In 2022, Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, was ranked first in the billionaires list published by the US business magazine Forbes. Suppose you worked 50 hours a week between the ages of 20 and 65 – week in week out, year in year out – how much would your hourly wage need to be so that by the end you had amassed Musk’s wealth? The answer is: $1,871,794 per hour. Almost two million dollars per hour. Every working hour for 45 years.
Elon Musk might be seen as exceptional, but there were 2,668 other billionaires on that Forbes list. Together they held $12,700,000,000,000. Do you, like me, see all those zeros dancing before your eyes? That’s because we don’t know how to take in that number. On average the value of their assets is $4.75bn. If we ask the same question again – what’s the average lifetime hourly wage? – we get $40,598 per hour, the equivalent to what many Americans hope to earn in a year.
How much is too much? When I started this research, 10 years ago, several of my colleagues – professors in philosophy, economics and related disciplines – were initially amused that I wanted to delve into this question. Some argued that poverty was what mattered, not inequality. A few felt that focusing on the rich was an indication of envy on my part.
But I wasn’t alone. Across various disciplines, scholars were starting to see that something was happening at the upper levels of society, and we ought to pay attention. I started to think through the ethics of extreme wealth concentration in a systematic way, and after a decade I became convinced that we must create a world in which no one is super-rich – that there must be a cap on the amount of wealth any one person can have. I call this limitarianism.
As a concept, limitarianism is simple. But what does it mean in practice? My book endeavours to answer that question, but it can best be understood as a regulative ideal – an outcome to strive for but which, like the eradication of poverty, is unlikely to be definitively achieved.
In practical terms, limitarianism calls for three kinds of action. First there is structural action. Our societies’ key social and economic institutions should give people genuinely equal opportunities, through affordable childcare, free high-quality education and a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy.
The more structural steps we take to reduce inequality, the less need there will be for the second strategy, fiscal action. If taxation were our only tool for achieving a limitarian society, the tax rate would need to be set at 100% for wealth and income beyond a certain point (spoiler alert: it is not the only tool). Still, there is a very strong case for imposing a cap on extreme wealth.
The third kind of action limitarianism calls for is ethical action: we all need to embrace a limitarian ethos.
One objection to this might be that limiting how much wealth a person can accrue would require us to give up private property or the market mechanism, and force us into USSR-style communism. Such an objection is nonsense, and it’s probably just another attempt to silence meaningful criticism of the status quo. Markets are a very powerful tool for securing material welfare; private property is a cornerstone of our security, autonomy and prosperity. The real question, which we must seek to answer, is rather which constraints on the market and private property we need if we are to achieve limitarianism.
Another objection might be: doesn’t limitarianism mean equal outcomes for everyone, regardless of what they do? The answer is simply: no. Limitarianism does not advocate strict equality. There are reasons, based on principle as much as pragmatism, why some degree of inequality is justified. Some people work much harder than others, take more risks or assume more responsibility. Others, meanwhile, lead sober lifestyles that generate savings over time.
And this is the most important aspect of limitarianism.