Is greed really good?

FOR most of the 20th century in the West, governments oversaw national economies. In the US, Theodore Roosevelt reined in the robber barons before his distant cousin Franklin occupied the commanding heights of the nation by mobilising resources to counter the Great Depression and then to fight World War II. But in the 1970s, high inflation and industrial strikes made it apparent that government control of the economy no longer worked. Thus in the latter half of that decade, with the growth of the post-war decades petering out, people sought a new economic model.

In response, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan captured the zeitgeist, and Western economic orthodoxy took a dramatic turn. The Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s took a back seat. Spurred on by low interest rates and the rhetoric of a dynamic, deregul…