Milton Friedman when asked about combating greed.
> Greed: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed
This definition is quite easy to distinguish ordinary desire from greed. Otherwise you need to render selfish and excessive banal and meaningless as well.
They did not need doctors, daycare, helmets, cars (they sat 5+ to a motorcycle), air conditioning, avocados, bedrooms, computers, etc.
Context and our norms is what determines it.
One of my cousins' parents immigrated to the Bay Area, but mine went to the midwest. Am I greedy for desiring to earn income more than a couple standard deviations above the mean so that I could buy land in the Bay Area? Is my cousin not greedy because they were born there?
>Context and our norms is what determines it.
Exactly, which is the problem with trying to distinguish "desire" and "greed". "We" don't have norms. I was lambasted growing up by my grandparents for wanting things that any 1990s kid had in the US, but they didn't have in their poorer country from 1920 to 1940.
It isn't my definition, it's Merriam-Webster dictionary, and I suggest reading the definition more carefully, it really isn't that hard to understand. That is how the word is used.
All of your examples are not selfish or excessive. So not greedy. That it isn't a clear bright line isn't a problem, most judgements in life are not clear cut.
The human emotion that drives free market capitalism optimally isn't greed, it's competition.
People compete to produce better goods at a lower price to win acclaim and profit.
Greedy people mess that all up by amassing wealth and then using that wealth to change the rules of the game so that they can amass more wealth.
It's like you're arguing that overeating isn't how you gain weight, it's just having an unbalanced caloric ratio.
And your food analogy works against you. If we extend your analogy, profit is like eating, greed is like overeating. Saying profit = greed is like saying every person who eats three meals a day is a glutton. Competition rewards healthy eating -- efficiency, balance, discipline. Greed is scarfing down the pantry and locking the fridge so nobody else can eat.
The desire to compete is somehow not really the same as the desire to win. This is overtly apparent in things like body building. 99.9% of body builders will never compete in a body building show, let alone win, but enjoy the journey that's mostly full of years of self inflicted pain, occasional injury, and endless dedication - largely for the sake of competition and of course what it does to your body. And that latter part isn't really about showing off or sex or whatever, but simply about pride in what you've accomplished - much in the same way one might take pride in their ability to play chess well, or manage a healthy business.
You're making up your own novel definition of greed there, which is certainly cheating when you're saying Milton Friedman is wrong. He was using greed in a more generally accepted sense, ie, a desire for more than one has right now.
There are a lot of greedy people out there who are scrupulously honest. As far as I can tell, the average greedy person should be modelling scrupulous honesty, advocating fair systems and enforcing rule-following behaviours - that is creating the best environment for acquiring capital and maintaining property rights. Greedy people who white-ant the systems sustaining their capital are generally more stupid than greedy.
No, sorry, it's not only the same emotion, it's the same system and the same rules: if greed is good, why shouldn't one seek network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, vertical and horizontal integration that block competition, engage in FUD and dumping and regulatory capture and so on and so on? The answer that the entire business community and an increasing fraction of the general population seems to agree to is that one should, and this has prevented the sort of gardening that can keep the system actually competitive and working for the people, rather than working for the people on top, which is what it overwhelmingly wants to do when left to its own devices.
If you want a dictionary definition, search suggests "An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth".
On their own neither of those implies any desire to rig games or to avoid competition. Some greedy people do that, but since pretty much everyone is greedy to some extent you find greedy people with every combination of human characteristics.
Greed and competitiveness are two different motivators, and free market capitalism is driven by competition and not greed.
People compete for many reasons and the collection of material wealth is only one of them.