Greed versus Self-Interest

Political philosopher Michael Sandel:

...Citizens generally who looked at this - at the bailouts and the bonuses and have been outraged - they believe there is a difference between greed and self-interest. But here's no way of capturing that intuition in economic analysis because, according to economic analysis, in any case one is deploying self-interest or greed, which is simply self-interest squared, to serve a social purpose. That's what the economic model says. And you have to introduce some normative assumption about what is excessive pursuit of gain in order to make sense of greed as a vice independent of the self-interest that all of the economic models presuppose. So I think there are intuitions in everyday life that people have that the economic models simply don't capture, and greed is one of them."

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