18-07-2025
A Brisk History of How Greed Became Good
Paul Vigna's The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin (St. Martin's, July 22) bats .333 on its subtitle, which is all-star level in baseball and good enough for this book. In tracing how greed became virtue, or at least not obviously sin, Vigna implores his readers to look freshly at the world and to move through it in a mode other than blind acquisition.
'The idea that greed is a bad, dark impulse indulged in only by bad, dark people is deeply embedded in our most revered moral tales and religious texts,' Vigna writes. 'And yet greed endures.'