Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
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‘The best case I've read for putting an upper limit on the accumulation of wealth’ Richard Wilkinson The sky is not the limit - £10 million is. We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental and psychological terms, she shows, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all - the rich included. In place of our current system, Robeyns offers a breathtakingly clear alternative: limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism - and the opportunity for a vastly better world - lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you.
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Basically, what this book says is that the ultra-rich are a policy failure, but the market economy is good, so we have to make it morally wrong to hoard wealth so that eventually it'll become the rule to cap wealth at a certain amount. It makes the case for that idea by providing examples of rich people who separated themselves from much of their wealth and by looking at the outsized impact of the ultra-rich on the world.
The book itself is approachable but I felt like it really aimed to speak to the ultra-rich and not the everyday person such as myself and personally I don't believe that appealing to morality when it comes to most of these people will be any kind of effective (something that doesn't seem to be lost on Robeyns herself). I also found it to be quite repetitive.
I also don't see how the idea holds any chance to be applied without the end of corporatism and in a context where wealth is so largely abstract and not made of liquid assets and where our political class has a vested interest in not even marginally inconveniencing the moneyed class, but I think that aspect was beyond the scope the book aimed to cover.
Many thanks to Astra Publishing House for providing me a digital copy of this book for review consideration.
