The Need for Greed

A topic in Econ this week was greed. Naturally, the question that arose was, "is greed a good thing or a bad thing?"  Over the years, I've noticed that I've become much more opinionated.  That's not really a good thing or a bad thing, it just kind of happened.  However, I'm having a tough time deciding if greed is good or bad. My initial instinct was that greed is definitely beneficial to society.  And in a lot of cases I still stand by that.  Without greed, there are no world leaders.  Without greed noone is being taken advantage of and being stepped on, which sounds like a good thing. But in a way, since no one is being taken advantage of, isn't everyone being taken advantage of? To prove this, let's go back to the Prehistoric Era.  A Tyrannosarus Rex was a breed of dinosaur that was strictly carnivorous.  But as a group, all T-Rex's decide that eating other dinosaurs is greedy because they are taking away the lives of others for their own good.  So all T-Rex's stop eating and die out, affecting the whole biosphere and causing all dinosaurs to die.  There's my theory on how the dinosaurs became extinct; because T-Rex's stopped being greedy.  In order to make it to the top, sometimes people must be greedy and do things they aren't proud of. It's a way of life. Hunt or be hunted.  With all this being said, there are certainly perks of greediness.  But too much of a good thing can be dangerous.  I believe that is is greed that has caused this technology-geared generation.  Kids want more, and they want more now.  When I was in elementary school, my friends and I were always playing basketball outside or making up games to play.  Nowadays, the parks look like something out of an old western film, with a tumbleweed passing through and no one to be seen. Everyone is too busy inside on some sort of technology. Second graders have cell phones and iPods. It kills me to say that, because I am way too young to sound like my dad or grandpa telling me how hard he had it as a kid.  But the greed and wants for tangible items at such an early age has destroyed the imagination of kids.  During any given passing period at Conant, you could be bumped into ten to twelve times by students wandering around with their heads down looking at their phones.  The greediness kicks in because everyone wants to feel popular: to have the most Facebook friends or the most followers on Twitter. Noone knows how to use their imagination effectively anymore.  The creativity in a student's mind is used to gain retweets and favorites on a post, it's not used for innovation or anything productive for that matter.  Maybe I'm wrong and I just have a skewed vision because it's just one school: monkey see monkey do.  Either way, the point is still evident.  Greed can either exploit one's potential, or greed can completely destroy it.