Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and Capitalismand is regularly used as a parable to discourage peoplefrom buying lottery tickets (Plumer 2012; Thompson 2012).It is, however, hard to imagine it being used to discouragepeople from wearing crash helmets, although that wouldbe an equally logical lesson to draw. We would rightly viewsuch advice as absurd and dangerous, but it is no worsethan saying that economic growth should be discarded asan objective on the basis of the Easterlin Paradox.Regardless of what happiness scores people awardthemselves, there are obvious, objective benefits to beinga lottery winner and obvious, objective disadvantages tobeing severely disabled. This is quite clear from the text ofthe lottery winner/paraplegic study (Brickman et al. 1978:920, 924):The large majority of the changes mentioned [by the lotterywinners] were positive, including financial security,increased leisure time, easier retirement, and generalcelebrity status. Negative effects of winning, if any, werealways mentioned together with some positive feature …They rated winning very high in relation to the best thingthat could possibly happen to them. They typically listedpositive life changes as resulting from the windfall, suchas decreased worries and increased leisure time. Thissuggests that winning lessened the stress and strain oftheir lives.The accident victims, by contrast, ‘rated themselvessignificantly less happy in general than the controls’ (i.e.102