Thinking about greed differently

I recently finished Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, and one passage stuck with me more than any other. Through the character Zara, Backman implies that the biggest problem in our world is not greed in the moralized sense, and not "the system" we were placed in, but the way ordinary people participate in their own incentives every day while insisting they are innocent of what those incentives produce.

"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 then we have the nerve to wonder why the stock markets crash and the city is full of rats..."

We recognize the consequences of our actions, direct and indirect, but we don't care about those recognitions. We attribute them to forces beyond us.

The idea avoids the usual argument that turns greed into a personality flaw. Greed is often discussed as though it belongs to a certain type of person. Someone excessive, someone unscrupulous, someone who takes from others for the sake of it. Landlords, scammers, billionaires. That framing misses what actually gives greed its power: not its extremity but its normality. Greed, as it appears in modern society, is almost never loud. It operates through behaviors that are socially validated, institutionally rewarded, and individually defensible, and it becomes difficult to isolate because it hides inside actions that appear reasonable when viewed on their own. Nobody looks at the full picture.

Classical economists point out that the free market gives us the most complete information about people's preferences. Individuals act in their own interest, prices reflect their behavior, and the result is a competitively efficient outcome. The logic is clean. But the appeal of the framework is not ideological as much as it is aesthetic. We arrive at an orderly equilibrium on a supply and demand graph, and that feels like enough. Look further, though, and this same approach quietly diffuses responsibility. If outcomes are naturally emergent, no one person is truly accountable for them.

That is how we have been taught to think. And it is wrong.

The abstraction only works because it ignores the conditions under which people actually operate. Humans don't always have access to equal perspectives or information, and current systems widen that inequality. Everyone operates from their own psychological position, shaped by the conditions they are placed in, whether they acknowledge it or not. 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 the free market stops functioning as a neutral mechanism that sorts value. It becomes a 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. The absence of immediate punishment gets treated as evidence of correctness, and over time that belief becomes internalized. If an action is permitted, profitable, and defensible within the rules, it must also be justified. Responsibility shrinks to wherever consequences are visible. Once consequences are externalized, they begin to feel unreal.

The markets and systems we live in will never actually fail. They have already succeeded, and succeeded too well, because they have trained people to behave in predictable ways. That behavior is defended through language that sounds factual but never considers ethics. People say they are responding to demand, or maximizing shareholder value, or playing by the rules. These statements are rarely false, but they function as stopping points for thought, describing how things are without engaging with what the behavior produces or why it persists.

This is what I think of when people call greed the issue with our world. It can't be separated from the structure of our society. Greed doesn't need to be encouraged explicitly because it is rewarded implicitly. Restraint becomes irrational unless it is subsidized by culture, norms, or regulation. Without those constraints, the logic of selfishness takes over. Not because people are inherently selfish, but because systems that reward selfish behavior will reliably produce it. People act according to their best interests. Who can blame them? I can.

I've mostly been approaching this from an economic angle because that's the framework Backman expressed it through. But this isn't an economic issue. It's a human one. The same pattern shows up in politics, where incentives reward signaling over outcomes. It shows up in housing, where landlords who agree that shelter is a basic need can gradually see rising prices as reasonable once their income depends on it. Greed lives in our daily routines, in smaller and quieter ways, wherever convenience overrides responsibility long enough for justification to become easy.

Recognizing this has pushed me to think more critically about how I act, and it has made me more disciplined. Good intentions aren't enough. I don't assume that something which benefits me is therefore neutral or deserved. I try to stay aware of the incentives I respond to and the ways they shape how I think, what I rationalize, and what I'm willing to overlook. I still presume decency from people. 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 mechanism capable of coordination at this scale. But a system that relies exclusively on self-interest to produce social outcomes assumes that private rationality aggregates into public good, and it doesn't.

Understanding our greedy society means grappling with the ways incentives shape both our outcomes and our perceptions. Without that awareness, people will continue participating in systems they later claim to be powerless over, and the gap between acknowledged consequences and accepted responsibility will keep widening. What needs to replace that detachment is a more deliberate willingness to take ownership of how our choices affect the world, even when doing so is uncomfortable.

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. Once that happens, greed doesn't seem malignant. It's just common sense.

That's the problem.