Odd, isn't it, how once you start thinking deeply about a topic -- as I did when I was editing The Love of Money: 56 Classic Stories About Greed -- how that subject pops up everywhere.

Just finished reading Elizabeth Ironside's A Very Private Enterprise, an excellent mystery set in India. On page 57 a character had this to say:

"Extreme wealth and poverty undoubtedly increase the temptation to steal, but I think we must agree that the impulse of greed lies deep within man's nature. Indeed, perhaps we can say that social controls on greed are stronger in a society like India where the hierarchy of wealth and position is felt to have a religious and moral basis than in a more egalitarian society where even quite slight differences in wealth can create envy, because no particular right is felt to attach to its owners."