Ethics, Economy & Society - Ética, Economia & Sociedade: The Fall EE&S Conference (Fall, 2016)

'Money'

‘Money makes the world going ‘round, the world going ‘round’, Lisa Minelli and Joel Grey sang in Cabaret. Money does not bring happiness, they say. You cannot use money to buy happiness, they add. Well, Maria José Pereira does not overtly disagree with common sensical notions. Like an alchemist, she mixes money (warrant of ‘material welfare and wellbeing’) with love ( which ‘fulfils our emotional and spiritual needs’) and virtue (inspired by love) and we get ‘the seed of happiness.’ Will this mean that only a tiny proportion of mankind is able to get the seed of happiness? On Pereira’s own words, ‘Once reconciled, money, love and virtue lead to a life well lived, a happy life, and permit a world of which many only dream.’ That is, only a few can attain.

How did Maria José come up with this idea of reconciling money, love and virtue?

How did I start this reflection? Having spent my whole career in finance, I observed with deep discomfort the gradual degeneration of the established financial model: the eruption of corporate scandals, such as WorldCom and Enron, the increase in leverage and speculation causing the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, and the eventual explosion of the subprime crisis leading to major financial disruption in 2008. The unethical, speculative and extractive behaviour was becoming accepted and tolerated and in fact proliferating. The erosion and abuse of trust that permitted it took place largely unnoticed until the financial crisis finally and fully revealed it in all its dismal reality. (p.3)

What Maria José calls degeneration, Durkheim would most likely have called anomy. He would certainly have explained that the turmoil in the financial world was due to lack of regulation. That is to say that the financial sector has been able to develop, to grow, and to accumulate power without much regulation if any. It escaped the attention of those who have the power to enforce norms and rules that express the main moral values of society. The outcome was that a few individuals actually got the opportunity to give free reign to their self-interest. Then society as a whole, or the whole world to be more accurate, endured the dire consequences of such reckless behaviour. However, why would those free agents give others or society a thought? the truth is that they learn from textbooks that teach them otherwise. Moreover, in our society moral values became instrumental, and are all entwined with gain and material advantage. Suffice to see how our lives are tied up with work, and how we are judged according to how successful our career is, and so forth.

Maria José Pereira is a former player of this financial world. She is not a sociologist, and therefore talks about ‘environmental externalities’ and ‘social factors’; she purports the idea of sustainable investments, which need take the former into account. And here, we cannot but recall Karl Polanyi’s substantive meaning of the economy, one that does not treat the environment as an externality, but as a necessary part of the survival game, the same happening not to social factors, but to people. And Pereira’s book is, after all about people and the games they play. Not common people, that’s understood, but people just the same. Because even if they are greedy, or evade taxes, or are indifferent to climate change, they are still people. And people may lack money, may ignore virtue, but at least, they crave love. Or do they?