The one-sentence summary

The case against extreme wealth means that it should be limited to £10 million per individual and ideally be set at £1 million.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing to show for it. Or is there? The true extent of our wealth problem has been silently spiralling out of control for the last 50 years, and it is harmful to all – including the extreme rich themselves.
  • Limitarianism is the proposed antidote to the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism – placing a hard limit on the wealth that one person can accumulate, because no one deserves to be a millionaire. It is a regulative ideal – an outcome to strive for, but not one that can necessarily be legislated. It calls for three kinds of action: structural (designing our economies to provide equitable distribution of wealth for all), fiscal (balancing tax and the benefits system) and ethical (embracing a limitarian ethos). There should be no decamillionaires, and the ethical limit should be one million dollars, pounds or euros.
  • Limitarianism makes a distinction between three thresholds: the riches line, the ethical limit and the political limit. The riches line is the level at which additional money cannot increase your standard of living. The ethical limit is the maximum level of money we can own on moral lines. The political limit is the ultimate limit on a person’s wealth that the state should use as a goal when setting up its social and fiscal systems.
  • Actions to instigate limitarianism include dismantling neoliberal ideology, reducing class segregation, establishing a balance of economic power, restoring the fiscal agency of governments, making international economic architecture fair, and halting the intergenerational transmission of wealth.
  • Most people appear to be able to draw a distinction between the rich and the super-rich. The rich can afford to buy a house without a mortgage and possibly own one abroad. They have private services such as nannies and gardeners, and several cars and investments, whereas the super-rich have much more than they could ever need.
  • The super-rich are making the world worse and there are many ways in which they do it, including crimes against humanity such as Nazi atrocities and slavery, kleptocracy and officials engaged in corruption, dirty money from business practices that deliberately cause harm to customers and the wider environment, and tax dodging.
  • Super-rich people also undermine democracy by purchasing golden visas and passports, making political donations in return for favours, using lobbyists to influence legislation, the media, research and the output of think tanks. They have been called the transnational capitalist class, who can live and work anywhere, and generally do exactly what they want. An example are the attendees at Davos. In 2022, an estimated 500 private jets flew in to discuss what public-private partnerships can do to tackle climate change, causing emissions equivalent to 26,700 cars driving from Paris to Davos.
  • Amazon could choose to have a lower return for shareholders and thereby significantly improve the lives of their workers, but they don’t. Instead, Jeff Bezos flies into space. Rich individuals are increasingly hoarding everything. There are 2,775 billionaires with a combined net worth of $13 trillion. If each of them just kept one billion, it would still leave $10 trillion for ending poverty, hunger and environmental destruction. They alone could finance a civilized world.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Rich people feeling a deep sense of unease about their extreme wealth can do something about it. For example, Patriotic Millionaires is a group who ask to be taxed more.
  • In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill developed the idea of the ‘declining marginal value of money.’ This is based on the simple intuition that the more money you have, the less any additional unit of money contributes to your quality of life.
  • A joke on social media says that anyone becoming a billionaire should be given a trophy for having ‘won capitalism’. They should have a dog park named after them and any additional wealth should be confiscated.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • This book is a detailed and well-argued manifesto and contains many radical ideas, so it needs to be approached with an open mind.