My wife and I recently went to Paris for our wedding anniversary.

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We spent an afternoon at the Rodin Museum and stood before Rodin’s enormous Gates of Hell. More than six metres high, the doors are covered with human figures twisting, clinging to one another and falling towards Hell. Above them sits The Thinker, originally conceived as Dante himself, looking down upon the damned. I found it disturbing. It appeared ugly to me. But it was impossible to ignore.

It made me think about the seven deadly sins. Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth. They sound old-fashioned today. We have different words for them. Greed becomes incentive. Envy becomes aspiration. Pride becomes self-belief. Gluttony becomes consumption. Wrath becomes engagement. Sloth becomes somebody else’s responsibility. We have not defeated the seven deadly sins. We have rebranded them.

I have spent nearly fifty years in business and benefited enormously from capitalism. At my Goldman Sachs interview in 1982, a senior trader told me: “To be successful, you need to be greedy. To be very, very successful, you need to be very, very greedy.” Later, the partner sponsoring me told me I would never be satisfied, no matter how successful I became, and that this determination would make me and Goldman an enormous amount of money.

There was truth in that. Markets are extraordinarily good at turning the human appetite for success into economic activity. But markets are much better at answering what people will pay for than whether something should exist. That second question belongs to us.

I learned something about this through William Hill. In 1997, Nomura, the bank I worked for, acquired the bookmaker and I led the acquisition. We pushed William Hill........

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