Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

William Deresiewicz, author of  “A Jane Austen Education,” among other things, reminds us that while the percentage of “clinical psychopaths” in the general U.S. population is about 1%, on Wall Street it is closer to 10% — ‘exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an ‘unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.'”

He goes on to say:

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted as much nearly three centuries ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called “The Fable of the Bees.”

 

and that if ‘… if entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth creators. ”

You’ll enjoy it, read on….