Stephen Gudeman
We are living through a distressing economic crisis, the dimensions of which none of us has previously experienced. Around the globe, unemployment and sub employment have risen, salaries are frozen, homes are being repossessed, economic inequality continues, and many are experiencing heightened emotional distress. We cannot foresee the full consequences of this downturn, and even if some forecasters glimpse a turning point recovery will be slow.
We have heard many explanations for this economic and social mess, and the accounts have proliferated. Just as economists and commentators have not agreed about the causes of the crisis, so only a few predicted its appearance.1 We listen to these accounts with shock at their diversity, with anger at the consequences of the events, and with incredulity that we could have been caught in a fool’s paradise.2
In spite of the distress it has brought, I am fascinated by the crisis, because it displays some of the fault lines, terrors, inequities and inequalities of capitalism, which only a few years ago had seemed to be the world’s welcome future – as visualized in the US and the UK. Governments may treat the crisis as a cyclical downturn to be managed by post Keynesian policies, however I think it also represents a tectonic shift in material life that calls for rethinking our image of economy. Because the normal discourse of economics does not explain this world of contradictions, ironies, and unpredictability, perhaps anthropology’s moment has arrived. I offer a sketch of the contemporary situation based on my anthropological vision of economy as a structure and combination of different value domains. Today, through the impact of growing specialization, these faces of material life exhibit escalating forms of economic power. If the idea of the division of labor with increasing specialization has been a central thread in economics since Adam Smith, its counterpart in anthropology has been the assumption of value diversity within and between cultures. Material life is a shifting combination of the two.
Economists may see economies as flat or smooth plains consisting of markets and market-like behavior that lead to equilibrium situations, but I think they consist of overlapping and conflicting spheres of value and practices. I label these fuzzy-edged spaces House, Community, Commerce, Finance, and Meta-finance. The domains are separate but mingle; individuals and cultures emphasize them differently; their prominence changes over time; and they represent contesting interests and perspectives. The market part of economy, consisting of commerce, finance and meta-finance, often colonizes or cascades into the other two spheres, influencing them to conform to its pattern, although they also help structure market practices.These five domains – from house to meta-finance – exhibit increasing reach in space and inclusiveness of material activities, services, and institutions. They also are increasingly liquid: the speed and number of transactions multiply in the upper domains, especially in meta-finance. This liquidity and ability to shift resources and insert them into different parts of the economy give the upper spheres greater control of the economy and opportunities for sequestering value from elsewhere. Today, in high market economies the financial domains tend to dominate the others for they encompass all value or asset forms, such as land, manufacturing capacity, technology, capitalized human skills and ideas, as well as house production and community sharing.
I shall focus on the relation between commerce and finance in the changing global economy. My theme, the division of labor, is an old one but it has many new forms, especially in high market economies. Traditionally, the division of labor referred to specialization in the tasks of work. Today it is sometimes called ‘slicing and dicing,’ and can refer to splitting property rights to material things, to labor, to risk, to corporations, to services, to technologies, to financial instruments, and even to education which can be securitized as debt to yield a return over time. According to most theories, the division of rights propels markets and the expansion of wealth.
At the outset of The Wealth of Nations (1776), which is considered to be the founding text of modern economics, Adam Smith presented his leading theme: the division of labor. It is not often recognized that he distinguished two forms: the division of labor within a manufacturing unit and the division of labor between units. Within a manufacturing entity, output increases with the division of labor. Smith’s famous example was the pin factory. He observed that if each worker made a pin by carrying out all the tasks on his own, he might be able to make one pin per day. When there is a division of labor in the pin factory, however, everything is different. In his words, ‘One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business…the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations’ (Smith 1976 [1776]:8). By dividing the tasks of making pins among laborers, each worker effectively makes thousands of pins a day. This is the first form of the division of labor.
Smith also discussed the division of labor between manufacturers or tradesmen. This second division of labor arises not from an urge to divide work into parts and specialize but from self-interest and the propensity “to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” (Smith 1976:17). When people trade, they find they can obtain more goods by specializing in one product, and exchanging it for their other needs than if they produce everything for themselves. This double division of labor argument is Smith’s famous justification for markets, for it leads to “universal opulence” in a well-governed society (Smith 1976 [1776]: 15). His claim has since received formal, mathematical treatment by economists, and most of his conclusions are still found in contemporary arguments, which is to say that self-interest and specialization lead to affluence.3
Smith considered the division of labor principally within the commercial sphere of an economy. Forty years later, David Ricardo showed how specialization and the division of labor could be both an international and national benefit. Since Ricardo, the theme of comparative advantage has provided the narrative foundation for supporting international trade: national economies should specialize in what they do best, relative to the marginal returns of their other products, and trade with others who also calculate and specialize. Everyone benefits because more is produced, although it may be unequally distributed. Anthropologists have long seen the local effects of one form of international trade. Primary products from the ‘third world’ may be traded to commercial centers in the ‘North’: tin from Bolivia, sugar cane from Panama, rubber from Brazil and Malaysia, coffee from many parts, and the list continues. In many cases, the primary products are processed in ‘first world’ commercial centers that reap the returns of the value added. Broadly, this division of labor that separates national economies occurs within the commercial realm, but it is supported by differential control of finance.
Today we are witnessing a new pattern of trade that grew in the second half of the twentieth century. This division of labor is connected to the difference between finance and commerce and to shifting corporate borders, or to the interaction of Adam Smith’s two forms of the division of labor. Consider the example of General Electric. When I grew up it was known for manufacturing and selling household appliances, such as dishwashers, refrigerators, and of course light bulbs. Sometime in the later 1950s or 1960s it instituted a form of internal governance by which its product divisions were evaluated by their return on assets. Divisions with a higher return on investment (or profit rate) received more resources for expansion. Divisions with lower rates of return received less. The internal division of labor was measured and monitored financially, which provided a more efficient use of capital. General Electric’s commerce was brought under financial control, or the qualitative differences between light bulbs and refrigerators were seen in terms of quantities.
I view this financialization of commerce or financial cascading as an initial step toward outsourcing commercial capacities. The outsourcing revolution grew in the 1990s, and GE was a major player, under the guidance of Jack Welch. As General Electric and other companies increasingly focused on products they thought would bring the highest returns, lower returning parts of the company were sold or outsourced. This process is now explained as focusing on core competence. Broadly, core competency refers to a competitive niche that a firm has in a product or service, in relationships with buyers or sellers, or in its organizational form, such as making pins, producing wine, or manufacturing microchips. By comparing units internally according to their return on assets and allocating funds in accord with the results, GE set the stage for comparing its functional divisions to external providers of the same product. When it was less costly to outsource to places like India, GE would shed parts of the company. Late in the day, GE even outsourced some of its back office activities.4 From this perspective, defining a company’s core competence is not a qualitative judgement about how the work is being done or whether the product is well fashioned but also a quantitative one in light of the economy’s division of tasks and competition. Or, core competence is what is left standing after less competitive parts are sheared off. Anthropologists know about the other side of the core competence revolution because in many of the places where we work, we have observed the appearance and disappearance of light assembly plants that employ people at low wages. Less expensive to operate than if they were in high market regions, these centers move about as wage rates shift among nations. Profits may be kept off-shore or flow back to metropoles; usually they are not dramatically reinvested in the assembly plant or region.
By outsourcing its less profitable divisions both nationally and internationally, GE increasingly became a financial organization. It may surprise some to know that General Electric’s major revenues in the past years have not come from the realm of real commerce – or light bulbs – but from the realm of finance – or credit cards. From 2006 through 2008 consumer and industrial products contributed 7% to overall revenues and 3% to profits, however the financial division contributed 37% to overall revenues and 39% to profits, including the recent difficult times. Similarly, the former giant automobile company, General Motors – now effectively nationalized in part – was most profitable in its lending operations.5
Out sourcing the production of commercial wares from high market economies while controlling finance is the middle part of my story. I suggest that the slicing and dicing, outsourcing, and core competence revolution also seeped into the financial realm through the impact of the financing of finance, which is my fifth sphere. We enter here the realm of derivatives and the innovation of investment vehicles, such as a CDO squared.6 In the latter part of the 20th century, following innovations concerning asset allocation and the pricing of futures’ contracts, risk became a commodity or property that could be separated or sliced from a stock, bond or commercial venture, and bought and sold.7 Through the commoditization of risk, one can buy and sell the price of a price. Derivatives allow one to separate the risk of a price change in an asset from the price of the asset in order to assure a particular price in the future. House mortgages, for example, are risky loans. By slicing off their presumed risk, and outsourcing it, banks can separate the principal and interest of a loan from its risk, at a cost. Specializing in derivatives and other financial instruments is a new core competence or division of task specialization. Of course, therein lies a tale: the problematic assessment of risk. Perhaps we can begin to assess risk through local knowledge or by extrapolating from the past. But how does one assess the risk of an asset’s price that has no history, such as a mortgage issued to a subprime borrower? Yet, risk was computed, sliced off, and outsourced, and we have seen the disaster wrought by this financial revolution. Its effects have cascaded down on the rest of us, and we are calling on community in its governmental form to save us from this excess market expansion. (Should we refer to this botched specialization as core incompetence?).
My story is not finished. With other anthropologists, I have recorded how a house and communal economy that partly relied on self-sufficiency was destroyed by market expansion through the arrival of a cash crop, which was an innovation in the service of efficient production. This shift was driven by the search for profit through commercial operations. More recently we have lived through a commercial outsourcing revolution in high market economies, which includes downsizing to core corporate activities that produce a financial profit; it too is a revolution in efficiency and an example of creative destruction with task specialization.8 Now we are living through a crisis in the financial sector, done again in the name of enhancing efficiency in the use of capital, and fuelled by a focus on “alpha.” Sophisticated professionals talk about the “search for alpha,” which was one of the mantras of Goldman Sachs in New York. Alpha is the label for the excess return relative to a benchmark index; or it is the abnormal return above the expected financial return. A calculated return about other returns (meta-finance), the profit of alpha lies at the center of the finance of finance sphere. Securing alpha became the core competence of financial firms. This ultimate profit on profit was the Holy Grail of Wall Street and the City of London.9 Economists may not speak about economic bubbles, but certainly we experienced one in the mortgage market, in the stock market and even in high-yielding instruments. 10 But I think they were all facilitated by the bubble in meta-finance, which was the innovation or creation of new instruments, one after another, in an uncontrolled, competitive bout to out-do others and soak up finance. That bubble burst. For example, in 2007, Goldman Sachs’ supreme, task specific hedge fund, the Global Alpha Fund, managed12 billion dollars. But with the crisis, by mid 2008, it was worth 2.5 billion dollars, or 20% of that amount. By April 2009, Goldman Sachs had dismissed its founding managers, who had been lauded as the drivers of this “Cadillac of funds.”11 I think back to Marcel Mauss and his characterization of the Kwakiutl potlatch as the “monster child” of gift-giving. To gain prestige and out-do others, chiefs ultimately would burn blankets and throw pieces of copper into the sea. Was this destruction different from the financial potlatch in our metropoles?
My view of economy as a structure and hierarchy of value spheres and their interactions portrays the current crisis as an emergent phenomenon that is continuous with the expansion of the division of labor to task specialization to core competence, and of economy from house, to community, to commerce, to finance, and to finance of finance. But the tale has a prickly tail. We may be in the midst of a double, tectonic shift. The division of labor in its many guises and developed form, whether in making pins, focusing on core competency, slicing and dicing risk, or outsourcing lies at the heart of these changes. The US especially has been outsourcing commerce or manufacturing to countries such as China and India, while securing gains in the financial sphere; but reinvestment in manufacturing has dropped, workers have not shared in the gains, and unequal distribution of income has increased. As dollars have accumulated abroad they have been used to purchase US Treasury and other forms of debt. The economy of the US and other countries was supported and pumped up through the finance, and finance of finance sectors. Does the US face a double crisis from the bursting of the financial bubble, on the one side, and from evisceration of its commercial sector, on the other? Has the commercial sector been debased by the outsourcing of manufacturing and the focus on financial profits as the zone of core competence.12
I am hinting that high market capitalism may have a tendency to debase itself through creative destruction in the search for profit. I am not an evolutionary anthropologist, but I do picture alpha males chasing alpha profits across the rooftops of Wall Street and the City. But on what is alpha – the profit above a profit – based? If in the alpha competition we cut away the underpinnings of houses, community, and commerce, can we expect a return to economic life as it was before the crisis? Is destruction of itself, through concentrating on finance, core competence, outsourcing, and slicing and dicing, the future of high market economies – has the division of labor run amok and have the spheres of value become unbalanced? Or, will the experiences of capitalism, socialism, and ethnographic economies be combined in creative ways to support social relationships, decent material living, and individual well-being? Will there be a creative destruction of the contemporary economy itself? These are some of my questions about today’s economy and its future.
Footnotes
1In the spirit of the times, I am inclined to suggest that there is always a risk that a statistically small number of people will accurately predict a crash, or a boom.
2 “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” Paul Krugman. New York Times, 6 September 2009.
3 The concept of the division of labor is probably most familiar to anthropologists from Durkheim’s writings on organic solidarity. But Durkheim did not distinguish between the two forms, and neither Smith nor Durkheim discussed their interaction. Like Adam Smith he largely viewed the increasing division of labor as a positive change in society.
4Back office work refers to keeping records of sales, inventories, and purchases, and to assembling other data bases as well as accounting.
5 “We are GE.” Annual Report 2008. General Electric Corporation.
6 Numbers of mortgages may be assembled into mortgage pools, which are then divided into tranches (slices) or different risk levels for sale as securities. Then slices from one mortgage pool may be combined with risk levels from another or with slices from yet a different type of pool. These mixed securities, backed by debts, are Collateralized Debt Obligations. Finally, risk slices of different CDO’s may be combined for sale as a CDO squared.
7 For an inside account of this new financial world, see Gillian Tett (2009) Fool’s Gold.
8I have drawn liberally on William Milberg, 2008, “Shifting Sources and Uses of Profits: sustaining US Financialization with global value chains,” Economy and Society 37:420-451and on William Milberg and Deborah Schöller, “Globalization, Offshoring and Economic Insecurity in Industrialized Countries” ms. 11 March 2008.
9 “The Search for Alpha Continues,” (2001); “Active Alpha Investing.”
10 But see John Kenneth Galbraith (1993), A Short History of Financial Euphoria.
11 “Global Alpha Founders Are Out at Goldman Sachs.” FINalternatives. http://www.finalternatives.com/node7441. For an earlier laudatory description, see “Information Processing: Alpha geeks.” http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2006/04/alpha-geeks.html.
12 See, for example, Krugman, “Reconsidering a Miracle,” NY Times, 16 April 2009; van Ark, O’Mahony, and Timmer (2009).
hartk | 12-Oct-09 at 8:53 am | Permalink
If we carry on like this, the whole initiative of getting anthropologists to have a conversation about the financial crisis will die stillborn. I don’t know why nothing is going on here, but I can guess. First, both writers so far produced articles, not blog posts. They were too long and so polished that they appear closed to the reader. Second,the blog is over-managed and under-animated. The organizers should know that it is not enough to sign up bloggers and then sit back waiting for something to happen. It doesn’t work like that. Third, all my attempts to post comments so far have ended up in the spam. I don’t know many others had the same experience; but it is discouraging.
I defer to no-one in my regard for Sandy and Steve, as they know. But if you present a dense argument, the only comments you are likely to get are ‘I liked that’ or nothing. Blogs are infotainment. People read them in the same way that they might skim an Oped page. There are several points in Steve’s impressive post that I might take up. But the last time I did it, there were no other takers. All I can see here is another manifestation of British social anthropology’s chronic shyness of publicity. It’s a disease and it has taken over this thread.
OK, to the substance. Why does a major producer become a financial conglomerate and outsource most tasks to smaller firms? The answer is obvious enough. Why go through the hassle of hiring workers, organizing a plant, moving the stuff to points of sale, persuading people to buy, arranging for the credit and so on, when you can play the money markets with a huge stash of cash? The returns are more predictable (really, they are if you make lots of small shortrun bets with a big capital reserve) and you avoid those messy people and things. This is the apotheosis of capital as anticipated by Marx, money making money with nothing to get in the way.
The GE example is classic, but, in all the talk of saving the US car industry, I never saw any journalist or academic point out that GM had stopped relying on cars for profits and had become a glorified hedge fund instead. Then again, as Gillian makes clear in her book, the financial conglomerates themselves get on a treadmill where they are judged by their rate of profit, however risky the source. CEOs who do not deliver get the sack.
For some time now, I have been asking whether the century or so when the most reliable way of making money was by producing things more efficiently than your competitors was an aberrant blip in economic history, sustained briefly in our times by the likes of Japan, Korea and China, but all on the basis of a collapsible mountain of American consumer debt.
The main way of getting ahead has always been to derive rents from inside political contacts. Distribution was always the name of the game. Who gets what depends on who you know and it helps to have a gun. One of the crimes of free market economics is to collapse distribution into exchange and make its politics invisible. Financial profit in the last three decades, as ever, was based on capturing the state. Look at the amazing record of Goldman Sachs in US government, not least since the crash. Nathan Rothschild would have been proud.
I believe that we inhabit a world run by the successors of the Old Regime, of George III and the East India company. the people have been brainwashed not to see it any more. And if some of us thought that the financial collapse would do in free market economics for a generation, the evidence is that all these bankers,the corrupt politicians who do their bidding and the economists who dupe the public are now roaring back.
If this is a rant, it’s because you have to shout to hear yourself in an empty cave.
simone | 12-Oct-09 at 10:15 am | Permalink
I’m not sure the cave is empty, there are people reading and listening, but Keith is right that it’s hard to respond to these postings, because they suggest you need to be a specialist in the field of finance to comment (although the comments from ‘Alexander Robertson’ gave us an opening to be brutal (‘I like’)).
I’m not a specialist in the the City etc, but I have two tales to relate. I worked for the other General Electric Company in the 1980s, and on day one we were asked what the point of the company was. Like any other naive 18 year old, I said ‘to produce power stations’. Ha ha. The answer, of course, was ‘to make money’. Ever since, the continued production of things has looked extremely fragile to me.
Secondly, what I have worked on in some detail is the renovation of public space (public housing, city centres) in England. This is where the financial crisis has been felt most publicly. You can see that the building has stopped, from the silent building sites all around the city. But the plans are still there, and the belief that building is the way to keep the economy moving. Building has become the UK’s major manufacturing industry. It relies on human labour and produces goods from raw materials. But for corporate investors, the profit is made from having buildings on the account book as an asset that increases year on year. Renting out accommodation would devalue the property, which is why so much of it has stood empty. It was obvious among property and regeneration researchers (well, to me anyway) that some kind of crash was coming – as soon as one owner of empty flats decides to sell, the gap between asset-book value and sale-value becomes real, and who’s going to buy all those overpriced rabbit hutches?
I think Keith’s last – no penultimate – point is the critical one. The enduring question for me, the one that anthropologists really do know things about, is how people can convince themselves to believe in something unbelievable (like endless growth), and Stephen’s posts show that it is by losing oneself in the detail. If you can obsess about equations for CDO’s, you can ignore the fact that a hedge fund is a pretty stupid idea.
Alexander Robertson | 13-Oct-09 at 8:44 am | Permalink
From Sandy Robertson:
Steve – what’s the difference between ‘alpha competition’ and ‘greed’? You make ‘alpha competition’ sound so technical – economic rationality, albeit on the rocks?
I’ve always suspected that the guy who wrote a concise and influential book called ‘Economics as Culture’ is a neoclassical economic wolf in Boasian relativist clothing. He’s just too economically savvy. Like Keith. But in the current mess it seems highly relevant that the public has seized on the word ‘culture’ with a pathetic mixture of despair and hope. You’ll hear it a dozen times every day on the BBC Today program and its global ilk, befuddling every fragment of coherent discussion: it’s the cause of all the mischief (the bonus culture, the rent-seeking culture…) and the pious remedy (a culture of restraint, a culture of accountability…) ‘Culture’ – it’s our morally exhausted gift to the world, propagated by thousands of Intro Anthro classes over the last half-century. As Simone seems to suggest, it’s practical utility is obfuscation (‘how people can convince themselves to believe in something unbelievable’).
Like Steve, I shrink from the notion that I’m an ‘evolutionary anthropologist’, but the other public perception of us is just that – we sort out the men from the monkeys. The expectation is that in the current crisis we urgently need to come to terms with something very fundamental in human nature if we are to damp down the accelerating, broadening and deepening cycles of boom and bust, and that maybe devising nicer sorts of ‘culture’ can help. There’s an undercurrent of populist nostalgia, maybe even that we can appeal to what Steve calls ‘ethnographic economies’ to show us the light, something old and sweet, something redemptive that will ‘support social relationships, decent material living, and individual well-being’.
If we’re hoping here to engage a wider public, shouldn’t we be dealing with these things? What do you think, Keith? Anyone?
Alexander Robertson | 13-Oct-09 at 10:34 am | Permalink
What happened to Gillian Tett?
Stephen Gudeman | 13-Oct-09 at 10:41 am | Permalink
I had not planned to respond to Hart’s self-described “rant,” but now I see that I must, given Simone’s and Robertson’s additions. On outsourcing, Keith repeats what I argued, but kindly credits me with seeing that GM had turned into a financial conglomerate via outsourcing. I love the credit, but the source of GM’s past profits has been “in the air” (or should I say, “out of the cave”?) for some time. I disagree with him that “political contacts” are the main way to get ahead financially, though I agree with his following statement that distribution is the name of the game. Not for nothing did I invoke Schumpeter’s expression “creative destruction.” Innovation and creativity are involved in making a profit – think of Bill Gates (yes, I know about monopolies and governments, but how did he get that far to become a monopoly?). Hart goes on about crimes, guns, and profit to which I must respond and to Sandy on greed. Sure, all of us can be greedy, beat people over the head, and twist arms, but that tells us very little about the economy within which it appears. People were greedy in feudalism, and they used axes on each other before capitalism. Come on, guys (alpha males?), you can do better than that. What’s the difference between your arguments and calling it “self-interest”? You are both neoclassical wolves in anthropological dress. (Actually, Sandy’s picture of me as a neoclassical economic wolf is self-contradictory: wolves are very social animals – they have “wolf culture.”)
I thank Simone for the tales about GE and housing, but two points: I am not at all a specialist in high finance – I have no training in that – but as an anthropologist I try to read about it so that I have a minor, sometimes misguided, sense about what is going on. I don’t know much about the public housing crisis in the UK that you describe, but as I suggested in the blog and in earlier writing I was disappointed that the Obama crew did not try to combat the US recession through focusing on the domestic aspect of the economy in addition to commerce and finance, though now there are signs of an awakening. I find this social-political- economic blindness ethnographically interesting. Let me add that I do not agree that a hedge fund is a bad idea – sorry to disagree. It all depends on how it is used. A lot of us hedge all the time – for example we buy insurance and hedge our bets on not getting hit by a car, not hitting someone with our car, not having a storm wreck our house, and so forth. But leveraging our bets without knowing the real risks, that’s a different ballgame.
Now that I have gotten on Sandy’s bad side, he will be glad to know that I have had “liberal” neoclassical economists throw chalk at me, tell me to shut up, and a few worse things. But in Economy’s Tension I argue that all us are both self-interested and sociable– that’s the tension, that’s the dilemma, that’s what we need to work through.
hartk | 13-Oct-09 at 11:52 am | Permalink
So there I go trying to liven things up and suddenly we are all being called economists in drag.
Sandy says that anthropologists have contributed to the spread of ‘culture’ as demoralizing virus through public discourse. I acknowledge that Steve has moved on from economics as culture to economy as a dialectic of market and community. But, in my knockabout way, I was saying that we need to reintroduce the politics to political economy and perhaps both Sandy and I implied that Steve’s analysis was too ‘economic’, thereby reproducing the ideological separation of economy from politics that is designed to prevent us from seeing their unity.
I am glad we agree that ‘distribution’ is worth focusing on. In his critique of the classical liberals, Marx argued that it was a mistake to make the political fact of domination prior. Sure the Normans conquered England and looted it, just as the Mongols took over China and India. But you can’t steal from a nation of shepherds in the same way as you can from a nation of bankers. So, he said, production is prior. Even so, it was only with industrial capitalism that wealth and power in society came from making things.
I was asking if this assumption about capitalism still applies to our world. Some would point to China’s inexorable rise and say it does. But the financial imperialism of the last three decades (like its counterpart before the first world war)undermines the proposition that the economy rests on production in Marx’s sense.
I know that Steve knows this and, unlike him, I will not go through his comment to find quibbles to dissent from. It is however a truism that a certain style of economic analysis abstracts from and disguises the violence with which inequality is instituted in our world. Sandy uses ‘greed’ to try to reach a more visceral level of disgust with that world and its principal beneficiaries. I think he is complaining that Steve makes it all sound too rational and cosmetic.
So it may be that we are all three disputing both the appropriate focus and rhetorical style of an anthropological engagement with the financial crisis.