It is not so much money itself, as money combined with hyperbolic discounting -- some money now is much better than a lot more money later. Sometimes this is a valid decision; if you are going to starve tomorrow, a couple of dollars today is likely far more valuable than twenty thousand dollars next year. After that point, it is a matter of degrees; how much short-term constriction of lifestyle would you be willing to accept for the sake of longer-term reward, or how much long-term pain would you be willing to tolerate for a short-term lifestyle boost? A number of biases and beliefs come into play at this point including: whether you think yourself, or any of us, will be around for the long-term; whether you think that creating a prosperous image for yourself in the short-term will increase your long-term prosperity by playing other peoples' biases about image; whether you think you can gain enough in a short enough time-frame by taking shortcuts and being destructive than the ramifications of your actions will manifest after you get rich, and will manifest in low enough severity that get to stay rich.
The commonality between this and the financial catastrophe is that these people doubled-down on the short-term. In the financial world, they played hot potato with ticking financial "assets". In the bee-keeping world, they deferred basic hive maintenance as long as was possible and still have bees to keep. Some people get rich, some people -- sometimes a lot -- get hosed, and there is a lot of collateral damage. You might argue it is an unethical as all hell, but ethics doesn't enter into it. I get the feeling these people were going to be unethical however we measured productivity; give them a metric and they'll game it for their own ends.
bravo. the misunderstanding of economic latency combined with our natural hyperbolic discounting seems to lead to the majority of misunderstandings about economics (besides the basic fallacies and terminology).
It seems that everyone has been infected with short-term thinking and forgotten how to run a regular business. In short-term thinking you don't care about whether or not you're going to do business with anyone again, because you're unsure whether they will be around to do business with. This kind of reasoning is infectious. What we wound up with was a "race to the bottom" in terms of who could make the riskiest highest leverage moves.
It's a natural consequence of uncertainty about the future. The idea that everything could change within a few years or a decade is now so prevalent that it affects everyone's medium-term planning, and heavily reinforces the future discount.
The commonality between this and the financial catastrophe is that these people doubled-down on the short-term. In the financial world, they played hot potato with ticking financial "assets". In the bee-keeping world, they deferred basic hive maintenance as long as was possible and still have bees to keep. Some people get rich, some people -- sometimes a lot -- get hosed, and there is a lot of collateral damage. You might argue it is an unethical as all hell, but ethics doesn't enter into it. I get the feeling these people were going to be unethical however we measured productivity; give them a metric and they'll game it for their own ends.