I recently finished reading Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (really stellar book), and I really liked one of the points expressed through the character Zara. It was a little chunk implying that the biggest problem in our world is not greed in the overemphasized, moralized sense, and it is not “the system” we were placed in, but the way you and I participate towards our own incentives every day while insisting we’re innocent of what those incentives produce.
Here’s the quote if you want to read it:
“People like you and me are the problem, don’t you get that? We always defend ourselves by saying we’re offering a service. That we’re just one tiny part of the market. That everything is people’s own fault. That they’re greedy, that they shouldn’t have given us their money. And the we have the nerve to wonder why the stock markets crash and the city is full of rats...”
Put in simpler terms, we realize the consequence of our actions (both direct and indirect), but don’t actually care about those realizations, mostly because we attribute them to being beyond us.
What makes this idea more philosophical in my opinion is that it avoids the usual argument that turns greed into a personality issue. Greed is often discussed as though it belongs to a certain type of person; someone who is excessive or unscrupulous, who just takes from others for the sake of it. I’m sure you can all think of many examples (landlords, scammers, billionaires, etc). That orthodox framing misses what actually gives greed its power, which is not the extremity of those the characteristic belongs to, but actually its normality. Greed, as it appears in modern society, is almost never loud. I’d actually say there’s an argument that people are more inconspicuous when they’re being greedy, but that’s besides the point.
Greed operates through behaviors that are socially validated, institutionally rewarded, and individually defensible. It becomes difficult to isolate because it hides inside actions that appear reasonable when viewed in isolation, because nobody actually takes a holistic approach.
Classical economists often mention how the free market offers us the most complete information over people’s preferences, because individuals act in their own interest and as a result, prices are a direct result of their behavior, leading to a competitively efficient outcome. Logically, this makes great sense, but thinking about it just a bit further, I’ve realized that the appeal of this framework is not ideological as much as it is aesthetic. Sure, we’ve reached an orderly equilibrium on our supply and demand graph. But intuitively, doesn’t this same approach just diffuse responsibility onto others? If outcomes are naturally emergent, then no one person is supposedly truly accountable for them.
This is how we’ve been taught to think.
And that is just wrong.
The issue with that abstraction is that it only works because it just doesn’t keep in mind the conditions under which markets and humans themselves actually operate. Behavioral economists will tell you that (obviously (hopefully)) humans don’t always have access to equal perspectives or information. And we all know at this point that current systems are exacerbating economic inequality. Everything and everyone operates from their own unique psychological perspective, whether they acknowledge it or not, and that perspective is going to be shaped by the conditions they are placed in. Over time, individuals and institutions learn which behaviors are rewarded and which are punished, and they adapt accordingly. Those who can delay consequences or influence the rules of exchange begin to experience the world as more forgiving than it actually is, and as a result, this whole free market idea stops functioning as a neutral mechanism that sorts value and instead becomes a behavioral feedback loop, reinforcing the same actions, mindsets, and incentives that produced the imbalance in the first place.
We have elevated this structure into something that implicitly teaches consequence-free behavior. We treat the absence of immediate punishment as evidence of correctness, and that gets into our heads. Over time, this trains us to believe that if an action is permitted, profitable, and defensible within the rules, then it must also be justified. Responsibility becomes something that only exists where consequences are visible, and once consequences are externalized, they begin to feel unreal.
In pushing this logic as rational and even virtuous, we end up normalizing a worldview where actions are detached from their effects, and where the lack of consequence is mistaken for moral clearance rather than what it actually is, which is structural insulation.
What this leads me to believe is that the market and systems we live in will never actually fail. They have already succeeded, and they’ve succeeded too well, because they have trained people to behave in predictable ways. This consistent behavior is often defended through language that sounds factual but fails to ever consider ethical standpoints. People just say they are responding to demand or maximizing shareholder value or something along those lines. They say they are playing by the rules. These statements are rarely false, but they function as stopping points for critical thinking. We just describe how things are without engaging with what our behavior produces or why it persists.
This is what I think of when people say greed is the issue with our world. I don’t think it can be separated from the structure of our society. Greed does not need to be encouraged explicitly, because it is rewarded implicitly. Restraint becomes irrational unless it is subsidized by culture, norms, or regulation. In the absence of those constraints, the logic of selfishness takes over, not because people are necessarily inherently selfish, but because systems that reward selfish behavior will reliably produce it. People act according to their best interests. Who can blame them? (Me).
I’ve mostly been talking about this from an economic standpoint, because that’s the framework Backman expressed it through in his book. But I don’t actually think this is an economic issue. This has to do with general human behavior. The same idea applies to every field you can think of. It shows up in politics, where incentives have historically rewarded signaling over past outcomes (and literally anything else for that matter). Or in housing, where landlords who definitely agree that shelter is a basic need can gradually come to see exclusion and rising prices as reasonable or even necessary once their own income is impacted.
Greed is just part of our daily lives, in smaller and quieter ways. And it is just where convenience overrides responsibility enough to where justification somehow becomes easy.
Recognizing that has pushed me to think more critically about how I act, and I think it has helped me with being more disciplined. Good intentions aren’t enough, and I don’t assume that just because something benefits me it is therefore neutral or deserved. I try to stay aware of the incentives I’m responding to and the ways they might be shaping how I think, what I rationalize, and what I’m willing to overlook. I still presume decency from people, because I think most people are decent, but what I consider decent always requires context.
None of this implies that incentives are irrelevant or that markets should be discarded. Incentives are real, and markets are probably the only display of such powerful coordination at scale. I just think a system that relies exclusively on self-interest to produce social outcomes assumes that private rationality aggregates into public sentiment which is, again, false.
Backman’s quote ultimately highlights how oblivious we are to our own behavior. Greed, in this sense, is less a moral failure than a structural habit, reinforced through repetition and defended through language.
Any serious discussion of our greedy society must grapple with the ways in which incentives shape our outcomes and perceptions. Without that awareness, people will continue to participate in systems they later claim to be powerless over, and the gap between acknowledged consequences and accepted responsibility will continue to widen. What needs to replace that detachment is a more deliberate willingness to take ownership of how our choices impact the world, even when doing so is uncomfortable.
That, to me, is the substance of my argument. We are not always to blame, but “the system” is our fault, because our incentivized behaviors, repeated and defended often enough, become indistinguishable from normalcy. And once that happens, greed doesn’t really seem malignant, it’s just common sense.