As Christmas approaches, I reflect on my word of the year: pleonexia — an ancient Greek term describing the insatiable desire to take more than your fair share, even when it harms others.
Once you understand pleonexia, you start to see it everywhere: in big tech, in bond markets, in tax avoidance, and in government policy that treats human suffering as an accounting inconvenience. This video argues that much of what we excuse or defend in modern economics is, in fact, a moral failure hiding in plain sight.
If we want an economy based on care rather than cruelty, contribution rather than entitlement, we first have to name the problem. That is where political economy begins.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
As we creep towards Christmas, I thought about what my word of the year is, and the answer is 'Pleonexia'.
Now, that isn't a word that slips off the tongue very often. Not even in my case, and apparently, I use more words when writing my blog than 99% of people do, according to Grammarly, which is the word spell checker that I happen to apply for that purpose.
But it is an important word, and it's a very old word because it comes from ancient Greek. What it means is that somebody has an insatiable desire to have what rightly belongs to others.
They don't want to do well.
They aren't seeking security.
They just want more than their fair share, even if - and even when they know that - this will harm others as a result.
It comes up in discussions by Plato.
It comes up in discussions by Aristotle.
It's referred to in the Bible. This word has been around for a long time. It features in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.
So, there you go. It's ancient, a bit like me, but this idea isn't ancient. That insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others is something that dominated so much of economics in 2025.
Once you understand pleonexia, you start seeing it everywhere.
It explains behaviour that is often excused.
It explains policies that are often defended.
And it explains harm that is too often ignored.
Pleonexia is not accidental; it's entirely deliberate.
We see it in, for example, the behaviour of those who run the big tech companies. They demand excessive fees from us, and that is undoubtedly true because we see it reflected in their excessive profits. And then they demand, as well, access to our data, which they sell to others, and which they use to influence and control us. They then demand influence over governments, and they treat us as citizens as exploitable. And they do really exploit us. That is pleonexia in practice.
We see pleonexia in our bond markets; markets that insist interest rates must stay high to suit their own returns, even when that decision pushes households into mortgage distress, and it damages businesses and harms millions of people. This is extraction by choice and nothing to do with fiscal discipline; it's pleonexia at work.
We even see pleonexia in government, because it's implicit in the mindset of our Treasury. We hear them demanding of spending departments that they must cut their budgets to suit the cloth that is available. They cannot afford to house people properly. They cannot afford to feed children properly or to fund essential public services. All of that is because the books must be balanced, whatever the human cost: this is not responsibility, it is moral failure described as accounting, but in truth, it's pleonexia at play. They're demanding more than their fair share for a purpose which is wholly inappropriate.
We also see pleonexia in the demands for low taxation of wealth, and that is everywhere. We know that those who have high investment incomes pay much lower rates of tax than those who have to work for a living. Those with the most demand to contribute the least. That is not fairness; it is entitlement in play. It is pleonexia.
Pleonexia also drives tax avoidance, which still exists. We see it everywhere. There are those who cheat the system. There are those who game the system. There are those who refuse to pay what they owe. Forty per cent of all small companies in the UK do not pay their corporation tax. All of those, plus those people who threaten to leave society altogether by fleeing to tax havens, are doing something which is called pleonexia. They want more than their fair share out of society, but deny their responsibility for sustaining it.
This, of course, again, is not by accident. Pleonexia has been promoted for 45 years by the neoliberal ideology that has dominated our politics for that period of time. It's celebrated in fact within that ideology, which is wholly antisocial in nature because it tells us that selfishness is virtuous, greed is efficient, and care is weakness. That story might have dominated for decades, but it's wrong, and it has failed us.
We've paid an enormous price for pleonexia. It always imposes harm without exception; there's no occasion when you can spot it where there isn't harm flowing from it.
This year, we have seen that cost in poverty, in hunger, in insecurity and anxiety, and in social breakdown. These outcomes are not inevitable. They are chosen, and we must therefore get rid of pleonexia. We must cure the world of this complaint. An economy cannot survive on extraction alone. We need an economy built on care rather than cruelty, contribution rather than entitlement, fairness rather than privilege. That is the political choice we should make, not the technical one which applauds excess and pleonexia.
Pleonexia is what I wish the world would be rid of in 2026, but that will not happen by accident. Political economy does, however, begin by naming the problem. Once named, it can be challenged. This avarice, this greed, this excess, this desire to rule, this desire to dominate, this desire to have what belongs to others; all of it needs to be named and challenged time after time in 2026.
I have to live in hope. I live in the hope that pleonexia might be cured in 2026. That most definitely is one of the things that I want for Christmas.
The Best of the Blog 2025 combines 60 of the most popular blog posts from here this year as selected by you, the readers. This 200-page eBook is available as a free download here.
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Now that is the nicest truest christmas wish i have ever seen. You really are a marvel. Have a wondrful yule time.
And you, too.
I think that Orwell wrote “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
The implications are that human beings know about things like pleonexia that cause problems and have at various times tried to deal with these – from debt jubilees, to religious bans on usury to the creation of better social security and tax systems. But the history of much of that gets hidden, suppressed even in order to create the secure future for exploitation by many of the people you mention above.
I think that pleonexia also gets a mention in Tolkein’s ‘The Hobbit’ as ‘dragon sickness’ (the dwarf Thorin for example).
It is good and right to bring forth wisdom from the past – as Milan Kundera said ‘Man’s struggle with power is one of memory against forgetting’.
Thanks
Merry Christmas, Richard. I’ve been listening to and reading your work over the holiday period, and as ever I find it challenging in the best sense. You consistently force me to examine my assumptions — which is exactly what serious writing in political economy should do.
Your focus on pleonexia is powerful. The idea that the desire to take more than one’s fair share corrodes society is ancient, well-grounded, and plainly visible in many modern institutions. On that, I agree with you more than you might expect.
Where I struggle, though, is that your analysis often seems to imply a moral asymmetry: that those who advocate freer markets are, by definition, morally suspect or driven by greed, while those who favour large, regulatory, interventionist government are implicitly cast as morally superior — more caring, more humane, more virtuous.
That framing worries me.
Pleonexia is not unique to markets. It is a human failing, and it appears wherever power concentrates — including within the state. It does not disappear when economic activity is routed through government; it simply changes form. Bastiat put it starkly in The Law (1850): “The state is the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” His point was not anti-solidarity, but anti-illusion: coercion does not cleanse moral hazard.
You rightly criticise corporate excess and rent-seeking. But political extraction exists too: expanding bureaucracies with weak accountability; policies that reward organised insiders; tax systems so complex that only the well-advised can navigate them; programmes that persist despite poor outcomes. This, too, is pleonexia — taking without proportional value — though it is often rendered invisible by good intentions.
At their best, markets discipline excess through competition, loss, and choice. Governments, by contrast, operate through compulsion, and when they fail, costs are socialised while decision-makers remain insulated.
I share your desire for an economy rooted in contribution, fairness, and human dignity. I just don’t believe that virtue resides reliably on one side of the market-state divide. Pleonexia must be named honestly — everywhere — or we risk replacing one form of extraction with another, wrapped in moral certainty.
Still, thank you for the provocation. I hope the debate continues in 2026.
I do not believe virtue resides on one side of the market–state divide, and I agree with you that pleonexia is a human failing, not a market-specific one. Power attracts extraction wherever it settles. History gives us no grounds for romanticising either unregulated markets or unaccountable states.
Where I may differ from your reading of my work is here: my critique is not primarily moral, but institutional.
Markets do not merely reveal preferences or discipline excess; they also structure power. When markets are allowed to allocate essential goods, determine wages, shape housing access, or discipline governments, they do so without democratic consent and with asymmetric power built in. Competition can restrain excess in some contexts, but in many real-world market, whether for land, finance, utilities, data, and health, competition is weak or illusory, and rents persist precisely because “loss” does not fall on those best able to bear it.
Equally, you are right that the state can be extractive. Bureaucratic self-preservation, insider capture, complexity that favours the well-advised, programmes that outlive their usefulness – all of these are real. That is why I argue not for more state in the abstract, but for different governance: transparency, simplicity, accountability, long-term stewardship, and institutions designed to limit capture rather than entrench it.
The moral asymmetry you sense is not about intentions. It is about who bears the cost of failure. When markets fail, costs are often socialised. When states fail, costs are also socialised – but states at least can be redesigned democratically. Markets cannot be voted out.
So pleonexia must indeed be named everywhere. My concern is that we currently name it readily in public institutions, but treat it as “incentives” or “efficiency” when it operates through wealth and markets. That imbalance matters.
The task is not to replace one extraction regime with another cloaked in virtue, but to build institutions – public and private – that make extraction harder and contribution easier. On that, I think we are closer than your closing paragraph suggests.
I think yhere is a significant moral element to how people answer the question, “So what are you going to DO about it?”
(“It” being the adverse social consequences of neoliberal staud quo economics as they affect the most vulnerable)
Maybe they don’t care.
Maybe they put their own lesser need first.
Maybe they feel powerless?
Maybe they are lazy?
Maybe they really like the staus quo.
Maybe they are under threat to do as they are told.
All morally distinct positions.
Agreed.
I am beginning to realise just how many moral questions I do ask. They are unavoidable.
Interesting…………..Dr Grafton’s list of public sector ‘crimes’ reads like something James M. Buchanan’s public choice ‘theory’ would put out – and not just for the sake of balance. I worked in the private sector for 11 years full time, 4 years part-time and every crime Buchanan ever listed of the public sector I saw in the private sector. And I saw mistakes and waste of money too – and unlike the state, not money of its own – another false Thatcherite accusation made of the public sector using ‘other people’s money’. The public sector always used the government’s money.
What has not helped the public sector nor government is trying to adopt private sector cultures – ‘managerial-ism’, competition (compulsory ‘competitive tendering’), bidding for funds (beauty contests), ‘value for money’, quality networks, ISOs. And the biggest crime – use service user’s input to disguise financial retrenchment. And a bigger crime than that: reducing accountability, particularly to the centre – Westminster.
This ‘market infected’ public sector is failing us. Pay differentials are like private sector differentials; large quasi public housing associations swallow up smaller ones and assert strip them; buy s.106 housing only to sell it on at huge profit without letting them – behaving like companies, not providers of housing when housing lists are so long – portfolio management being put before the core meaning of existing at all (providing shelter). No, sorry it is the unnecessary adoption of the private sector that is the problem here. I think someone has been watching too much ‘Yes Minister’.
Previously to that, the British state was class war personified, with the rich holding court and the purse strings which they did right up to the inter war years.
I think that your answer to the good doctor is better than mine but I just had to say something – the public sector is in a mess but the desire to meet need is still there in my opinion and we are I think still the best people to deliver it. Because you can’t beat wetting yourself in a dark suit.
Thanks
Could I suggest that practitioners of pleonexia be known as Quockerwodgers. A term that appears in the middle of the nineteenth century, apparently originally an English dialect term for which no antecedents are known. The English Dialect Dictionary of the end of the century has quocken, to vomit or choke, and quocker, a man who goes harvesting at some distance from home, neither of which is any help at all in explaining a word that means a wooden puppet on a string.
It is recorded best in John Camden Hotten’s A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words of 1859:
The term quockerwodger, although referring to a wooden toy figure which jerks its limbs about when pulled by a string, has been supplemented with a political meaning. A pseudo-politician, one whose strings of action are pulled by somebody else, is now often termed a quockerwodger.
Older readers may remember the toy. It was a wooden puppet whose legs and arms were connected only loosely to its body. It was suspended by a single string connected to the head. By jerking the string you could make the puppet flail about in amusing and ridiculous ways. You can see how the political meaning could easily have grown out of that.
Though it is widely recorded in dictionaries of slang in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with Farmer and Henley even describing it as common in Slang and Its Analogues in 1892, and it continues to be included in works on historical slang to the present day, it has rarely appeared in print. It appears in a book of satires edited by William Nation published in 1880: “The shameless arts of the sycophant are not monopolised by Mr. Quocker-wodger and his congeners.”
Nadolig Llawen from mid Wales.
In order to help Messrs Fa***e and Yaxley-Lennon with their mission to recover “Christian values” in the UK, I dug out my Bagster’s Analytical Greek Lexicon to look it up, as used in the New Testament.
The moral, rather than lexical root of course, is in the 10th Hebrew Commandment – “thou shalt not covet” (stuff/relationships that already belong to someone else. Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21) which being last on the list, seems to have fallen out of favour for those who say they want the return of “Christian” values to “British” life.
I’ll be back later today with the results of my New Testament lexicon study on pleonexia. It’s not something my fingers can manage on an android keyboard.
(Just in case you find yourself discussing the UK’s “Christian” heritage over the Christmas holiday with friends and family.) 😉
🙂
Here we go:
Bagster’s Analytical Greek Lexicon, on the “Funding the Future” WORD OF THE YEAR!
“πλεονεξια” (PLEONEXIA – in case the Greek text doesn’t transfer)
(URLs are for the Contemporary English Version – a “dynamic equivalence” translation (English should convey same meaning to us as original Greek did to the writer) as opposed to “verbal equivalence” translation (word for word literal translation).
Pleonexia – from verb pleonekteo: to have more than another, to take advantage of, to over-reach, to make gain of: 2 Corinthians 7.2
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Corinthians%207.2&version=CEV
& 2 Corinthians 12.17-18;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Corinthians%2012.17-18&version=CEV
To wrong: 1 Thessalonians 4.6;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20thessalonians%204.6&version=CEV
to get the better, or an advantage of: 2 Corinthians 2.11
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=%202%20Corinthians%202.11&version=CEV
pleonektes (noun) – a person who has or claims to have, more than his share. a covetous avaricious person, one who defrauds for the sake of gain: 1 Corinthians 5.10-11;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%205.10-11&version=CEV
2 Corinthians 6.10;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%206.10&version=CEV
Ephesians 5.5
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Eph%205.5&version=CEV
pleonexia (noun) – some advantage which one possesses over another, an inordinate desire of riches, covetousness: Luke 12.15 et al;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2012.15&version=CEV
grasping over-reaching, extortion: Romans 1.29;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans%201.29&version=CEV
1 Thessalonians 2.5 et al;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Thess%202.5&version=CEV
a gift exacted by importunity and conferred with grudging, a hard-wrung gift: 2 Corinthians 9.5;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20cor%209.5&version=CEV
a scheme of extortion: Mark 7.22;
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%207.22&version=CEV
See also:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=%CF%80%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%BF%CE%BD%CE%B5%CE%BE%CE%B9%CE%B1&ia=web
( a search list) and an online lexicography:
https://www.wordreference.com/gren/%CF%80%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%BF%CE%BD%CE%B5%CE%BE%CE%B9%CE%B1
I’m no Hebrew scholar but the word “greed” does feature in English translations of the Tanach/Old Testament.
https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?qs_version=CEV&quicksearch=Greed&begin=1&end=46&resultspp=25
Please share them gently with any friends, UTK enthusiasts or Reform voters you meet, especially if they talk about “Judaeo-Christian values” or our “Christian culture”.
Thank you!
This word is firmly lodged in my less than efficient brain. We need to spread the word. I like the two comments I can see so far.
Thanks
Expressed in art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdYGQ7B0Vew&list=RDMdYGQ7B0Vew&start_radio=1
(probably one of his best). The lyrics are pitch perfect describing those with ploenexia (& there are a very large number).
It takes a certain kind of man with a certain reputation
To alleviate the cash from a whole entire nation
Take my loose change and build my own space station
(Just because you can, man)
Ain’t no refutin’ or disputin’ I’m a modern Rasputin
So contract disputes to some brutes in Louboutin
Act highfalootin’ while my boys put the boots in
(They do the can-can)
(Spasibo!)
I’ve got Stolly and Bolly and Molly, so I’m jolly
And I’m always off my trolley, so I never say sorry
There’s a doll inside a doll inside a doll inside a dolly
(Hello, Dolly)
I put a bank inside a car inside a plane inside a boat
It takes half the Western world just to keep my ship afloat
And I never ever smile unless there’s something to promote
I just won’t emote
(Spasibo!)
Well spotted….
Maybe the modern term would be ripoff and their merchants such as banks, hedge funds and the other financial extraction devices.
My dear Richard,
Thank you SO much for bringing this wonderfully powerful Greek word to the attention of your readership.
This is one of many Greek words that make one realise the truth of the old adage that “the Greeks have a word for it”.
This one is a stunner. Thanks.
Thanks, Andrew
And I hope you have a good Christmas.
Richard
Yes indeed a great word. I don’t know much about the ancient Greeks but it applies to some of the Roman emperors. Musk and his ilk definitely have a lot in common with them.
What’s wrong with “greed”? It is more accessible and rolls off the tongue better
Because it dues not describe the phenomenon.
I disagree but I have always been in favour of direct communication.
Merry Midwinter.
Lorraine
The problem with the word ‘greed’ is that it is emotionally loaded – it may allow us to dehumanize the Pleonexic when really – practicing what we preach – (we try to avoid the dehumanizing fascism of old Left and Right here) it allows them to be seen in more complete sense, that there is a human being in there somewhere who has that humanity (in this case maybe, vulnerability receptor that is linked with pro-social behaviour) turned off because off their wealth. Money – even lack of it – changes people.
At the root of understanding the problem as one of pleonexia are the political possibilities of compromise. If we understand what drives wealth, then it maybe it is possible to negotiate with it or give it a chance to change? And even I am sceptical about that! But that is also a truly Liberal objective – putting yourself in someone else’s shoes in order to understand them and solve a problem justly and more importantly – peacefully (although real human history is littered with violence).
The devil is in the detail Lorraine. Always has been; always will be. One thing I have learnt from people like Richard and Steve Keen and others over the years is that ‘direct communication’ MUST include facts as much emotion. And the facts continue to build up. Technical virtuosity always wins wars Lorraine.
Thanks
I think the word pleonexia is a great word and the devil is in the detail in all things. That is why I subscribe here.
But my white, poor illiberal family would only give pause to the word greed. In my view you need different words for different people.
Tax Research has always been an exceptional educational experience but this latest piece of work takes it to new heights. Thank you so much Richard.
Thanks