Need Brings Greed, If Greed Increases It Spoils Breed

For about five hundred years the cod of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland were so thick that early explorers said that they could be scooped up in baskets. The fishery fed Europe and employed tens of thousands of Canadians. In the 1960s and 1970s, large factory trawlers from many nations began taking enormous catches, and fishermen used ever more efficient gear. Scientists warned that the stocks were falling, but the pressure to keep fishing was strong. In July 1992 Canada declared a moratorium. About thirty thousand people lost their jobs, and the fish did not return in the decades afterwards. The story illustrates the verse of the topic, that need brings greed and that greed, if it increases, spoils the breed.

The saying compresses a moral causal chain. Need is the starting point, the legitimate demand for food, shelter and security that every living creature has. From need grows the desire for more, which is greed when it exceeds what is required. The topic suggests that greed, once it grows, damages the very stock from which it draws, the breed, whether that means a species, a community or a lineage. The line is cast in the language of proverb, but its logic is ecological and ethical.

The distinction between need and greed is ancient. Gandhi wrote that the earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not every man's greed, a thought attributed to him widely and consistent with his book Hind Swaraj of 1909. The Buddha taught that craving is the root of suffering, and the Isha Upanishad opens with the instruction to enjoy through renunciation and not to covet anyone's wealth. In the Christian tradition greed or avarice is one of the seven deadly sins, and in Islam the Quran warns against the rivalry in piling up wealth. Across cultures wisdom has treated limitless wanting as a disease.

What makes greed different from need is that it has no natural limit. A man can eat only so much, but he can accumulate money without end. Aristotle saw this when he distinguished the household economy, which provides what is needed, from the art of acquiring wealth for its own sake, which he thought unnatural because it has no boundary. Modern psychology adds the idea of the hedonic treadmill, in which satisfaction returns to its base level as soon as a goal is reached, and the appetite grows. Because there is always more to want, the logic of greed leads to excess.

Excess ruins the commons. Garrett Hardin's essay of 1968 on the tragedy of the commons described how each herdsman, seeking his own advantage, adds animals to a shared pasture until it is destroyed. The cod are an example, and so are many others. The passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird in North America with billions of individuals, was hunted to extinction by 1914. The great whales, tigers, rhinoceroses and elephants have been reduced by hunting for fur, horn and ivory. The Earth Overshoot Day, calculated by the Global Footprint Network, fell on 8 August in 2016, meaning that humanity had used by then the resources the planet can regenerate in a year.

Excess ruins the commons.

Greed spoils human communities as well. The financial crisis of 2008 followed a period in which banks lent to borrowers who could not repay in order to earn fees from packaging loans, and sold the risk to others. When the structure collapsed, millions lost homes and jobs. In India, scandals such as Satyam in 2009 and the telecom and coal allocations of the early 2010s showed how private greed corrupts public institutions. Corruption eats away trust, and the loss of trust is the worst kind of ruin because it makes honest dealing costly. In the same way, the pursuit of unlimited profit has led firms to cut corners on safety, as in the Bhopal gas leak of 1984, where cost saving led to disabled safety systems and thousands of deaths.

The word breed brings another dimension. It points to the inheritance passed on, since the greed of one generation spoils what the next will inherit. A forest cut down today leaves no timber for children, and a river poisoned for profit leaves no drinking water for the grandchildren. The ethic of sustainability is a response, defined by the Brundtland Commission in 1987 as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The word need appears in that definition, and so the definition draws a line between need and greed.

Yet the topic cannot be left as a simple condemnation of wanting. Ambition has driven progress. The desire to do better has led people to invent medicines, build bridges and explore the sea. Bernard Mandeville argued in his Fable of the Bees in 1714 that private vices could lead to public benefits, since the pursuit of luxury created trade and employment. Adam Smith held that the baker's self interest leads him to feed his customers. An economy with no desire beyond need would be a stagnant one. The question is where to draw the boundary, and whether a society should honour the wish for more.

The line between need and greed is drawn differently by different people, and by the same people at different times. What counted as luxury in 1950, a refrigerator or a telephone, is a need today. The poor may say that the rich call their wants needs and the rich may say the poor have unrealistic wants. A judgement of greed is easily made about others and hardly ever about oneself. Philosophers have therefore looked for tests that are not subjective, such as whether the pursuit harms others, whether it can be sustained and whether it brings contentment.

Remedies are social as well as personal. Education in moderation, taxes on harmful consumption, limits on the catch and the cutting of forests, and institutions like the local fishing cooperatives which Elinor Ostrom studied, have all curbed greed in practice. Laws that make firms bear the full cost of their actions turn greed back on itself. Yet institutions rest on norms, and norms rest on individuals. The oldest remedy is to cultivate the capacity to feel that one has enough, and nobody has yet found a law that can make a person feel it.