what went wrong

in a nutshell:

And it is those attitudes that have changed so profoundly in the past generation or so.

Left unchecked, greed overwhelms any sense of proportion, fairness or morality. We as a culture and as individuals came to believe that if greed is the engine that drives progress, any attempt to curtail greed thus curtails progress. We thought that since greed is good, unrestrained greed must be an unrestrained good.

What we’ve discovered — yet again — is that when properly harnessed, greed makes an effective, productive servant.

But it makes a terrible master.