Why is television so awful? Why do drug companies hide unfavourable test results? Why do automakers market unsafe cars? Why is our environment poisoning us? Why do we brutalize farm animals? Why is our food so unhealthy? Why is political discourse so debased? Why are we working sixty-hour weeks?

Wade Rowland's new book Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and How We Let it Happen places the blame for much of what ails contemporary society at the doorstep of a single institution - the modern publicly-traded business corporation.

In this landmark book, Rowland - one of Canada's leading literary non-fiction writers - shows how we have become an uncaring society because the corporate ethos that informs virtually everything in our culture is uniquely and implacably selfish. The corporation exists for one purpose only: to make a profit. And such an objective trumps all others. Nothing else matters.

Greed, Inc. traces the rise of the corporation from the Rationalist social engineering of the 18th century - as well as the parallel triumph of moral relativism, consumerism, enterprise culture and other dominant value systems of our time. It shows how a series of psychological and philosophical misconceptions institutionalized greed and self-serving behaviour as a good thing for society. Indeed the origins of corporate culture seem in retrospect so preposterous as to defy belief - and yet these misconceived values now dominate our lives. Because of these notions of selfishness, we have arrived at a time when we seem at odds with almost everything around us.

Greed, Inc. is a groundbreaking book in that it reveals the roots of this social discontent for the first time through the lens of moral philosophy. It provides a highly original analysis with which we can begin to truly understand the cultural and moral dilemma in which we find ourselves mired at the beginning of the 21st century.

Anybody who cares about our quality of life and the very survival of humanity will need to read this book.

Wade Rowland is one of Canada's leading literary non-fiction writers. His most recent works include Greed Inc.; Galileo's Mistake; Ockham's Razor; and Spirit of the Web. He is a long-time journalist who has worked for the Winnipeg Free Press, the Toronto Telegram and the television news divisions of both the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and the CTV Television Network.

Rowland holds a doctorate from the faculty of Communication and Culture at York University (Toronto) and teaches the history, sociology and philosophy of communications technologies at the Atkinson School of Arts and Letters, York University. He has also lectured in the Computer Studies faculty at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and he is a former Maclean Hunter Chair of Ethics in Media at Ryerson University in Toronto.