Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and How We Let It Happen - Hardcover

Rowland, Wade

3.74

35 ratings by Goodreads

9780887621765: Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and How We Let It Happen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0887621767 ISBN 13: 9780887621765

Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2005

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Why is television so awful? Why do drug companies hide unfavourable test results? Why do automakers market unsafe cars? Why is our environment poisoning us? Why is our food so unhealthy? Why are we working sixty-hour weeks? Greed, Inc. places the blame for much of what ails contemporary society at the doorstep of a single institution - the modern publicly traded business corporation. We have become an uncaring society because the corporate ethos that informs virtually everything in our culture is uniquely and implacably selfish. The corporation exists for one purpose only: to make a profit. And such an objective trumps all others. Nothing else matters. This book traces the rise of the corporation from the Rationalist social engineering of the 18th century -- as well as the parallel triumph of moral relativism, consumerism, enterprise culture, and other dominant value systems of our time. It shows how a series of psychological and philosophical misconceptions institutionalized greed and self-serving behaviour as a good thing for society. Indeed the origins of corporate culture seem in retrospect so preposterous as to defy belief -- and yet these misconceived values now dominate our lives. Because of these notions of selfishness, we have arrived at a time when we seem at odds with almost everything around us.

Greed, Inc. is a groundbreaking book in that it reveals the roots of this social discontent for the first time through the lens of moral philosophy. Anybody who cares about our quality of life and the very survival of humanity will need to read this book.

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Review:

Why is TV so bad? Are corporations moral or sociopathic? Wade Rowland pondered these questions when he was fired from his job as a Canadian TV network news executive. Out of these ruminations emerged Rowland's book Greed, Inc. Rowland, the author of books about Galileo and the Internet, warns that corporations have grown too powerful and have spawned a "selfish, market-driven society." Greed, Inc. covers some of the same ground as Joel Bakan's bestselling book, The Corporation, but where Rowland stakes new ground is by investigating how the modern corporation is a perversion of the philosophy of Western thinkers like Adam Smith, who he suggests would be horrified to see how businesses run amok in today's world.

Rowland doesn't blame corporations themselves or their executives or shareholders. The problems, he writes, go much deeper and are not restricted to a few "bad apple" companies like Enron and WorldCom. Corporations can't be expected to act morally, Rowland argues. They are fundamentally amoral, with only a responsibility to follow their profit-making interests. How can they be expected to fulfill the "social good" without being forced to do so by society and government? At the root of the modern corporation, Rowland suggests, is a flawed assumption that comes from Rationalist philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries: that people are naturally greedy and selfish, while social institutions--such as companies--constrain people to act morally. If anything, Rowland writes, it's quite the opposite. Government should force corporations to serve our interests through stronger regulation and restrictions on their size and wealth. "Corporations are not human," Rowland says. "Corporations are tools." Greed, Inc. is not the most elegantly written or original of books, but it will appeal to readers interested in understanding the structural roots of recent corporate-fraud scandals. --Alex Roslin

From the Back Cover:

"The corporation has extracted, distilled, and concentrated the essence of human selfishness and acquisitiveness, enormously amplifying the range and depth of immorality deemed acceptable, even admirable, in human affairs. To the corporation, vice is virtue and virtue is vice, and that is the Orwellian message with which consumers of corporate media, worldwide, are bombarded all day every day. This is what we designed corporations to be and they are doing what we built them to do. But no one, certainly none of the early Rationalist designers, suspected they could become so good at it." — from Greed, Inc.

"Timely and important. No anti-capitalist rant, Greed, Inc. is a wise book by a thinker and writer of great good sense and clarity. Wade Rowland shows how we have allowed the giant corporation to run amok amongst us, and offers ways to tame the beast and re-hitch it to the public good. All who are worried about the mounting damage done to society and nature in the name of profit should read Greed, Inc. without delay." — Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

"In trying to understand the aberrant immoral behaviour of his former corporate colleagues, Wade Rowland has brilliantly excavated the ideological foundations of today's business corporation, revealing an inherently inhuman institution inimical to any kind of morality." — David F. Noble, author of America by Design and Beyond the Promised Land

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