'Greed is not good, it makes sociopaths,' Seattle entrepreneur says
Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer has a rebuttal to the famous line delivered by actor Michael Douglas, in his role as corporate raider Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie Wall Street: "Greed is good."
"Greed is not good: Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist -- It makes you a sociopath," Hanauer said in a TEDSummit talk in Edinburgh, Scotland, earlier this summer. Its text was released Friday.
"In an economy as dependent on cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society."
The very rich Hanauer has put himself in harm's way, becoming what Franklin D. Roosevelt was described as in the 1930s -- a "traitor to his class." He has lately made a public career of pushing back against America's new Guilded Age in which wealth has flowed to the top.
He has championed the $15-an-hour minimum wage, argued that corporations aren't responsible only to shareholders, and helped underwrite the state's gun safety initiatives.
"I'm not just in the top 1%, I'm in the top 0.1% of all earners," he told his Edinburgh audience. "I have come to share the secrets of our success, because rich capitalists like me have never been richer."
The "dirty secret," Hanauer said, can be found in an economic philosophy that underpins the new Gilded Age, in which the rich get the gold mine while everybody else gets the shaft. He singled out its architects.
"There was a time in which the economics profession worked in the public interest," he said, "but in the neoliberal era today, they work only for big corporations and billionaires, and that is creating a little bit of a problem.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/greed-is-not-good-it-makes-sociopaths-seattle-entrepreneur-says/ar-AAHgqPh
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