The Good, The Bad and The Greedy: Why We?ve Lost Faith in Capitalism

Capitalism – once a great engine of human progress – has lost its moral compass, lost public trust and is urgently in need of repair. This has become a familiar refrain since the global economic downturn and has worsened through the pandemic.

The young of today tend to regard wealth and its creation as alien to the society in which they wish to live, rather than essential to its well-being. Yet, they also regard personal debt, through credit cards and consumer loans, as a matter of entitlement, rather than burden, and have lost the frugal habit of saving that helped their parents’ generation build better futures for themselves.

The Good, the Bad and the Greedy examines how distortions of capitalist mechanisms, and public attitudes towards them, might be rebalanced and how capitalism will be at the forefront of society’s recovery from coronavirus.

This seminal critique, written from the point of view of a deep admirer of entrepreneurship and private sector investment as a proven path to innovation, social progress and prosperity, argues that businesses always operate in a social context – that a ‘good’ business in a moral sense can also, in a perfect world, be a business that richly rewards its creators and backers – so long as the basic principles are right.

Putting aside the nonsense of corporate virtue signaling, Vander Weyer formulates a number of core principles, separating out ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ in today’s corporate arena – and placing the spotlight fiercely on a third element: ‘the greedy’.

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor and columnist of The Spectator and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph. He has been writing about business, entrepreneurship and social change throughout the national press since 1992, after a career in international banking. His previous books include Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank (2000); Closing Balances: Business Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph (2006); Fortune’s Spear (2011), the biography of 1920s fraudster Gerard Lee Bevan; and Any Other Business: Life In and Out of the City (2014), a semi-autobiographical collection of his journalism. He lives in London.