What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible?

Last month, 93-year-old Ruth Gottesman, a former professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the widow of financier David Gottesman, announced a gift of $1 billion to her school. With the funds came instructions: The money is to be used to make tuition free for students at the Bronx institution, in perpetuity.

The donation was celebrated—for its size, of course, but also for its humanitarian cast. As the New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante put it, Gottesman’s giving “broadcasts a message of how a billionaire might live his or her best life—without terra-forming Mars, without Burning Man, without the attempts to stealth-run Harvard.”

Endowing an underfunded medical school is clearly a better use of money than buying yet another super-yacht. But it’s also staggering that a decision as society-shaping as dissolving the debt load of thousands of potential doctors could depend on the whims of one individual, and that one person has the resources to implement such a policy on their own, needing no one else’s input or approval.

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Gottesman’s fortune is comparatively modest next to those of the growing group of ultrawealthy individuals. Her estimated $3 billion isn’t even high enough to crack the top 100 wealthiest on the Forbes list, where characters such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault cavort in the 12 figures. If Gottesman has the power to change so many lives, the power held by those with 10 or 50 times her fortune is hard for the mind to even grasp. Maybe we should be asking whether she—or anyone else—should have that much wealth at all.

“For a long time, I felt there was something wrong with an individual amassing so much money, but I couldn’t properly articulate why,” writes the Dutch philosopher Ingrid Robeyns. “After a decade of analyzing and debating extreme wealth, 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.” In her book of the same name, Robeyns fleshes out the case for such a cap while upending common conceptions of agency, ownership, and what a fortune really signifies.

Extreme wealth keeps the poor poor, she argues, and expands inequality. The super-rich undermine democracy through their outsize political influence and wreck the climate with their luxurious lifestyles. Some of their money is acquired through questionable means—from exploitative business practices, or dodging taxes, or outright theft. Robeyns argues that no one deserves such excess, that people would be better off morally and psychologically without it, and that there are better uses for society’s spillover abundance—ending poverty, say, or improving infrastructure. Even well-intentioned philanthropy doesn’t make up for these downsides: It’s no stand-in for a well-functioning, well-funded government—the sort that the wealthy often undermine in the course of making their fortune.

And it’s that government and its citizens on which any fortune depends. “Take any multimillionaire or billionaire, and put them on a desert island,” Robeyns writes. “They still have all the same talents and personal traits as before. How rich could they become? Not very rich, obviously.”

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Any individual’s wealth is dependent on the resources, effort, and cooperation of the society that surrounds them. Yet today, even though multibillionaires make their fortunes using the resources of a broader society—profiting off customers, employees, and public infrastructure; protected by government regulation and international accords—they are able to make unilateral decisions that shape society according to their desires, without that same society having much input at all.  

Robeyns proposes two upper limits on personal wealth. Most countries with a solid social safety net should bake a 10-million-euro (approximately $10.8 million) cap into their social and fiscal systems, she argues. As an ethical guide, individuals should limit themselves to 1 million (perhaps $5 million in the less secure United States, where one mistimed hospital bill could be enough to thrust a household into bankruptcy). She also notes ruefully that both proposed numbers are also less restrictive than some philosophers’ ideal: In The Laws, for instance, Plato argues that the wealthiest people shouldn’t be able to have more property than four times what people with the least have.

The numbers are somewhat arbitrary and context-dependent, but precise amounts are less important than having a socially recognized upper limit in play—a line between being reasonably wealthy and being unethically super-rich. After a certain point, extra money brings decreasing marginal utility for an individual—instead, Robeyns suggests, those surplus funds should be used to address society’s most urgent and unmet needs, “redistributed to those who have very little or else used to fund public goods that benefit us all.”

Any limit, of course, would likely be difficult to enforce without significant changes to our tax and governance frameworks. Critics say that such a policy would be impossible to put into practice—and even if it were, a cap on potential wealth would be demotivating, stifling innovation. Plus, the idea that others might have a say in distributing what an individual has personally earned (even though, as Robeyns convincingly illustrates, no one “earns” anything in a vacuum) can feel like a threatening prospect. Can governments use the money as efficiently as we might want? Do we really trust our fellow citizens to make good decisions?

But it’s not the intricacies of implementation that make Robeyns’s “case against extreme wealth” compelling. Rather, it’s the challenge to often unexamined beliefs about ownership and how many people measure their own worth. Limitarianism questions the idea that individual wealth is ever individual.

The majority of extreme wealth is born from happenstance, Robeyns posits: wealthy parents, a well-timed inheritance, or unearned natural endowments like intelligence and creativity. And while it’s fair to leverage one’s assets and drive—some people work harder than others, and in a limitarian regime, inequality would not be eliminated—doing so shouldn’t result in the wild disparities we see today.

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Yet it can be destabilizing to realize just how much of a role luck plays in our success and how much wealth is undeserved—which is why the most fortunate may avoid talking about money at all. Frequently, they regurgitate platitudes that suggest that with a little elbow grease, a cultish morning regimen, and a tight grip on our bootstraps, any disadvantage can be overcome.

After all, the U.S. has long idealized the self-made man, whether he’s a rough-hewn frontiersman or a Carnegie-style tycoon. And some Americans believe that restrictions on individual economic freedom are a threat to political freedom, that governments are inherently wasteful, and that we can define our worth by what we’ve attained.

Only a minuscule percentage of Americans would meet that net-worth threshold of $5 million—in fact, the average yearly salary in the U.S. today is $59,384. (Compare that with the centibillionaire Jeff Bezos, whose net worth increases by $59,000 roughly every minute.) Limitarian policies would not materially affect most people’s money. But directing excessive wealth toward prosocial goals—using it to pay for a stronger social safety net and better public resources, to mitigate climate change, or to end hunger—would help everyone feel more secure.

Even so, the thought of capping wealth is intuitively disquieting because it contradicts some of American culture’s most deeply held beliefs. If extreme wealth is no longer aspirational, what else should we strive for? Will we lose all ambition if the prospect of material gain goes away? If we didn’t earn what we have, how do we measure our worth?

In provoking this discomfort, Robeyns’s book is a timely addition to the conversation about extreme wealth—subverting assumptions in a way that may make it easier to accept the (far less dramatic) shifts that may finally be taking place. People generally agree that inequality is too high in the United States. Younger generations already view capitalism less favorably than their parents once did, and are more supportive of redistributive policies. President Joe Biden’s latest budget proposal calls for a 25 percent minimum income tax on Americans with more than $100 million in wealth, in part to help fund Social Security and Medicare, among other policies meant to shrink income inequality.

Policy change is necessary, but most essential is a change of heart. “We don’t just need institutional design and fiscal choices, we also need to develop a set of public values that are culturally embedded, where material gain is not the leading incentive,” Robeyns writes. “We must rebalance our view of society, and our view of ourselves as human beings.”

A society with limits on wealth will have to develop new aspirations. Now is as good a time as any to begin dreaming new dreams.