Greed is not good

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Most of the people in The Great Gatsby are terrible. Fascinating and attractive and occasionally great fun to be around, sure, but terrible nonetheless. And they are terrible in large part because they are rich. Tom and Daisy—the “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money”—were born rich, as were their parents and grandparents and so on. Gatsby himself became rich by being terrible (bootlegging liquor with gangsters), and now that he is rich he remains terrible, if also terribly charming. Nick Carraway, who narrates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, which is now celebrating its 100th anniversary, isn’t poor, and is probably on his way to being rich; he’s not terrible. Yet. Give him time.

But although the main characters are rich and awful, leaving a trail of ruined lives in their wake, I don’t remember any of them as being particularly greedy. Selfish, certainly, and addicted to the privileges their wealth provides, but none of them craves more money² . There’s a bright line: Once you become rich, you’re just rich. You’ve won. Okay, maybe you haven’t won the heart of your childhood sweetheart or long-lasting peace of mind, but money itself is no longer a concern. You can instead flaunt your wealth and pursue other unattainables, like love, sex, and social status. Good luck with those.

Not, alas, in reality—either Fitzgerald’s or ours. We live in a world—or, let’s be specific, a nation—where for well over a century no man has been satisfied simply to be wealthy. To get rich is not the goal. It’s only the first step. The goals mount: to have more than you did yesterday, to add another zero, to have more than the next guy, to have more than anyone ever had in all of history. These are purely arbitrary measures; the numbers correspond to nothing. For the greedy, riches are not about enabling a lifestyle or ensuring security—they’re an end unto themselves, a way station on the path to infinity. They’ve taken the place of those other, baser, more comprehensible desires.

When the West was religious, greed was a sin. A deadly sin! Some argue that greed only came into being with the introduction of the medieval money economy, where wealth could be amassed in an abstract way, held in banks and vaults and ledgers instead of acreage and herds and blood. This professor, however, dates it all the way back to the first century C.E., enabled¹ by the decadence of the Roman Empire.

Our current era of greed dates, of course, to the 1980s—to Ronald Reagan, who removed the governmental barriers that kept greed in check, but especially to Wall Street, the Oliver Stone movie where Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, in a now-famous monologue before the shareholders of Teldar Paper, declared that “greed—for lack of a better word—is good”:

God, that’s beautiful fucking writing, except that in the four decades since, it has been taken at face value by the actually greedy of this world, and used as justification for their thoughtless, destructive, acquisitive rampage, to the detriment of nearly everyone else on the planet.

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Greed is bad. But it’s not just bad, it’s blinding, it’s hallucinogenic, it makes everything worse. In their unending quest for ever more money, the greedy inevitably wind up believing they can game the system, get something for nothing. Think of the economic disasters of the last few decades: The dot-com boom and bust. The subprime mortgage disaster and the Great Recession. Think of the ones on the horizon: Crypto. AI. All of them stem from the idea that you can make millions—billions, even!—without doing any actual work. You can invest in digital businesses that have no plan for earning revenue, hoping to cash in on the IPO. You can bundle shit mortgages into highly rated collateralized debt obligations, and be out before the bill comes due. (Flip a house or two while you’re at it.) You can buy a fictional currency based on nothing but a meme, then sell it for 100x to the next greedy sucker. You can pretend that replacing skilled humans with sloppy coding and nanometer-scale silicon is smart, but you can’t pretend the results are good, or even profitable. Greed is bad because it makes us lie to ourselves; it tricks us into fantasies that the rules don’t apply to us, and it tricks us because we want to be tricked. And the problem is, when the world fails for the greedy, it fails harder for the rest of us.

I want to be clear: Ambition alone is not greed. One can desire to attain—a level of wealth and comfort, fame and adulation, influence and relevance, the love of the girl who lives across the inlet—without over attaining. To simply become rich, or want to become rich, is not in itself proof of greed. You could, as the rich and powerful are always hectoring the rest of us, work hard, invest cautiously, and build slowly. I’ve heard this even works! Patience, forethought, and discipline are solid ways to approach anything in life, as is a keen sense of when enough really is enough, while their opposites—hastiness, recklessness, and laziness—are not qualities commonly recognized as helpful for building a life or career.

Except, I guess, on Wall Street and in the upper echelons of the American business and political communities, where those whose avarice is outmatched only by their ignorance keep failing upward even as they drive the rest of us down. This particular moment in 2025 is Exhibit A: Their feckless idiocy will wreck businesses and lives—but not theirs, never theirs. We may get lucky and survive, but not as well as they will, and we’ll only survive until this happens the next time, when the careless people once again beat us with the oars they’ve stolen from our lifeboats, leaving the current to bear us bloodily back into the past³ .

I don’t know what to do about them, but we do need to understand that they will never stop wanting more. Their greed is what defines them. We can’t let it define us. We need to learn to recognize that same deadly instinct in ourselves—to shout it down with joy and satisfaction. Basta! Ça suffit! Enough! 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: What’s a Cynic?

1  I’m guessing—I haven’t read it.

2  I could be wrong! Been many years since I reread the book.

3  If you set The Great Gatsby in 2025, Gatsby would win by dint of his monstrous wealth, crushing or cowing Tom (with the help of his gangster friends), marrying Daisy, then ditching her years later for a trashier bimbo. In the movie version, Tucker Carlson would play hagiographer Nick Carraway.