Economics is not a morality play. Don’t take my word for it – Paul Krugman said it first. In a 2010 blogpost I for some reason never forgot (alongside a host of random Arsenal scores from the early 2000s and Taylor Swift bridges), he wrote:
“It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The market economy is a system for organizing activity — a pretty good system most of the time, though not always — with no special moral significance. The rich don’t necessarily deserve their wealth, and the poor certainly don’t deserve their poverty”.
