Greed is to defect in game theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Its somebody who instills distrust in society by taking advantage of it.

Rent seeking and corruption are two definitions that spring to mind.

I think those are good ones because they're definable in ways that we can probably come to a consensus on.

The problem is the term greed is often used in a pejorative way as a proxy for success. If you work hard and achieve a lot and that comes with financial rewards, you are greedy by definition. Add in some snark about how the work hard part doesn't count somehow, and that's the modern critique of capitalism.

Oh, and rent seeking and corruption are because capitalism too and not at all human flaws seen to an even greater degree in every other economic system ever devised.

I think that the issue is when the financial rewards are dramatically greater than how much harder someone could conceivably be working.

A billionaire could conceivably work much harder than the median person. However, they don't work 8000 times harder ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122k).

Why is the "hardness" of the work the key criteria? If you compare "value to society based on peoples willingness to pay", then the ratio of that between a billionaire and the median person probably is 8000x - the founders that become billionaires usually capture only a tiny fraction of the value they create, but we tend to take that value for granted and it's hard to measure. So we only see the billions of dollars they have, not the 10s or 100's of billions of dollars of value they create.

The thing is nobody gets to build a fortune in the billions from saving up their salary. The principal way to do it is through ownership and control of a company. So what's the alternative to private individuals founding companies, finding ways to provide valuable goods and services, employ lots of people and grow successful businesses. Is that something we want to discourage? I think we all benefit from having hard working, innovative people creating, leading and running big companies. Or even from investors deploying capital so that it grows companies and expands beneficial economic activities.

part from my first job working for the government here in the UK all my other jobs have been for companies founded and run by private individuals. They've helped me put food on my table and clothes on my children.

On the other hand I do agree that when it comes to inheritance, rent seeking, financial manipulation, etc there's a lot to do to close loopholes and create a more equitable system. There is a good argument to be made that the main reasons inequality has risen are not good ones. I do not see those as fundamentally flaws in capitalism, they're certainly flaws but you get abuses in any economic system. They're not fundamental. The Netherlands is definitely a capitalist society, but they also have a wealth tax for example. There are good arguments for land value taxes, which some countries use to good effect. There are plenty of tools available to us.

I don't think it's black and white. I have no issue with someone starting a business and becoming hundreds of times more wealthy than the median American. However, I think that's a lot different than becoming thousands of times more wealthy.

Opposition to addressing inequality in the US tends to take the form of arguing that the rich worked harder, earned their wealth, are more valuable, etc.; therefore, it is immoral to redistribute that wealth. The argument that I am attempting to make is that the differences in wealth are so dramatic that it isn't realistic that they earned it in the sense that free market advocates are implying.

I think if you're opposed to people obtaining that much wealth is, how do you stop them? How do you prevent Elon Musk from investing heavily in Tesla, growing the company and ending up owning billions of dollars worth of it's shares?

They may not work 8000 times harder, but they may bring to the table a skill which is 8000 times more valuable than a shelf stocker at Walmart.

That's certainly possible, but the argument that usually gets made is that they worked harder and therefore earned being a billionaire.

That being said, I think it's also unlikely that they brought a skill to the table that's 8000 times more valuable. My understanding is that people who become billionaires do so by leveraging capital.

They both seem fine to me. Rent seeking keeps system stable. It keeps a balance between crash-and-burn vs absolute no risk types by taking little risks to collect rent and providing some useful service.

As a third world native I find corruption works better than everyone mindlessly following law under one self-righteous government becomes illegal under the next one, thereby making citizens life hell.

One approach might be to compare how much wealth someone is attempting to attain with how much they could conceivably be outperforming the average person.

For example, if we make a back of the envelope estimate that an elite person has skills that are 10 times those of an average person (10 times smarter, stronger, more charismatic, better educated, etc.) and works 3 times longer then they could conceivably be 30 times more productive. If, to be conservative, we doubled that, then we could define greed as attempting to amass more than 60 times more wealth than the average person.

What if our elite 30x productivity person takes a significant risk? If he flips a coin and wins he should rightfully expect 60x

And you can be much more than 10x more productive than your average person without being 10x smarter. You can just have skills or have an idea that allows you to scale your contributions much more than an average person.

For instance, if we can teach cars to drive themselves, we have the capacity to save hundreds of millions, if not billions, of man hours a day.

The people who made significant contributions to that effort will have contributed thousands of times more to society than an average person.

If a surgeon saves 50 lives a year, I'd say that's a lot more than 10x what I'm doing.

I agree, it's perfectly reasonable for someone who takes a risk to receive more than I do. I could even see them receiving hundreds of times more than I do. That's a lot different than them receiving 8000 times more ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122 thousand).

Yeah, especially when there's occasional extremists that refuse to acknowledge that putting one's own first isn't the natural state of things.

I guess the way forward is to build a sustainable future for everyone and their families. And to get everyone to agree it's the best way to go about things.

> putting one's own first isn't the natural state of things

I am very confused about this statement, can you please explain what is the "natural state of things" ?

Let's imagine a hypothetical crisis, say a building on fire. You can save your own child/spouse/relative or you can save a complete stranger. You will succeed in saving any of them, but not both.

Most people will chose child/spouse/relative without thinking twice and doing so is quite natural. Not everyone agree on that though, and would argue that the potential benefit the stranger could be to society should be taken into the equation.

Luckily, reality isn't that black and white in most cases, but most people will prioritize their in-group. That's just the way people work.

Clearly, people will prefer their own in-group. I think, however, you just made the parent poster's point.

People will often prefer their own in-group to themselves.

Thus, it depends on how one defines the in-group, and one's own interests.

Looking at Coldtea's earlier comment:

>It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.

showing how the 'in-group' has shrunk. Used to be a larger tribe, now you could be lucky to consider it an atomic family.

Definitely. I was agreeing with the parent post, while adding a semi-sarcastic reply about everyone having to agree before things start moving.

Community-building might be a possible solution, but how do you pull people away from their screens and get them out on the streets to make new connections and then turn that into a positive force that actually makes a different?

I have a trick to define greed: pauses. A bad greed impulse based system won't survive a stop, it's a hog, a leak .. it needs to keep going to survive.

I think there are many examples, from French Revolution to day to day examples of people throwing others under the bus for a promotion.