The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, last week announced that greed is good.

 In fact, greedy rich people are much more likely to lie, steal, cheat, behave unethically and break the law than lower class people, research at the University of California at Berkeley showed.

Expensive cars are much more likely than cheaper cars to break the law by running through pedestrian crossings where pedestrians are waiting to cross.

It is not wealth itself which makes cheats and criminals of people, however but rather the combination of wealth and a belief that ‘greed is good’.  

This was almost certainly a factor in the financial collapse of 2007-8, where individuals in the financial sector made greedy by a culture of huge bonuses engaged in reckless trading driven by a selfish and myopic focus on their own profits in spite of the disastrous effects for society of this behaviour.

In fact…