4 ms·
There's a fundamental flaw in that thinking. Greed is far from the only motivating factor in humanity. As a matter of fact, I'd argue that it's precisely the be
by Killah911 11y ago
There's a fundamental flaw in that thinking. Greed is far from the only motivating factor in humanity. As a matter of fact, I'd argue that it's precisely the belief in this status quo, that causes sociopathic a-holes to run sociopathic companies. The solution is not necessarily to make everything government run, but perhaps to simply not accept such behavior/thinking as having any place in our society.
- rayiner 11y agoGreed is not the most motivating factor, but it certainly is a key one. If you adopt the rule that greed has no place in "high minded" stuff like saving lives, then all the smart people who are nonetheless greedy will go into areas other than saving lives. There is no correlation between intelligence and selflessness. You give the best and brightest a choice between earning millions on Wall Street or never breaking $150k in science (after 7 years of low-paid doctoral and post-doctoral work) then you'll cut yourself off at the knees.
- gohrt 11y agoYou are assuming that the greedy Wall Street folks are actually contributing some of their smarts to improve the product of the industry in some way, and not just sneaking in and extracting value from the medical industry as Shkreli does.
- rayiner 11y agoI'm not saying that the Wall Street folks are improving the products of the drug industry. I'm saying that a lot of very bright folks go to Wall Street instead of into science because of the opportunity to make a lot more money. And they're not even really greedy people. We live in a country where even a PhD making $150k still has to stress about saving for college and faces potential bankruptcy from medical expenses. You don't have to be greedy to want to stave off that risk by getting a high-paying Wall Street job.