Can we introduce a maximum wage cap and get rid of the billionaires?
Every year more wealth ends up in the hands of fewer billionaires, as billions of people go without basics.
You know that meme which goes something like, if a monkey hoards more bananas than it could eat in its entire lifetime, zoologists would study it as a freakish anomaly – the meme doesn’t say ‘freakish anomaly’ because it’s a meme – but if a human hoards more money than they can spend in their entire lifetime, we put them on the cover of Forbes?
Instead of regarding such individuals as mentally unwell – if they were hoarding egg cartons or scary dolls they’d be featured in a low budget documentary – these people are revered. Thought of as special, different, cleverer, harder working, more gifted than everyone else. It is this awe and admiration for the extreme, incalculable wealth of a tiny few which prevents us from changing a system so skewed that every year more wealth ends up in the hands of fewer billionaires, as billions of people go without basics.
In 2021 on Twitter, someone calculated Elon Musk’s wealth by asking us to imagine being born in the Ice Age, and saving $10,000 a day for 82,021 years. By 2021 we’d still not have as much money as Musk, who a year later proceeded to buy Twitter and eat it feet first.
But when we worry about wealth inequality, for reasons of obvious urgency we focus on the billions going without basics. We don’t look at the hoarders, the wealth vampires whose souped-up accountants spend their days electronically whizzing around global markets, turning money into more and more and more money.
They include not just Space Karens like Musk, or Jeff Bezos who earns the average annual salary of an Amazon worker every nine seconds, but the current UK prime minister, on an annual salary of £164,951 but personally worth £530,000,000.
Nobody should have more than ten million, says Professor Ingrid Robeyns. She means euros, and she proposes something called Limitarianism. Robeyns, an economics philosopher at Utrecht University, has long been suggesting we direct our attention at the super-rich, as well as the poor, so that more balance may eventually be achieved not just via an economic shift, but a paradigm shift.
She advocates a maximum wage as well as a minimum – and ten million is hardly scrimping – in a world where unlimited accumulation meets not just with approval, but admiration. A world where the starving monkeys mutely look on as a handful of their fellows hide all the world’s bananas.
Capping personal wealth at ten million, says Robeyns in her new book Limitariansm: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, would not just result in better living conditions for all – if you think being mega-rich makes you happy, watch Succession – but could reverse current threats to democracy, climate breakdown, and, crucially, the balance of power itself. She’s done the maths.
Instead, given how the mega-rich so often own the media, we have been schooled to hate and fear the most vulnerable – migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, the ones with zero bananas – while the banana-hoarding billionaires recline on their superyachts as the world burns. We need Limitarianism. Urgently.
