Did greed just save the day? That’s what British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed recently. “The reason we have the vaccine success,” he said in a private call to Conservative members of Parliament, “is because of capitalism, because of greed.”
Despite later backpedaling, Johnson’s remark reflects a widely influential but wildly incoherent view of innovation: that greed—the unfettered pursuit of profit above all else—is a necessary driver of technological progress. Call it the need-greed theory.
Among the pandemic’s many lessons, however, is that greed can easily work against the common good. We rightly celebrate the near-miraculous development of effective vaccines, which have been widely deployed in rich nations. But the global picture reveals not even a semblance of justice: As of May, low-income nations received just 0.3 percent of the global vaccine supply. At this rate it would take 57 years for them to achieve full vaccination.
This disparity has been…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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