want more money, and more money). But small and medium sized companies can and often do this very equitably. My aunt works for a midwestern corporation which has in recent years gone public. But before that, when it was owned by the one guy, it was a pretty magnificent place to work (it's not bad now -- just different). The owner and his family lived modestly. The children did not get fancy new cars, although they do have trust funds that don't even kick in until their 40s. Profits were shared. Wages were really good -- quality pay for quality work. Huge grants were given to the city for parks, or museums, or art. An endowment fund was created for charities, and twice a year, employees would compete for grants to given to the employee's favorite charity. The owner would often help out employees with troubles -- there are stories of medical bills paid, burnt homes rebuilt, and once, a new car showing up in a driveway.

He could have been laying up wealth for that unforeseeable future. He preferred to make his workplace a family, in the truest sense of caring for each other, helping each other out, treating each other with respect, etc. He preferred to raise up his community, his church, his city, his people, than to own a fancy car, or the biggest house in town.

You say wealth can be lost through war, disease, etc. And you're right that many people who think they have enough, may not have enough to meet those unforeseen needs. But what will it take to weather war? -- will it take mounds of gold in a pit in the ground? Will that mound of gold have helped someone near ground zero at Hiroshima? -- would that gold have rescued a Jew from Auschwitz? Would that gold have saved your great-grandfather from the influenza pandemic -- would any amount of gold have bought a cure for that?

Some things are beyond the ability of money to control or ameliorate. Our goal should be to have enough -- enough for present needs, and common future needs (and a common future need is certainly to pay attention to possible future medical needs such as nursing home expenses). But to have enough to plan for every twist in the road, for every possible potential future? -- to lay up enough money for the cancer treatment you MIGHT need, for the war that MIGHT strike, for the space aliens that MIGHT land on your house? If you do that, when will you ever live in the moment, and enjoy what you have now?

Greed in business is profiteering without principle. It has little to do with "too much" or "not enough". Greed is short-sighted and is actually punished by the market, not rewarded. Greed does not make a business successful, customers do.

Take for example the peanut packing plant that shipped tainted peanuts to customers all over the US resulting in deaths and sickness. Instead of taking a hit in profit to do the "right" thing and stick to principle by not risking harm to their customers, they shipped them out. This was an example of greed. The plant and company was shutdown and bankrupted days after the discovery.

Greed in business is like being stuck in the desert with 6 other people. You are the sole owner of several gallons of water and you refuse to share unless the others give you EVERY dollar they have in return for the water. Because of greed, you sell ALL of the water. In the end, you have a fist full of dollars and NO water. Do you suppose any of the others will now take your dollars for their water?

Succinctly said, Price! -- "profiteering without principle".

That peanut plant is in my part of the country -- rural southwest Georgia. My husband's best friend is a peanut inspector there (and before people get all huffy, a peanut inspector does NOTHING MORE than grade the quality and size of the peanut, and pull samples for other people to test for diseases and mold). He says to pull that truckload of tainted peanut paste would have cost several tens of thousands of dollars (I can't remember the figure he said, but I'm thinking it was around $40,000). To save $40k, they destroyed the company, and put a couple hundred people out of work -- in a town with a population of about 4000. That is an excellent example of the short-sighted nature of greed.

I would argue that even looking over the needs of an entire lifetime, and trying to accumulate goods/money enough for that lifetime, is also short-sighted. There are transient things within one's lifetime that need taking care of, that have nothing to do with money -- for example, children, who are directly in one's life for a mere 20 years out of the 80 or so you hope to live; or one's job/business, which might be part of your life for 50 of the 80 years of your life; or spouse, who might be there for 60 of your 80 years (unless you are such a short-sighted accumulator that she leaves within 10 years, taking the kids with her).

There are other ways to be greedy. My in-laws, who lived through the depression, won't throw away things, and so they accumulate (not in the sense of the mental-illness, thank heaven!, but for example, my FIL has ten ice chests, some of which are rotting in the sun, that he won't throw away; and when he cleared out his mother's house after her death, he saved even the paper towel roll from her kitchen (and it's still there in storage, 20 years after that death)). We are moving, and as we clear out our house, my husband and I are arguing over the sheer tons of CRUD he wants to move. He wants to move wood! -- pieces of wood that he bought to fix this, build that, patch the other thing. Lengths as short as 18 inches of 2x6. I hear the constant refrain of "You know how much I paid for that? -- two dollars a foot!" and "We might need it in the new house". He wants to break his back, splinter his fingers, and stretch out the time and space we need to move, for a small mountain of pieces of wood. He even laboriously moved the wood from the garage to a trailer (under a tarp) so we could paint the garage, and had plans to haul it the 100 miles to our rental, where he would pile it in the garage until we bought our new house, whatever that may be (it might even be brick, and not need wood!). He even wanted to move the pieces of siding we have, lap masonite specific to this house, and not likely to be on the side of any house we purchase in future, because he bought it, and he wasn't going to give it for "free" to the purchaser. I am happy to report that after moving it a few times, he decided he was an idiot, and gave away useful pieces to our neighbor, and threw the rest away. I would argue several layers of greed -- he was greedy when he purchased more than he needed, he was greedy to try to retain it for some unforeseeable future, and he was short-sighted about what was important in life at that particular moment -- because all the while, his wife, his partner (me!) was steaming mad that he wasted time and energy on a pile of wood, when there are other, more useful things to move, and other parts of the home-selling process that need his attention.

Yes, there may come a day when we will wish we had that 18 inches of 2x6. On that day, though, we can run to a hardware store and buy the piece we need, in the exact length we need. More crucially, though -- there may never come a day when we need 18 inches of 2x6, and we would have wasted moments in our life moving wood, piling up wood, adding to the pile of wood, cleaning around the wood, then eventually tossing the wood because termites got into it (ask me about the pile of wood his father stored up, which he's afraid to move because he knows there's termites in it, and so it sits there, termites eating and breeding and growing, while he cannot act).

When I asked for a definition, I wanted something that could be measured so we could all agree on what was or was not greedy. Otherwise the term can be thrown like a poison dart at people simply because we don’t like them. It seems to me that people are often using the label, greed as a weapon to insult those who have more than they do. It seems like I hear this at least once a day now.

So far, I have gotten this definition: Wanting more than you need. But I think that it is impossible to determine actual need let alone one’s own perception of their own need. So, in order to make a judgment about other people’s greed, we have to also make a judgment about their need. Would that not be an act of judgmentalism?

I agree that there is wisdom in living for the moment and not getting caught up in a rat race to acquire possessions with the expectation that they will bring permanent happiness. But this is a personal decision. I certainly would not label someone as greedy just because they were insecure about not having enough or thought they could acquire happiness through possessions. Who am I to decide what lines other people can or cannot cross?

I think greed is actually a political term of propaganda to accustom people to distrust capitalism and turn to big government socialism to level the playing field. Differences in personal wealth are a natural consequence of a free market system where each individual is 100% motivated to produce because they are allowed to keep the fruits of their labor. The charge of greed is an expression of class envy whereby it is postulated that the rich have gotten rich at the expense of the non-rich. The way the term is used today, wouldn’t everybody agree that the rich are greedy? And that the only way they can avoid that label is to give away a large amount of what is deemed excess by the non-rich. While some resent the rich, I see extreme beauty in the freedom to get rich. That is the freedom in the "free" market system.

When you learn how to measure internal qualities externally, let us know. Many things are qualitative, subjective, relative and (not surprisingly) subject to value judgments and can be used and or interpreted in any manner of ways. When has it ever been different?

Good point, Blixet. It's like that one discussion we had here a few years ago, about how much one should accumulate for retirement. The only possible answer is "enough". Laying aside greed, consider merely the differences in market values in housing. I have a beautiful 2200 sq ft home that we put on the market at $119k. In Los Angeles, you probably can't get a cardboard box under a bridge for that price, while in South Dakota, you can probably get some acreage to go along with that house. And then there are the attendant property taxes, utility costs, cost of repair/labor in your area, etc. And that's just the house.

Euclid -- I think you're jumping the gun. I hear a lot of shouts of socialism these days, but I don't see it that way. What I see is the continuation of capitalism's growing pains, which began wayyyy back with the window tax and the manservant tax, going through Sinclair's "The Jungle" and the minimum wage, and now flowing into questions about what successful corporations owe their employees (health care benefits? massive bonuses?) and perhaps even the beginning of the end of unions.

And we have these growing pains because we Americans -- along with our peers in other countries -- have undergone a sea-change in the way we feel about our fellows. There are no longer better or lower classes -- there are only the advantaged and disadvantaged. Children are no longer a dime a dozen, easily and anonymously lost to disease and crime and just as easily replaced -- now they are precious resources into which adults pour their hopes and ambitions, and the loss of even one is mournful. In short, we now value human life, regardless of class differences. That value has also taken a path which has put it on a collision course with rampantly unregulated and irresponsible market capitalism (note this is very different from responsible capitalism). It may be unfortunate that the only language we have found to express this is wrapped in the word "greed", which is a word of low cunning and simplicity that it does not adequately express the conflict between our humanitarian values and our market capitalistic values.

If I understand the point that blixet made, it is that we should not throw around accusations of greed because we cannot measure the subjective, internal qualities of other people.

Yet I must have heard the accusation of greed leveled about twenty times already this morning, just listening to the news. There was a time when I would hear the word greed maybe once a year. Now I hear it about once an hour. What’s going on?

The purpose of the media is to deliver viewers tiny attention span to the advertisers. Emotionally charged content does it pretty well apparently or else we'd have more channels with actual intelligent content. It's all noise. Turn off and tune out. I'm sure there are huge, significant issues that we as a people need to deal with, but braying jackasses the likes of which seem to dominate the available media distribution modalities aren't much good at anything but making a ruckus. And now that you are good and titillated here's a message from our sponsors.

If I understand the point that blixet made, it is that we should not throw around accusations of greed because we cannot measure the subjective, internal qualities of other people.

No -- merely that words like "enough" and "greed" and "too much" with regard to what a person needs to go through life are not quantifiable.

Yet I must have heard the accusation of greed leveled about twenty times already this morning, just listening to the news. There was a time when I would hear the word greed maybe once a year. Now I hear it about once an hour. What’s going on?

see def. "Bandwagon". Besides, populism is back! The "little guy" is in vogue once again! It's only a matter of time before they bring back "Green Acres" and "Andy Griffith". Maybe they will even bring that show from the 50s where the millionaire shows up at people's houses....

It's not that hard to get people whipped up into a agitated state. Controlling the outcome of that energy is very difficult. People get ****ed, they want heads to roll, get yourself involved in that and pretty soon somebody with an agenda likely will turn that attention back on you. Eventually, even a strong wind blows itself out. And hey, Andy of Mayberry is on for several hours everyday around these here parts.

You get a line and I'll get a pole, honey....

[QUOTE=Puck]No -- merely that words like "enough" and "greed" and "too much" with regard to what a person needs to go through life are not quantifiable.

QUOTE]

I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Do you mean that words like “enough,” “greed,” and “too much” are quantifiable if you dissociate them from what a person needs to go through life?

Maybe -- it really depends on the context. For example, if a glass holds 8 oz of drink, but if you pour 10 oz into it, you have poured "too much".

When we spent over $100 on Christmas gifts for her, my mother in law insists we have done "too much". But when we do the dishes after she cooks a meal, we have done "enough".

When my husband nags me one too many times about cleaning something, I say I've had "enough", but what I really mean is "I've had too much". -- the variances of our language, and the complexities of our relationships are just some of the reasons why quantifying these words is difficult.

Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to; To-may-to, To-mah-to. Let's call the whole thing off!

Speaking of greed -- my husband and I have our house on the market. We got a full-price offer within three days, and we are working with these people. DH thinks we underpriced the house, and he wants to figure out a way to get a bidding war going. I think we got our price, and we shouldn't be greedy.

There's that magic word! Who is right?

Puck, I can see how the word could come up in that kind of situation, but I would not call it greed. However, I am not sure how your agreement works. If you get an offer for what you are asking, are you obligated to accept it per your real estate agreement? Or can you refuse any offer, no matter how much it is?

I know that it can be disconcerting to list your house and get an offer for what you are asking, especially if it happens real fast. If you accept it, you will always feel that you could have gotten more. With a sale the size of a house, the extra amount that you might imagine that you could have gotten would be very significant compared to ordinary day to day transactions. You would hate to close and feel like you left $10,000 on the table. Listing a house and getting an offer for your price is kind of like running at a door to break it down and having someone open it just as you are about to hit it.

To start a bidding war, you would need another bidder. Do you have more than one offer that meets your price? If you only have the one offer, you could still raise your price, but even if that were permitted in your real estate agreement, it would probably turn off the buyer so he or she would just walk away on principle.

But even if you had two offers that met your price, you would risk losing both of them if you tried to create an auction for them to bid against each other. That hazard might be seen as a sort of karmic retribution for greed. I regard the question of whether it would be greedy as being something only you can decide because I believe nobody else can accurately determine whether someone else is greedy. But for oneself, I think it pays to consider the effect of greed. If I were in your situation, I would probably consider it in terms of the basic greed concept.

I would also think of it in terms of basic financial risk, just like the risk of an investment, or the risk/reward foundation of capitalism. It would be the same kind of risk that you take just by listing the house in the first place. You have to set a price, and you want as much as you can get. But if you set the price too high, you take the risk that the house might not sell, or it might take a long time to sell.

Good points, Euclid. We priced the house for a quick sale in a normal market -- we thought in this sluggish economy (and our area has been hard-hit, with plant closures and people out of work) the house would sit for six months at least. Considering my husband was unemployed for six months, I'm looking at it as a spiritual reward for our previous suffering! -- a nice quick sale, at our price.

We had some other offers, but I think "on principle" they didn't want to go over full price. Besides, I think at most, we might be leaving $4k on the table. It's definitely not five figures! I think it's worth it, to not have it on the market another four or five months! Oh, and they are paying closing costs, too, so it's a true full-price offer. I thank the universe, and happily accept the gift -- DH, though, keeps yammering about what $4k would buy. He's ruining my karmic thankfulness!

Congrats on the quick sale. Hopefully it's smooth sailing through the close and the move. I'm sure it will all work out well, and your husband will come to his own realization in time. Where will you settle next?

We are moving to the town where my university is located. I've been driving 100 miles (one way) to work. DH's new job is an hour south of my university, so it's a good place to be for us! But housing is more expensive here -- a house like the one we're leaving behind is easily $50-60k more here. That's probably one reason why a price that was perfectly fine a month ago is -- after weeks of house hunting -- no longer good enough!

I understand. In fact, I fully expect to have to follow in your footsteps in a couple of years. It's stressful just thinking about it.

greed is good, we just need regulation and wachtdogs so it doesnt get out of control
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