The Dangers of Extreme Wealth and Inequality

Extreme wealth threatens democracy, perpetuates poverty, and fosters inequality, demanding a reevaluation of wealth limits for societal health.

### The Dangers of Extreme Wealth: Inequality, Power, and the Need for Limits
* 💰 Stefan Persson, the wealthiest man in Sweden, has accumulated such wealth that it would take an H&M salesperson **over 500,000 years** to match his fortune.
* 🌍 Elon Musk, the world's richest person, possesses wealth equivalent to **11 Stefan Perssons**, allowing him to fund significant **military or humanitarian projects for decades**.
* 🤔 The question arises: can anyone be **too rich**, and should there be limits to individual wealth to **prevent societal threats**?
* 📊 Research shows that most people believe there is an "**enough line**" for wealth, which varies globally, with the Netherlands suggesting **$1 million** and the U.S. suggesting **$5 million**.
* 📉 Despite these beliefs, the median wealth in countries like Sweden and the U.S. is **significantly lower** than these "enough lines," highlighting the **disparity in wealth distribution**.
* 💸 Currently, **243,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals** exist globally, with the richest **1% owning 43% of all financial assets**, raising concerns about the implications of such **extreme wealth concentration**.
* ⚖ Historical figures like Plato and modern thinkers advocate for limits on wealth, with proposals suggesting **ethical and political caps at $1 million and $10 million respectively**, to promote **social responsibility**.
* 🌱 Ultimately, a renewed **ethics of enough** is needed for all individuals, not just the wealthy, to combat the **relentless pursuit of more** that harms both society and the planet.

This is the headquarters of H&M, the company that has produced this shirt that I'm wearing, but that has also produced Sweden's richest man, Stefan Persson. Here's how rich Stefan Persson is. If a salesperson at an H&M store

would save every penny of her salary, it would still take her over 500,000 years to save up as much money as Stefan
Persson has today. And if you think that's a lot of money,
wait until you hear about Elon Musk.

So Elon, currently
the world's richest man, has as much wealth
as 11 Stefan Perssons. With his money, Elon could
fund 8 Manhattan projects, or he could pay for an army
of 100,000 top-level

Blackwater mercenary soldiers
for a period of 10 years. Or he could fund the complete operations of the United Nations
for more than 14 years. Can a person become too rich? So rich that the wealth starts to become a threat to society?

If so, shouldn't we limit how much wealth anyone person can have? And what should that limit be? So if I ask you this question, how much money is enough for you? How much money do you need
to have in your bank account

to fully flourish in life? $100,000. $1 million. $10 million. Or do you believe that it's 
impossible to have enough, like the American billionaire
Rockefeller, who, when journalists asked him how much money is enough,

famously replied: “Just a little bit more.” It turns out that many researchers
have asked people this question, i.e. how much
they believe is enough. And what these studies show very clearly
is that almost everyone agrees

that there is an enough line, a line
where people believe that more money won't make a big difference,
a line where once reached, people think that they have
enough money to fully flourish. Exactly where people draw the enough line depends a little bit on where
in the world researchers ask.

So in the Netherlands, people
say that $1 million is enough. In the US, people say that
$5 million is enough. To me, the most interesting takeaway
from these fascinating studies isn't the exact level of the enough line.

Instead, what I find
the most interesting is that most people do not agree with Rockefeller, that there is no limit at all. Almost everyone agrees that at some point, enough is enough. Another interesting thing to note
is that even in rich countries

like Sweden, where I live,
most people will in reality never get anywhere
near these enough lines. So in Sweden, the median wealth per adult is $78,000. In the United States,
it's $108,000. And in the U.K., it's $152,000.

And in the world overall,
the median wealth is just $9,197. So what people actually have is very far even from the modest Dutch enough line. Another interesting takeaway
is that the super rich today have so much more money than
what we've been talking about so far,

That is just mind-blowing. So 243,000 people in the world are what economists call ultra-high-net-worth individuals, which means that they have more than $50 million. Of those, around 7,000 have more than $500 million.

And then we still haven't even gotten to the billionaires. Stefan Persson, who I talked about in the beginning, has around $20 billion. And Bill Gates, he has around 128 billion and Elon, he has 220 billion.

So the super duper rich today, they aren't just a little richer than the rest of us. They are, truly, astronomically richer than the rest of us. But so what? Is there a problem that a few people have

these extreme levels of wealth? Well, yes, there is a problem with extreme wealth. In fact, there are several problems. There's a popular narrative among the rich today that tells this story: In the past, everyone except for the king was poor and miserable.

But today, thanks to global capitalism, most of us are rich and poverty is about to be eradicated. This narrative is illustrated by a popular infographic that Bill Gates, one of the world's richest men, has called one of his favorite infographics.

This infographic shows how in the year 1820, around 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. And then, over the following 200 years, this share has fallen to only 10% in 2015. And it's easy to understand why billionaires like Bill Gates

like this graph, because in
this remarkable graph, it looks like poverty is just
vanishing almost on its own. And if that's true, then we can maintain
the economic system we have, there's no need to look critically at extreme wealth concentration.

But there are many researchers,
for example the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and the economist Ha-Joon Chang,
who argue that this narrative, that poverty is just about to
be eradicated, is misleading. Researchers like these point out that we don't have
any accurate information

about global poverty from before the year 1981. So instead, graphs like these
make ten-year assumptions about people's incomes
rather than their actual needs, with the result that we overestimate how poor people were in the past, and we vastly underestimate

how poor many people are today. So despite what the dominant narrative says, in absolute numbers, there is, arguably, more poverty
in the world today than ever before. And to me, that is the first
problem of extreme wealth. Extreme wealth just cannot
be morally justified

when that wealth could
be used to alleviate extreme poverty. This is late billionaire David Koch. Even though he has never been elected, David, together with his
brother Charles, did more to shape American
politics than few others.

Over the years, they've donated
and raised billions of dollars to climate denial organizations, gun
rights groups and the Tea Party movement that, arguably, paved the
way for Donald Trump. This is the billionaire and
media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Through his media outlets like the News of the World in the U.K. and Fox News in the U.S., Rupert Murdoch was instrumental in getting Britain to vote for Brexit and the U.S. to vote for Donald Trump. This is Elon Musk, the richest person in the world.

So in 2022, he bought one of the world's largest social media platforms, Twitter, so that he can use it for his own political agenda. Something that is key to both democracy and capitalism is the concept of decentralization.

In contrast with regimes like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and North Korea, where the power and the economy was centralized under dictatorial rule, and where a ruling class controlled resources and suppressed political dissent, our democratic and capitalistic system relies on the decentralized principles of one person,

one vote, and a free market. But extreme wealth undermines the principle of decentralization, and it threatens both democracy and capitalism. Because, as the Koch brothers', Rupert Murdoch's and Elon Musk's actions show, extreme wealth

can easily be translated into political power and also into market power. And as Martin Gilens explains in his book, Affluence & Influence, research shows that over the last few decades, policy outcomes almost always favor the richest.

To take just one (almost mundane) example: in the 1990s, the Swedish government gave the Swedish H&M billionaire Stefan Persson a tailor-made tax break that saved him millions and millions of dollars. If you want to learn how the rich are using

their power to rig the tax system.
Check out my previous video where I use Lego figures
to explain how that works. With extreme wealth, we also get extreme inequality and there is a growing
body of research showing that inequality in itself
creates social problems.

As inequality increases,
so does crime, child bullying, mental health problems,
teenage pregnancies, corruption... The list goes on. And if you want to learn more about
how inequality in itself creates social problems, check out my previous video: “Why Inequality Matters
More Than You Think.”

To conclude, extreme wealth maintains
extreme poverty, undermines democracy, and it creates extreme inequality,
which is ruining our societies. So is there anything we can do about extreme wealth? Before we get to the next chapter, I would like to thank the first
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So thank you to The Compounded
Daily Newsletter. Now here's the next
chapter of my video essay. 2000 years ago, Plato argued that the wealthiest
people in society shouldn't be allowed to
own more than four times

more than those who have the least. Four times?! Just imagine what Plato would say
about the fact that today the world's richest 1% own 43% of all global financial assets. The idea that we should limit how much wealth one single
person can have is not new,

it's not radical and it's not left wing. If anything, I would say
that this idea is conservative. Not only Plato, also Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke,
John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes, all of them have argued that a good life
requires limits on wealth.

Even the father of capitalism and the invisible hand, Adam
Smith, thinks that wealth needs to be limited so that
real virtues can flourish. One person who argues
that we need to revive these time-honored ideals of limits
is the Dutch author and professor

of philosophy, Ingrid Robeyns.
In her book Limitarianism, Ingrid proposes that we implement
two limits on how much wealth any one person can have: one ethical limit and one political limit. The ethical limit, which Ingrid suggests

should be set to $1 million, corresponds roughly to the enough
line that we talked about in the beginning of the video.
To amass more wealth than this, shouldn’t be illegal, but unethical and socially irresponsible. And today, there are around 59 million

people in the world without much wealth, which means that the ethical line
at the level that Ingrid proposes would affect less than 1% of the world's population. The political limit, Ingrid suggests, should be set to $10 million.

The idea with this political limit
is that, over time, our laws and institutions should make it illegal to amass more wealth than that. And today, there are around
2.8 billion people without much wealth in the world,
which means that the political limit

at the level that Ingrid proposes
would affect only around 0.03% of the world's population. “In fact, this trend towards growing” “inequality is not unique to
America's market economy.” “Across the developed world,
inequality has increased.”

“I believe this is the defining
challenge of our time.” It's now been 11 years since Barack Obama called inequality the defining
challenge of our time. And since then, inequality
has only gotten worse. What we need right now
isn’t more talk about inequality.

We need action! That's why I appreciate what Ingrid Robeyns’s Limitarianism
Project is trying to do. However, I believe
the Limitarianism Principle is needed not only
for the extremely rich. So many of us who aren't extremely rich
but live in wealthy nations,

already have way more than we need. Yet, we choose to participate
in a relentless rat race to get even more money, to buy
even more stuff. A rat race that is making us miserable,
and that is ruining our planet. Here's the uncomfortable truth:

If you think you need $1 million to fully flourish, odds are
that you're already stuck in a Rockefellerian trap where
you will never have enough. So I believe what not only the rich, but all of us desperately need right now

is a renewed ethics of enough. To quote the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: He who knows he has enough is rich. I’m Andres Acevedo and this is The Market Exit. Since you watched this far, please don't forget to click LIKE and SUBSCRIBE and SHARE this video.

For example, why don't you post a link to this video in your chat groups? That would be really helpful. I'm also really curious to hear how you feel about Limitarianism? How much money would be enough for you?

And if we would implement a limit on wealth, where do you think we should draw that limit? Let me know what you think in the comments. And if you really like the videos I make, please consider becoming a patron supporter.

patreon.com/themarketexit Any amount helps me to keep making video essays like this. And to my existing patrons, thank you very much for the support. The ideas in this video are, obviously, inspired by Ingrid Robeyns’s book Limitarianism.

This is a book that I can really recommend reading. Limitarianism is almost like a political economy starter pack for anyone who feels that society has become unfair, but who struggles to articulate exactly how or why. That book masterfully condenses various complex

ideas from various disciplines in a masterful way. Really good work. All right. Thank you for watching this video essay. See you next time. Bye bye.

Why billionaires should be ILLEGAL

The Market Exit

Stefan Persson's wealth compared to an H&M employee's lifetime earnings.

Elon Musk's wealth compared to funding various large-scale projects.

Public perception of sufficient wealth and Rockefeller's quote.

Global variations in perceived 'enough' wealth levels.

Comparison of median wealth across different countries.

Number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and billionaires globally.

Critique of the narrative that poverty is vanishing due to global capitalism.

Challenges in accurately measuring global poverty throughout history.

Moral implications of extreme wealth in the context of poverty.

Examples of wealthy individuals influencing politics (Koch brothers, Murdoch, Musk).

Extreme wealth's impact on political and market power, undermining decentralization.

Correlation between wealth inequality and social problems.

Historical and philosophical perspectives on wealth limits

Plato's proposed limit on wealth and comparison to current global wealth distribution.

Historical figures who advocated for wealth limits (Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Mill, Keynes, Smith).

Ingrid Robeyns's Limitarianism proposal: ethical and political limits on wealth.

Impact of the proposed ethical and political limits on the global population.

Obama's statement on inequality and the worsening situation since then.

Critique of the relentless pursuit of wealth in wealthy nations.

The 'Rockefellerian trap' of never having enough.

Call to action for a renewed ethics of 'enough'.