Human Greed

In Augsburg, residents of the Fuggerei still pay less than one euro a year in rent, five centuries after the banker Jakob Fugger founded it. In the forest of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko's palace at Gbadolite is crumbling into ruin. Both men used wealth to buy power and power to gain more wealth. Why is one remembered with gratitude and the other as the archetype of kleptocracy?

Human Greed answers that question across five thousand years of history and eight regions of the world. Its argument is simple: the appetite is universal; the outcome is regional. Drawing on psychology, religion, philosophy and economic history, Dr. Gil Feiler shows that the desire for more is a human constant, from the hoarding instinct of animals to the reward circuits of the brain. What changes from place to place is opportunity, legitimacy and restraint.

The book follows greed from Mesopotamian debt cancellations, Roman tax farmers and Han dynasty monopolies to the Fourth Crusade, the colonial plunder of Potosí, Bengal and the Congo, the robber barons and the great speculative bubbles. It then examines Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Russia, China and East Asia, South Asia, Africa and Latin America in turn, with case studies including Wirecard, Siemens, Enron, Madoff, Oil-for-Food, Yukos, Magnitsky, Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, Suharto and Marcos, Adani, Satyam, South African state capture, Mozambique's hidden debts, Lava Jato and Odebrecht. The final part turns to global finance, the technology giants, climate change and the measures that have actually worked to tame greed.

Written by an economist and investor with four decades of experience in developed and emerging markets, documented with primary sources and updated to 2026, Human Greed is a clear, comparative and practical account of one of the oldest forces in human history, and of what societies can do to restrain it.