Greed

Tuesday

Peter Frankopan

The greed and hypocrisy of the opium trade continue to shock

‘A fact that confounds me now when I think back on it,’ writes the acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh at the start of this expansive and thoughtful book, ‘is that for most of my life China was for me a vast, uniform blankness.’ There were many reasons for this, he says. The war between India and China in 1962 might have played a part, along with the complex relationship between the two countries since then; but also the way that ‘an inner barrier’ has been ‘implanted in the minds’ of many around the world – one that blocks out China but allows in the ‘language, clothing, sport, material objects and

Wednesday

Michael Nazir-Ali

Boris, ‘greed’ and the moral case for capitalism

I, for one, was not surprised by the Prime Minister’s remark to his parliamentary colleagues about greed fuelling the race to develop a vaccination for Coronavirus. I well remember some years ago, when he and I were both on the Any Questions panel, he said to me in an audible aside:  ‘Bishop, greed is good isn’t it because it makes us rich?’  I replied quickly to say something like you would expect me to say no, and the reason is that it makes a few people rich but it impoverishes many. Greed also causes some to fall into debt and even crime, because of the desire to ‘get rich quick’. Greed

Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

Boris is right: ‘greed’ did give us the Covid vaccine

Boris Johnson might have started back-pedalling furiously. He might have tried to dismiss it as an off-the-cuff comment. And the spin doctor might have preferred it to have remained private. Even so, the Prime Minister was surely right when he told MPs last night that ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’ gave us the Covid-19 vaccine. And rather than backing away from the remarks, the PM should be doubling down on them. He was spot on. Free enterprise and the multinational corporation are getting us out of this mess, and we need to talk about that a lot more than we do. The pioneering MRNA technology used by BioNTech and Moderna was funded by