Larry Summers, the White House economic advisor, is now saying that we need a little bit more greed in the current crisis:
While greed is no virtue, entrepreneurship and the search for opportunity is what we need today. We need a program that breaks these vicious cycles. We need to instill the trust that allows opportunity to overcome fear and enables families and businesses to again imagine a brighter future. And we need to create this confidence without allowing it to lead to unstable complacency.
Greed is not a virtue, apparently, but we need a lot more virtuous greedy men and women to start thinking about themselves and spending more in order to reverse the economic downturn. I wrote about this same topic in August, 2008, when the big thing to talk about was high gas prices and the greedy oil executives who were stealing all of our money. It’s amazing how much changes in just eight months. The same men Americans deplored in August are the ones who we look to for deliverance in times of trouble.
May I recall the fictional Gordon Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech by Michael Douglas in Wall Street? Granted the speech is in a slightly different context, the tones seem to bear some similarities. Maybe Summers’s statement would be better received if he used the word ‘ambition’ instead of greed.