BOOK REVIEW
Where should society draw the line on extreme wealth? A fresh account sets out the logic and suggests how to redress inequality.
As soon as you hit 1B net worth, you get a diploma that says “Congrats, you won capitalism”, and every penny headed for your accounts past that point gets diverted into a society welfare fund.
Could probably set the bar A LOT lower too.
I’d draw the line around 20 million or so. I think that’s reasonable.
20 to 50 millions ought to be more than enough. A billion is an amount that no longer makes any sense (assuming we’re in euros/dollars).
I’d also say that after you get out of the low tens of millions you are, by definition, a fucking asshole. You can’t get that much money except by exploiting others. In my mind a highly skilled individual could personally create 20 million in economic output.
Where does that put entertainers, professional athletes, and lottery jackpot winners? I hear that Taylor Swift is a billionaire solely through her music sales and performance income.
Taylor Swift is an extremely odd case and might be one of the least ass-hole-y billionaires out there. But, given her level of wealth, why is she still charging for shows? Are all the people who work for her millionaires? Are all the roadies and stage hands and audio techs and venue greeters getting a fair portion of the revenue generated for their relative labor? Is there a compelling reason she shouldn’t’ve started giving away massive amounts of charity after she could afford her first mansion?
My main point about all billionaires being assholes is that at a certain point the wealth is so worthless to you personally and so valuable to the people around you that hording it means you’re an asshole - you’re greedy enough that number-goes-up is more important than the well being of those around you and those that helped you accumulate your wealth.
With $20 million I could still buy and control my local city council. /s
You could live a decent middle class lifestyle with 4 million dollars and never work again. Let’s be generous and say 10 million is the cap. There’s no reason to get further, much less to a billion.
I was going to say something about “cost of living in an area” because 10M in WV is gonna go a lot further than 10M in NYC, but then I started wondering what kind of knock-on effects setting that hard cap would have? Would cost of living in NYC decrease because now the rich people can’t be rich enough to comfortably afford it, or will it cause them to keep contributing to society for a paycheck because they don’t want to move? Feel like this might be a good speculative essay subject for a financial policy class.
That’s just socialism. On Second Thought, let’s just do that.
I love how when this gets recommended the responses turn into trying to find the more exact correct amount to set the line at. Just like normal politics though, they get bogged down so much that what seemed like a simple answer turns into discuss,defer,delay, and the original point was missed.
If you’re trying to solve inequality through tax policy alone, I wonder what the effect would be of having the top tax rate vary with the Gini coefficient. The idea being that the wealthy can theoretically reduce their tax burden if (and only if) they figure out how to use their economic power to reduce inequality by other means.
How would you pinpoint the reduction of inequality to one person?
You wouldn’t—they’d have to work together. (Something they do seem capable of, when there’s profit in it.)
I don’t understand, so is it like the lower the inequality, lower taxes for the wealthiest?
Right.
If they can proactively reduce inequality, fine; otherwise the tax rates will do it for them.
Interesting, but wouldn’t the lower tax rates that they earn end up counteracting the gains they made?
Partly—but depending on how much you want to prioritize redistribution vs revenue, you could adjust the tax/Gini curve to set the equilibrium wherever you want.
1,250,000 is 5000$ per month for 20 years.
1,000,000,000 is 5000$ per month for 16,666 years.
There is a great essay that touches on this question:
https://www.philosophersbeard.org/2012/04/what-to-do-about-rich.html
It’s more important to control trajectory than it is to control absolute wealth. Capital accumulation is how we got here, not people suddenly winning 1 billion dollars.
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It’s a good question… in computer terms, it doesn’t matter how much storage space or processing power you have, you WILL find a way to use it.
Someone who makes $30,000 a year and is legit living paycheck to paycheck may be just as tight on money as someone earning $100,000 and living paycheck to paycheck.
The difference is scale.
The person making $30,000 is struggling to make car and insurance payments on an 11 year old Honda Civic.
The person making $100,000 is struggling to make car and insurance payments on their 2024 Porsche Cayenne.
The person making millions may be struggling (to remember) to pay their car and insurance payments on their Bugatti Veyron.
Okay but if the rich person misses their Porsche payments, they can buy a Honda Civic.
I don’t know why you are even saying this. What is the point? “If a person spends lots of money on luxury items, they will have less disposable income.” Okay? What does that contribute to the question of how our government policies regulate wealth?
I’m saying that expenses scale to wealth, so someone making a significant income may still struggle at the same level as someone with a low income.
Look at someone like Rudy Giuliani, who I feel safe in saying, nobody feels sorry for that sad fuck. He’s having trouble paying for ANYTHING. Hope he’s cutting out that avocado toast. ;)
That is only true to a point, after which expenses basically don’t exist anymore and wealth continues to grow. The point at which that happens is much lower than you probably think.
I hear that expenses can scale to wealth (although, as I said, the difference is that the wealthy person can scale back but someone already buying the cheapest option has no choice), but what does that have to do with the article? Just a topic you wanted to bring up? Is there something I’m missing?
I’m saying capping how much wealth someone is allowed to have:
a) Is likely to have unintended consequences.
and b) May end up hurting more people than it helps.
Where is the logic from:
rich people may be broke if they spend a lot
to:
capping wealth may have unintended consequences and will hurt more people than it helps
You do realize that the vast majority of people are not wealthy and that the top one percent own a ridiculously disproportionate amount of the wealth? Wealth caps would only “harm” the top whatever percentage of earners. And if they’re at such a thin margin that the wealth tax would hurt them, like boo fucking hoo lmao, they can sell their Bugatti and buy a new Honda Civic fresh off the lot.
The person making $100,000 is struggling to make car and insurance payments on their 2024 Porsche Cayenne.
I get the idea of what you’re saying but for many geographies your dollar figure doesn’t match. Up your number to maybe $175k for somewhere like NYC or other large urban centers for it to be accurate.
Oh, definitely. You could even scale rent.
Someone making $30K with 3 room mates is struggling to come up with their share of the rent.
Someone making $100,000 with no room mates, is struggling to pay their $4,000 rent.
the spend X persons money games show that eventually its a job to find a ways to spend it. there is a limit when it comes to homes and cars.
But at some point, personal expenditure (not expenses geared to bussiness making more money) maxs out. Only so much food you can eat, only so much time you can spend in a day, only so much housing space you can occupy with out that 5th house basically becoming a investment property.
If you have a bloated program that sucks up all your ram on unnecessary processes because it was poorly developed your computer would care and especially if you go to scale, a billionaire costs more and takes more computing power than a finely tuned family living off of 40000 a year because the billionaire wastes everything since it means nothing but that family makes sure every Lil bit is used to its fullest. Billionaires break the computer
The person making billions is struggling to pay the officials off that enabled them to continue to make billions.
The person making 100,000 is either living in LA/NY or financially lazy. The person making 30,000 doesn’t have room to manuever.
Clearly we should rebalance things so everyone has room to manuever. The US GDP evenly split among adults is ~138,000 dollars. Take a bit off the top to run the country and we’re left with about 106,000. It’s blindingly clear we’re grinding the working class to the bone for the benefit of the few. Not the country or the people.
And justifying it with, but that guy with a million dollars spends it all! Just doesn’t cut it. He doesn’t need it and he doesn’t need the things it buys.
