How amused I was to read recently that some of the Apple Corporation's largest shareholders wrote the company a letter in which they urged it to begin thinking about how addictive their smartphones are.  Consider the greater good, they encouraged.
     Smartphones addictive?  What a novel thought!  (Not really.)


     One day later, another group of shareholders wrote the corporation.  Don't fret about smartphone addiction, they counseled.  Consider the greater good:  shareholder value.
     This rather begs the question:  what is the genuinely greater good here?  Is it monetary value or is it cultural sanity?  "The love of money," Paul counseled Timothy, "is the root of all evil."  Indeed, it is.  We all like the price of our stocks to be high.  Yet we ought to like even more a culture in which accumulating wealth is the last thing we need to think about.
     What do you prefer?  Wealth or addiction?