"In Greed Is Dead, a brief but dense polemic, Collier and Kay contend that this individualist ethos is 'no longer intellectually tenable'. They have two broad targets in their sights. The first is Economic Man — described as the 'repellent' invention of market fundamentalists who believe people act only to maximise their self-interest and must be monitored or bribed with bonus payments to serve the interests of their organisation. [...] Their second target is the self-righteous activist who loudly asserts an ever-expanding set of individual entitlements and legal rights — whether to intellectual property, housing, tertiary education or gender determination. [...]
The authors are democratic in their criticism: they are as scathing about the moral superiority of know-it-all academics or public sector workers (distinguished only by their better pensions) as they are about social media influencers [...] They are also refreshingly apolitical. The rejection of Economic Man is not a rejection of the market or of business — Titus Salt, the 19th-century textile magnate who spent his fortune on housing his workers, is held up as a model of what business can achieve in a community. [...] They are largely convincing — although many of their policy proposals are familiar, and do not depend on the intellectual framing they are given here."

"Paul Collier and John Kay, two of the most thoughtful economists writing today, argue that our problem runs deeper than hubris and complacency. The cause of our current malaise is, as they see it, a ‘half-century of extreme individualism’ – a long and damaging departure from the communitarian norms that ought to shape human societies. It is unclear how far they think the disease of individualism has spread. [...] The idea that humans are naturally pro-social and that collaboration has helped us to flourish is not a novel one, of course. It is a staple of evolutionary studies. It is also one of the best arguments for free markets that facilitate exchange and cooperation. Collier and Kay distance themselves from ‘market fundamentalists’ who ‘claim that the freest possible markets are required in order to harness the ineradicable power of human greed for public benefit’ (it would be hard to find many such people, I’d wager). But they insist that markets themselves are good, in that they allow for ‘disciplined pluralism’. ‘If experiments fail – and most do’, they write, ‘the market economy provides rapid feedback. Failures are abandoned, successes imitated.’ We neither need nor want a National Bread Service. In fact, a striking absence in the book is any call for economic or corporate reform. Indeed, the authors are against changes to corporate law or any of the main features of the economy. Instead, they are after that most elusive of transformations: one in culture. [...] The big problem they face, and never solve, is the one faced by all communitarian thinkers. They know what they are against – the ‘self-righteous narcissism of expressive individualism’ – but are hazy on what they are for, beyond the obvious."