Greed and Development

HopeAnne writes:

I was right in the middle of the Republic, studying for my midterm on Friday. Glaucon and Socrates are discussing their hypothetical "City of Pigs" and dialoguing as follows:

...And if we live like that, we'll have a far greater need for doctors than we did before?
-Much greater.
And the land, I suppose, that used to be adequate to feed the population we had then, will cease to be adequate and become too small. What do you think?
-The same.

I wrote in the margins, greed makes resources scarce. A very simple premise from my macro class.

What HopeAnne should have learned in her macro class is that greed does not make resources scarce; it makes them abundant.

Socrates and his interlocutor neglect that, provided the rule of law, their city's greed will drive its very development. As each landowner finds his dreams of avarice unfulfilled by his paltry holdings, he will dream up new ways to produce more crops from the same land, or open up foreign trade to bring in new goods. Rather than driving up prices and immiserating the City of Pigs, Socrates and Glaucon would be shocked to see that greed has ever been the boon of law-abiding societies.

This is not to say that greed is good, but to say that you get what you want; societies that want wealth get wealth. Societies that place a high value instead on leisure time or on family cohesion, for example, get those; they are presumably as happy with their choices as we Western materialists are with ours.