Philip Cardella/Alamy
Greed has contributed to massive wealth inequality. What are its evolutionary and psychological bases? What good is greed?
Robert Morley
London, UK
Linguistically and culturally, the word “greed” is almost always used as a moral judgement, rather than a neutral description of behaviour. From an anthropological or psychological perspective, this is precisely why scholars often avoid the term. They tend to use more neutral language: resource accumulation, status competition or self-interested behaviour.
Humans evolved under conditions of uncertainty, where acquiring and defending resources buffered risk. What we call greed draws on the same psychological systems as precautionary provisioning – sensitivity to scarcity, loss aversion and a drive for security.
So, what good is greed? Well, in a societally moderated form, it can motivate effort, long-term planning, innovation and the creation of surplus that supports dependants and wider societal projects. It is interesting that societies and people who condemn greed often still value ambition and foresight, traits that sit very close to it. A successful business is, anthropologically speaking, no more than a successful tribe.
Hillary Shaw Newport
Shropshire, UK
Greed is a “sin” that can have positive economic effects, in moderate amounts. It is normally defined as an excessive desire for something. If we want something currently unavailable, we innovate to make it possible, and even if that innovation is destructive military hardware, all innovations have spin-offs that are useful elsewhere.
We live in heated homes, drive cars, have pharmaceuticals and tap on computers because someone was greedy for more money and had an idea that would accrue them that money.
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We live in heated homes, drive cars and tap on computers because someone was greedy for more money
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Mike Follows Sutton Coldfield
West Midlands, UK
Evolution is driven by competition over scarce resources. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, once humans secure food, shelter, safety and opportunities to reproduce, we accumulate additional resources as a buffer against uncertainty – much as squirrels store food for winter. What we call “greed” can therefore be understood as an evolved precautionary impulse, rather than a moral flaw.
However, we are a social species and evolution also selects for altruism, reciprocity and fairness, because cooperation benefits the group and, by extension, the species.
Our modern overuse of the planet’s resources is clearly unsustainable, but it is also understandable in evolutionary terms. As Jean-Marc Jancovici argues in World Without End, access to abundant, cheap fossil fuels created a self-reinforcing cycle: more energy enabled more productivity and growth, which encouraged even greater extraction and consumption. In this context, environmental damage emerges less from individual moral failings than from the energy-rich system we built – a system that amplifies our innate tendency to accumulate.
We often accuse billionaires of greed, but their behaviour may simply express the same evolved impulse most of us share. If there is hope, it lies in the other half of our evolutionary inheritance: our capacity for cooperation, long-term planning and collective action.
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