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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. As the fortunes of the world's richest people swell, how much is too much? Can a person be too rich? For more than a decade, philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns has been considering these questions. In her new book, she lays out some of the problems of extreme wealth, practical, political, and moral, and proposes a potential solution. Robeyns writes, "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," she writes.

Let's find out more of where she thinks the upper limit should be, for example, and delve into what she calls the regulative ideal of limitarianism and who it would help. Robeyns new book is called Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, and she joins me now. Thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations on the book. Welcome to WNYC.

Ingrid Robeyns: Thank you very much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: I guess, we could start with a little bit of news for some context, if this is just an abstraction for people, there are super rich, yes. Last week CNBC and others reported that Jeff Bezos will save at least $600 million by moving to Florida, a state with no income or capital gains tax. Last year Bezos made about $7.9 million per hour, and his net worth is about 190 billion now. How do we even get to this place in which someone could amass so much wealth?

Ingrid Robeyns: Yes. How did we get here? That's a good question, but I don't think it's a recent phenomenon. It started already decades ago when we changed the form of the capitalism that we have. After the second World War we had what some economists called a mixed economy, where there was a balance between what the government provided and what the markets provided. We've moved to a type of economy where we really trust the market completely. We've lost fate in the government, we've also reduced the wealth of the government so that it can provide public goods, and that means that some are now reaping very high profits in the markets because they have extreme market power.

Brian Lehrer: I guess, limitarianism is self-defining, but are you proposing specific things, like a maximum wage or a maximum amount of wealth beyond which something happens at the level of a government?

Ingrid Robeyns: The largest inequalities across the world are not so much in income, although those are also large, but it's really about inequality of wealth. Why is wealth so important? It has a different function in the lives of people. Namely, if you have some wealth, just think of some savings or a house that you partly own, you have something to plan, to invest, to recover if some bad shocks happen.

We just know that from the fantastic data that have been gathered by economists over the last decades that wealth inequality is extremely unequal. Just to give you the figures for the US, half of the American population, so 50% of the population, has 2.3% of all the wealth, whereas if you look at the top 10%, it has 73% of all the wealth, with 34% going to just one out of every 100 Americans. That is really going back to wealth inequality numbers that we know from the Gilded Age.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your questions and comments on this. Do you think that the case against extreme wealth is a convincing one and there should be rules, and regulations, and tax rates consistent with Limitarianism, which is the title of the new book by our guest philosopher and economist, Ingrid Robeyns?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Where do you think the cap should be, what do you think the rules should be if we were to start a limitarian movement in this country, let's say? 212-433-9692. Comments, questions, ideas, call or text. Ingrid, I'd like you to get as specific as you can about how it would help everyone else to have limitarian limits. How specifically would a cap on wealth solve other people's problems? Does the limit necessarily result in a redistribution that leads to less poverty, less working class struggle? What happens once that wealth is taxed or otherwise limited?

Ingrid Robeyns: Yes. This is really the most important question, I believe. I don't think it should just be taxed, which tax is only one possible tool and one that comes at the very end. What you basically should have is an economy that's structured in a different way so that what we produce together is divided less unequally, hence more equally. Right now what we see from the data is that the share of the economic production that went to profit, so to the investors, has increased over the last decades, whereas what goes to the workers hasn't increased.

The fundamental question underlying this data about wealth inequality is, what does the economy create for us? What kind of world? Of course the government is part of the economy, but the government has increasingly started to prioritize the interests of the more wealthy and has prioritized less the interest of ordinary people. It is really a much bigger story than just the question about whether we should have taxation at some point to rectify the massive inequalities that we observe.

Brian Lehrer: What policies would you begin with?

Ingrid Robeyns: Well, I think when we had the mixed economy, both in the US, but also in Europe, in the '50s, '60s, we had a much fair division of what a company would produce. Workers would get a larger share. For example, in the US you have a group of activist millionaires, they're called the Patriotic Millionaires, and they argue for restoration of the wages of the least well-paid workers up to the level where people can really live from those wages.

In the sixties, if you were just in a lower middle class family, you could live a decent life. Now it's increasingly difficult because the real wages haven't gone up, whereas societies have developed. It is really also something to do, for example, with the role of unions in a company, but also I think it goes at a deeper level. It has to do with the ideology that we share across affluent societies. Why do we believe that whatever the market can give us, that it's morally ours?

We should see what we produce together as was produced by collaborating. Hence the question of a fair division of those benefits is inevitable. I do think there is deeper philosophical questions beyond the questions about measures, and those are also the ones that I tried to write about in my book.

Brian Lehrer: Raymond in Port Washington, you're on WNYC. Hi, Raymond.

Raymond: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I'm just concerned, for lack of a better word, as to the set limit, would there be what I call a creep? You set a limit, and would it change, would it get lower? How do you keep that from happening? I remember days when Cablevision said, "Don't worry, there won't be any advertising on cable." That turned out to be not true. There are dozens of examples of how government says one thing, and then of course over time the unintended consequences are that things change. What kind of regulations would be set?

Brian Lehrer: Is your concern that if there was a limit there would be a slippery slope to where people were allowed to accumulate less and less wealth? Is that what you're saying?

Raymond: Yes, that's precisely what I'm saying.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Ingrid?

Ingrid Robeyns: Yes, thanks. This is a great question. One of the reasons I argue in the book why we should do something about extreme wealth concentration is that it's undermining democracy. This is based on research that political scientists have done where they showed that increasingly the very rich not only influence much more, while the policy choices are a bit also, for example, changes in tax law. One of my main concerns about why I advocate limitarianism is the value of democracy. I totally think that the worry you express is one we should take into consideration but if a more balanced economy and a more equal, or I should say less unequal division of wealth, would also strengthen democracy, it should actually help us to defend ourselves against government measures that we do not want. Right now, we are increasingly losing control over those decisions because as some political scientists say, right now, the US they doubt whether it's still a democracy, and they call it an oligarchy, which is a form of government where those who have most money decide what happens.

Brian Lehrer: Brett in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Brett.

Brett: Hi. Is it true that the ancient Greeks used exile to exile people who became too rich and powerful for the good of society?

Brian Lehrer: An ancient historical precedent for this, Ingrid Robeyns?

Ingrid Robeyns: Yes, I don't-- It rings a bell. I'm not entirely sure, I'm not a historian, but I can say that the idea of limitarianism was already in Plato. Plato argued that in order to basically avoid societal unrest, and to keep stability in polis, in a society, you had to limit the wealth concentration of the best off to four times, that the lowest group would have one to four. Whereas of course, as the figures now say, we have one to a zillion. It's interesting that you find, throughout the history of economic and political ideas, you find people who have argued for limiting inequality and limitarianism is indeed one way to talk about limiting inequality.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us, is the philosopher and economist, Ingrid Robeyns, who holds the chair and ethics of institutions at Utrecht University, and is the author now of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth. Since your book and your outlook are global, how much is the United States a leader or the leader in inequality, and how much of an outlier if it is an outlier?

Ingrid Robeyns: Great question. The US has one of the greatest wealth inequalities. You're not the leader, actually, I don't think you want to be the leader because the leader is Russia. Russia has still, yes, [laughs] I don't think it's nice company in the leadership. What's surprising about US or what makes the US special is that it's not only in a group of countries that has high wealth inequality, but it's also very, very rich. The average and the mean wealth, family wealth, or personal wealth in the US is much higher than in most other countries. There are a few exceptions, like Switzerland has also a lot of wealth.

If you look at, for example, the number of billionaires or, not just, or say, I have here in front of me, the number of US dollar millionaires in the world, and the US has 38% of all US dollar millionaires, whereas it only has 4.2% of the world population. These data and all the other data that I looked at confirm that US is at once, it's very unequal, but it's also very, very rich. This, I think, puts us in a unique position because actually, the US has the wealth to redistribute. South Africa also is a very unequal country, but it's much harder to redistribute or to rearrange the economy to make it less than equal if the total amount of wealth that you have in a country is much smaller.

Brian Lehrer: Robert in Washington Heights, you're on WNYC with Ingrid Robeyns. Hi, Robert.

Robert: Oh, thank you so much. This is an important subject. It's not so much what people are allowed to own but what they're allowed to do with the wealth and the money that they have. Entire portions of our government have been purchased by the wealthy, which waters down our democracy tremendously. No one can argue that the working class has as much political influence as the wealthy class. There's a geometric aspect to all of this that inequality begets inequality, the more things become unequal, the more things become more unequal. The use of wealth to buy politics, to buy politicians, to buy our government is obscene. Today we're suffering tremendously from it, it's racial aspects to it, it's-- As I say, before we limit what people can own, let's start to limit what they can do with their money.

Brian Lehrer: Like specifically buying government policy through campaign finance. Ingrid Robeyns, what do you think about that priority?

Ingrid Robeyns: This is also fantastic question. I agree that if we talk about the value of democracy and good governance, that wealth is a very serious problem as this listener also rightly points out, ideally, we should have walls between the sphere of money and the sphere of democracy and politics. I should say that in Europe, those walls are stronger because of more restrictive regulation, for example, on campaign financing and so on. That is definitely something that if this is politically feasible, that the US could do, but even in the countries that have the strongest walls between politics and the sphere of money, we still see that the rich are having a disproportionate influence on politics. That is why I think together with all the other arguments I have in the book for limiting wealth concentration, because they are very different arguments apart from democracy, that I still think it would be better if you want to protect democracy to also limit wealth concentration.

Brian Lehrer: I want to ask a question that summarizes what a few listeners are calling or texting with which is, is this realistic politically in any way, one person who I'm not going to have time to take their call said they remember talking about this in college in the '60s and we've gone in the other direction, another person said the '70s, this listener writes, "How do we turn back the clock on extreme wealth? Where's the political will to change when capitalism has been allowed to run roughshod in the economy?"

Ingrid Robeyns: Yes, I should say I totally understand the sentiment. That's also why I call limitarianism a regulative ideal. It will take time to change things, but I do also see that there is an increasing movement of academics, thinkers, writers, politicians, and so on, who do want to change the type of capitalism that we have into something that is better for the planet and better for human beings.

We should also remember that if you look at the history of the neoliberal movement that got us this type of capitalism that we currently have, they also needed decades to spread their views and to basically seize power. It will require the coordinated efforts of very different types of people in society. I would actually think all people who think that the current system is not good for us, and also not good for the planet, to start that movement, and yes, then we will have to be patient, but perhaps we're doing it for our children or our grandchildren. At least we have to start now if we want to avoid even more dystopian scenarios.

Brian Lehrer: Michael in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hello. I just wanted to ask, if we still have the tax policy that we had in the post-war boom under Eisenhower, would this problem have developed in the way that it has?

Brian Lehrer: Ingrid Robeyns?

Ingrid Robeyns: Yes, I can't comment on on American history, I should say this is really beyond my area of expertise. I do think we should learn from history and also learn from experiences in different countries. There was also I think, a big difference between the economic discussions we had after the war in the '60s and afterwards, which is that the ecological dimension was not so prominent. Any discussion about a future economic system should put the planetary boundaries central. Then that means we have to think about many different goals or [unintelligible 00:19:48] that we want an economic system to meet. For me, the most important is that we will have this discussion amongst citizens, what society do we want, and what economic system fits with that society. We should start that conversation and then bring all the arguments and all the facts to the table.

Brian Lehrer: To be clear, do you have a specific number in mind for limits?

Ingrid Robeyns: I do, but before I tell you the number, I want to say two caveats. The first is that this is just to get the debate going. The second is that the part of the numbers are based on research we did in the Netherlands, where we did a survey among the Dutch population to ask where they would think that if you have more wealth it doesn't improve your quality of life.

The Dutch context is very different from the American context because in the Netherlands we have a public health care system that's very good. Also, we have a public pension system that moves everybody around the poverty line. That is two different caveats. We did research and we found in 2018 that if you ask the Dutch population, "When do you think you have so much money that if you have more money it doesn't add to your quality of life?" People said around one million euros per person per year. Now, we have to already add almost 10% inflation, it's 2018, and so on, and there's a context.

There is a number, and I think each of us also has to find these out for ourselves because our individual circumstances are different, where having more money doesn't add to your quality of life. That is for an individual, but the question is where do we as a society think we should have regulations that cap wealth? I think that limit should be much higher because you want to have enough room to allow people who are only motivated or mainly motivated by financial gain to be entrepreneurial in the economy. There I've proposed, again, for a context like the Netherlands, 10 million euros, which is actually only 0.1% of the Dutch population has more than 10 million euros.

We're talking about a tiny, tiny group that would see its wealth restricted, but that group has such a concentration of wealth. As I said for the US, it's 34% in the hands of the 1%, that if you were to use that for investments in the common good, in education, in healthcare, and so on, that it would massively expand the opportunities for everybody else.

Brian Lehrer: Ingrid Robeyns holds the Chair in Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University, and she's now the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Ingrid Robeyns: Thanks very much.

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