Ascent of Money--Week One

Charlie McGill
Mr. Roddy
GPHC
4/7/2020

How Does Behavior and Money Intertwine?

Since the creation of money, it has been intertwined with human behavior. This is evident in many ways, especially when it comes to our personality traits. Any given person has tendencies of greed, generosity, pride, and humility, and the easiest way to determine the proportion of  these qualities in an individual is by looking at their interactions with money. Generosity is easy to determine, will the person in question lend money to a trustworthy friend in need? Donate to a worthy cause, a charity? Pride and humility are also simple to discover; I have found that people who regularly buy items that are excessively large, expensive, or flashy tend to be the most prideful, and those that make the occasional splurge are usually humble (this isn't a rule, of course, just a trend I have noticed). And Greed, quite simply, runs and created the world that we live in today.

From the very beginning of money, there have been individuals who have devoted their life to making as much of it as possible, and for good reason too! Money holds far more power than what it can purchase. It influences politics, our social lives, our education; it influences every part of life. Often, someone's pursuit of it can get in the way of decency and morality. Greed is really what runs all. 

For this reason, I find money lending incredibly interesting. Theoretically, the act of lending another individual money for them to pursue an interest, monetary or otherwise, is a generous act. However, in reality, money lenders make massive profits off interest payments for their loans. Money and greed took a behavior, money lending, and made it into one of the biggest and most profitable industries in the entire world. It's an industry so powerful that it can cause the world to plunge into a global recession, like in 2008. In money lending, I believe, we see the greatest example of how money can affect human behavior. 

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