Kim -- yes, you're of course right. Just about any activity can be rendered bad. But there's one key difference. Education can be negative if pursued specifically with nefarious ends. Brainwashing may be presented as education, but it's quite easy to separate from the real thing. Likewise selling fake medicines is obviously bad, though it's difficult to argue that this is real health care. Meanwhile, it'd be unusual for children's vaccination, prenatal care, and guinea worm eradication to be harmful -- at worst it may be ineffectual.
By contrast, financial services can become a problem without anyone being pernicious about it. Credit in particular has an inherent tendency towards excess (perhaps best described by economist Marvin Minsky), and in fact requires quite a lot of focus to prevent it from getting there. And it's not simply due to the pursuit of profit -- a point where I differ with Chuck. There've been plenty of cases of non-profit credit providers and entire markets (Morocco, Bangladesh) that have overheated and created overindebtedness, without anyone having been at all pernicious or particularly greedy. Once markets get saturated, avoiding overindebtedness is actually quite hard -- even for well-meaning actors.
Perhaps that's the reason why -- as you rightly point out -- integrity is so important, yet so rare. I would argue that for teachers & doctors, basic competence is already sufficient to do good. For us, integrity (or more realistically, a watchful eye) is critical.
Best,
Daniel
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Posted by: danrozas@yahoo.com
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