Tomas Sedlacek on Economic Meaning.
A bit of an amateur investor, I am fascinated by the amount of energy, intelligence, and the sheer volume of money that operates within the financial markets daily. Our capitalist system truly is a miracle of both ingenuity and discovery, seeing that the principles upon which it is based can be said to have been just as much discovered as invented.
Today, however, even for many seasoned, long-time professional investors, the financial system is felt acutely to be awry. While markets around the world break record highs, from equities to commodities, and everything in between, prices seem unhinged from underlying fundamentals (that is, measurements of intrinsic value). All the while, we hear reports increasingly of bank fraud, advertising fraud, tax fraud, etc., perpetrated by both individuals and entire teams of management trying to game legally—and illegally—the system.
Where does this leave us as a society and as individuals? Has the greater meaning of our economic activity been eclipsed by an unbridled focus on profits and wealth, or the opposite, fear of financial loss and being left behind? Has competition driven us personally and our societies en masse slightly mad as economic growth indicators such as GDP become a daily media fixation and market prices swerve from true north?
In the Economics of Good and Evil, The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street, economist, columnist, and member of the National Economic Council in Prague, Tomas Sedlecek asks the question, Does goodness pay-off? Can we expect material rewards for doing good? He is quick to tell us that “this is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.”
Over the course of history answers quite different have been given to this question depending on time, culture, and place. Presently, there seems to be little, if any, reward for what once would have been considered good behavior or even agreement on what now constitutes the bad. Hence, the extreme bending and breaking of not only time-honored rules for good conduct, but of state and federal laws, which exist, we should hope, to build a level of trust needed to support a collectively beneficial way of life.
Well into a new century, we hear, see, and feel change all around us. Although we may not expect a definitive answer to this “most difficult moral problem”, in journeying back with Sedlecek through our intellectual past, we can uncover something that is worth not forgetting. For many of those who have come before us, who have handed on to the human race its most influential spiritual and moral traditions, goodness is its own reward.
