Today, you and I suffer the same feeling of lack, like our predecessors 3,000 years ago, even though we have 100,000 times more. Even with the technology of the 21st century it will not be enough to satisfy all our desires to the point where we say: “It is enough.” The problem is that demand does not want to be satisfied; demands want to be reproduced in a newer and better form. A successful desire is not a fulfilled desire, but a multiplied desire: you know how it is, you get a new car, you are happy with it for a week and then you are like, “Oh what is this…? The new model is out.”
But aren’t we talking about human nature here? Hasn’t that desire got us where we are today? That constant need to push ourselves, that need for more? Is greed necessarily a bad thing provided it can be mastered?
No, we can’t master it. This is the [Gordon] Gekko “greed is good” school of philosophy, which cannot be easily dismissed. This is very serious.
I would even go a little bit further than Gekko in [Wall Street], because I really think the problem of today is – and you can hear this between the lines of politicians, in between the lines of commentators and business people: the problem with greed is that there is not enough of it. It is this issue which is exactly what governments are trying to address through fiscal deficits and by having low interest rates, exactly to stimulate that greed.
Growing up in the former Czechoslovakia, we wanted sugar, but there was no sugar. We wanted razor blades and at times there were shortages of razor blades. We wanted cars, but you had to wait for three years sometimes to get a car. The money was not a problem; the demand was there, it was healthy and strong, but the supply was faltering, the supply couldn’t cook enough for everybody. Today we find ourselves in a similar crisis situation but exactly reversed. The supply is healthy, we have enough sugar but nobody wants it anymore. We have enough cars, but there is overproduction and the same thing goes for wanting 12 different types of razors. The economy cannot eat everything it cooks. Instead of cooking less, which could be one way of mastering this, we could cook more efficiently.
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