‘Everybody talks about progress. They do not talk about power.’
A conversation with Ingrid Robeyns, author of ‘Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth’
Ingrid Robeyns is a Belgian-Dutch professor of political philosophy at Utrecht University.1 Her research can be captured under the big question: What is a good and fair society, and what is a just world? Her latest book is Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.2
This conversation has been condensed significantly and edited for clarity. To listen to our complete hour-long conversation, head here, or search for “Reframe Your Inbox” wherever you listen to podcasts.
ADAM: We should probably start by defining what “limitarianism” is.
INGRID: Limitarianism is the idea, or the perspective, that there should be an upper limit to how much wealth a person can have. This can be developed or interpreted as a political claim, or as what you could call a “voluntaristic,” or an ethical, claim.
The “riches line” is a concept about the relationship between wealth and material quality of life. And that is a notion that at some point, having more wealth doesn’t really contribute to your material quality of life, so that you have a saturation point.
That is a concept on which we have done empirical research, and we’ve found that that concept is not just theoretically plausible. It’s not strange to assume, theoretically, that if you have more and more, at some point, well, what can you do with your money except just hoarding it? Or it becomes a status symbol to compare yourself with others. You can’t buy another pair of shoes. Well, you could, but at some point, it doesn’t serve any function.
We did a study in the Netherlands whereby we gave the respondents descriptions of a certain person’s quality of life—how they lived, what kind of house they had, how many cars they had, what kind of cars, how many holidays, what kind of holidays, all that stuff. And then we asked the respondents to give those different households a label. Is this household well off? Very well off?
And we found that 96.5 percent of the respondents didn’t hesitate to draw that line somewhere. They drew it at a different level. That is, of course, not surprising: People have different views on when it is too much in terms of increasing your quality of life.
The “ethical limit” is the answer to the question, how much do I need to lead a fully flourishing life? When do I [not] need any further money? And the answer to that question is individual. It depends on a person’s personal circumstances.
Then the “political limit” is the question, where should we put the limit of how much wealth a person can have so as to avoid the harmful effect that wealth concentration has on society? That is then related to questions about harm to politics, harm to ecosystems, undermining equal opportunities, and all those political—or, one could say, collective or societal—values.
That’s why there are three different lines [proposed wealth limits] in the book.
One thing I thought was really interesting about limitarianism as a concept is that it’s about numbers—we’re talking about wealth, we’re talking about income. These are all numbers. But this is ultimately not about a specific number. This is about a philosophy. This is about ethical and political limits. And if we get stuck on the specific numbers, we kind of miss the point.
I have had a lot of interviews by journalists who immediately jump to the number and then start arguing about the number. But that’s beside the point. We should have the conversation about, should we have an upper limit—politically, morally, and also personally—in societies?
I hesitated—should I put numbers in the book, or not? The reason why I did eventually come up with a proposal, a ballpark figure for the political limit and for the ethical limit, is that I was worried that otherwise somebody could say, Yeah, yeah, I agree. It’s a real problem that we have billionaires, so we shouldn’t have any billionaires.
But I’m just like, Look, there’s a problem with billionaires, but there’s also a problem with people who have $500 million. Because all the arguments that I develop in the book—of how wealth concentration harms societies—also apply to people who have $500 million or $100 million. So that’s why I decided to put in numbers.
In the end, the book is really about reasons against wealth concentration. And I hope that we can start to have a global debate about what could be reasons why we should not just say [that] nobody should be poor, but also there is a limit about how rich they can be for the sake of not only societies and the planet, but also themselves.
One challenge that you grapple with throughout the book is the extent of wealth inequality around the world. We can’t fathom exactly what it means to have Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk wealth. How do you think about bringing that to life?
The first thing is the numbers themselves. Do people know them?
The U.S. is one of the richest countries, but also one of the most unequal. If you take the bottom 90 percent [of Americans], they together have 26.5 percent of [the country’s total] wealth, whereas the 1 percent richest have 34.2 percent of wealth. And that’s probably already an underestimation because the rich are very, very good at hiding their wealth. So that means that if the American population is represented by 100 people, then one person—the 1 percent—has more than 90 people.
Another way to [show] what these numbers really stand for is by translating them into a unit that people can grasp because they understand it. I was, for example, recently looking into the data about the huge wealth transfer that’s going to happen intergenerationally.
We have all these multimillionaires that are currently getting older. Over the next decade, we will see a huge transfer of those fortunes to younger generations. An advisory firm has estimated that among the households where the older individuals have $5 million or more, over the next decade, there will be a transfer of $31 trillion to their children.
Now, $31 trillion: I don’t know what this does in your brain, but to me, it doesn’t do anything. So $31 trillion, you just think, Okay, it sounds like a big number.
Let’s take a flat of $1 million. With $1 million, I think that in most cities, except perhaps the very expensive cities, you can buy a flat. That means if you have [a] $31 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer, that is the same as 31 million flats that will be transferred from parents to their children. And children will receive these only because they happen to be born with certain parents.
By doing these kind of recalculations, by comparing groups or by translating a very difficult-to-grasp number into something concrete—like number of houses, number of flats, what that would mean in hourly wages—we can start to really understand how massive the wealth inequality is.
The hourly wages one really got to me. The minimum wage here in Washington, DC, which is higher than most other parts of the United States, just went up to $17.50 an hour, which is very far from a living wage in a city like DC. But then you compare the hourly wage to Bezos or Musk—we’re talking [about] completely different lived experiences.
If you were to translate Elon Musk’s wealth in 2022, which at the time was $219 billion, into what that would mean in terms of an hourly wage if he were to work 50 hours a week between the ages of 20 and 65—you would end up with almost $2 million per hour.
The inequality is, I think, for our brains, really difficult to grasp. But if we can’t grasp the numbers and see what that means, we also do not understand how vast the political power is that this brings to the people who have that amount of wealth.
[There is] this idea that you often hear from the Steven Pinkers and the Bill Gateses—you might call it the “enlightenment now” narrative, after Pinker’s book, or the “enormous progress” narrative. The way you phrase [this narrative in the book is], “in the past everyone was very poor, and we have greatly reduced extreme poverty on a global scale.”
You describe that as “misleading at best” because it’s a very incomplete way of thinking about how the world is. Can you unpack that?
The narrative that neoliberalism brings us, and also the policies that come with it, is that if we have [a] globalized economy and division of labor between different types of countries, and hence we have cheap labor from the Global South, that this is a win-win for everybody. The global poor will have a source of income, and hence it will raise their living standards, and so forth.
If you look at the data on the number of the people who live in poverty by the official global poverty line, which is $2.20 a day in purchasing power parity—I’ll get back to that in a second—then we see that the numbers have gone down really, really fast. There is indeed a great reduction.
Often, this is where it [the narrative] ends. Look, what a miracle! [People] will basically say, This proves that capitalism, and particularly this variant that we now have—neoliberal capitalism—really is a success story.
Well, I think they cannot conclude this for three different reasons. The first one is—and here I’m just reporting on what historians have said—that before colonization, poverty levels were actually lower than they were at the point where this positive narrative always starts. We should really have a much longer timeframe to look at how poverty increased and decreased. And there we also have to take into account what colonization did to those countries.
The second thing is that this $2.20-a-day poverty line, the official poverty line, is really way too low. In [some countries] you can do a lot with $2 [in USD]. But that is not what the poverty line says. It is purchasing power parity. That’s a construction that economists have made in order to be able to compare monetary numbers between countries. When we say the poverty line is $2.20 a day, it is what you could buy with $2.20 in the U.S. And that really is a ridiculously low number.
Of course it’s good that the number of people who live under that poverty line has gone down so dramatically. But development scholars say that the extreme poverty line—not just a poverty line, but the extreme poverty line—should be at roughly between $11 and $12 a day [in] purchasing power parity. That means that we still have many, many, many more people living in extreme poverty than those numbers suggest.
[Third,] the question is not, did poverty go down? The question is, what would have been other feasible worlds, and are there worlds possible in which poverty had gone down much more? And the answer is obviously yes.
We’ve seen that, based on the work by [economic anthropologist] Jason Hickel and his collaborators, from [globalization] the lion’s share of the profits went to the Global North.3 We basically have given breadcrumbs to the Global South. If we had divided it up, say, equally, then those poor would be much, much, much better off now than they are. Just saying that their situation has improved is too low a standard to accept. The question really is, what would have been alternative worlds that would have been feasible?
And what have we really given them? I say “given” because the power imbalance is such that the Global North can dictate their terms. In the end, all these analyses by these optimists [like Gates and Pinker], they raise questions of power. And I think the most important questions—when we talk about the economy, about [the] distribution of money, and how the economic system affects people’s lives—are questions of power.
And everybody always talks about progress and about the virtues of technological change, et cetera. They do not talk about power.
We often hear that poverty is the problem we should focus on, and inequality [is] just a byproduct. You point out [that] when we talk about poverty but not inequality, that avoids “asking why some have so much and others so little.” Why does inequality matter for its own sake?
They are conceptually linked, and they are linked in terms of policies.
Conceptually, if you think about this in terms of graphs, or in terms of mathematical representation, it’s easy to see because in the end, inequality is something you measure in the distribution of a metric—in our case, wealth—and poverty is the number of people below, or the percentage of people below, a certain cutoff point on that distribution. It’s basically two different aspects of the same phenomenon you’re looking at—namely, how is wealth distributed in society.
But if you look at it in terms of policies—here, my argument is just a generalization of what has also been studied by American sociologists. Matthew Desmond has written this book, Poverty, by America.4 The argument he makes in that book—and I think it generalizes to all countries—is that in the U.S., the reason we have poverty is because a set of policies has been chosen, including tax deductions, the way you regulate or do not regulate the housing market, and so forth.
There’s a set of policies and institutions that give ample opportunity for those who are well off and are already rich to become even richer. Whereas they make it very, very hard, and often harder, for those who are vulnerable and poor.
If you have more regulated housing markets, with rent regulation or with other types of measures, then it will be easier for ordinary people to rent or buy a house at a price they can afford. At the other extreme of the possible policies is a totally unregulated housing market, and what you see is that housing actually is suppressed by entrepreneurs, companies, even huge investors who see real estate as an investment opportunity. It is just seen as a way to maximize profit.
It’s interesting that in the case of housing, we see already a move away from the neoliberal policies. In my own city, in Utrecht, the local council has decided that if a house is being sold and there is somebody who wants to go and live in it—so they are buying it for themselves—they should be given priority. Recently they evaluated this policy, and they found that 98 percent of all houses had been sold to people who would go and live there.5 Previously we saw that more and more houses were being bought by BlackRock and other organizations.
Housing is, of course, there to meet a basic need of people, which is to be housed, to be sheltered. The poor are very vulnerable in an unregulated housing market.
This is how you see that inequality and poverty—both by the tax system but also by minimum wage regulations, [the] housing market, and so on and so forth—are connected to each other via policy and via the institutional design in societies.
There’s something you put very bluntly in the book: “We need to talk about class.” Why do we need to talk about class? And why don’t we want to?
Class has economic dimensions [and] cultural dimensions. So you can say, if you are from a privileged class and look down on what people in other classes do—for example, manual work, so-called “unskilled” work—then it is a cultural thing.
But you can also see that it is an economic phenomenon whereby those who are well off prefer to assume, but also to pretend, that there are no classes in society. That’s a way for them to avoid having to ask structural questions—questions we just discussed, like, Are certain policies really pro-rich?
For most people, they think, Oh, we try to care for poor people by having pro-poor policies. It’s almost inconceivable for them to see that many of the policies we have are actually much more catering towards the more privileged classes.
This myth or this belief that we have that we’re all equal—of course we are equal in terms of moral equality of people, but we are not equal in terms of the opportunities we get in society. And then if you start digging into the question—in what sense are we not equal?—it’s not just random. It’s really structured by what opportunities you get if you are in a different position in society.
We talk a lot about the decades-long attack on labor, on unions, on worker power. We think—rightly so—of unions as a tool for fighting for better working conditions and wages and benefits. But you point out that there’s something more intangible that the labor movement in the past has contributed to, which is an awareness of class differences.
I think that’s true. And also the other thing [about unions] is to make people aware that the system is not just given. That is the thing, of course, with neoliberal capitalism: It’s an ideological system, which then translates into concrete policies and institutional setups. But it tries to present itself as if it is designed by technocrats [who] have no ideology.
That is actually almost like a strategy to try to hide [its] ideological nature. Neoliberalism is just as ideological as social democracy, as socialism, as any of the other possible views on how we should organize society.
And so if you have unions and the labor movement in general, and also activists of different types, I think they make us more aware that we should answer the question, what kind of society do we want? That we are entitled to ask and answer that question.
The root word in “limitarianism” is “limit.” And that is not a popular word in America and in capitalist societies in general. The myth of meritocracy says if you work hard enough, there are no limits to what you can achieve.
You’re already taking on a pretty entrenched worldview that says “hard work equals no limits.” But I felt like a theme of this book was liberation, which you might not expect with a book that has “limit” in the title. Do you agree with that?
I don’t think the word is in the book, but I think you’re probably right that we would be liberated in a limitarian world. Even the rich themselves would be liberated.
We’re so into this “sky’s the limit” ideology, and we’ve been in it for decades, that we no longer see that this is the air we breathe. There’s this saying that a fish can’t recognize what the water is, because how can a fish know? And I think we don’t recognize the neoliberal capitalist ideology that we are breathing and that we grew up with.
Let me put [it] like this: This kind of liberation that you sense might be in this idea about limitarianism is one that we will only get if we change the structures. You can’t, as an individual, say, Okay, now I’m going to do it differently. It is really something that requires societies to change.
And that is really the question: What kind of society do we want? I keep just thinking that this is the most important question in this book.
Are there any films or novels that we can look to for inspiration for what a limitarian society, or a liberated society, looks like?
One book that I recently read, which is not really about how that society would look but that we need on our way to that society, is the The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison.6 They make this argument, about what neoliberalism is, for a broad audience. I think that is one that will make people think about the water they’re swimming in.
But then your question was about pieces of cultural products—the fact that I say “products” is already revealing how much I’m still in this economic frame myself.
I recently saw Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, which is about a man in Tokyo who’s a cleaner of public toilets.7 Throughout the film, we get to discover that his sister is very rich, and she really looks down on the fact that he’s a toilet cleaner, and so do the people whom he’s serving. I think that was actually striking as an example of how, if we talk about class, we [can] just not be grateful for people who do this kind of work. We look down on them.
This man, who is a cleaner of public toilets, is just very happy with his very simple life. But that is because he sees the beauty of a bird in the sky, flowers. He discovers a tree somewhere. He really looks. He has attention to how people relate to each other. And he sees the beauty in human beings around him and how they interact. Small gestures.
You may wonder, How did she start with those statistics and ended up with those kind of contemplative things? But I do think we have to ask these questions. Why can’t we just sit still and look at the things around us? And that is really where I think movies are very good in trying to draw our attention to the beauty in life, the beauty in the world.
https://www.ingridrobeyns.info
https://astrapublishinghouse.com/product/limitarianism-9781662601842
https://www.jasonhickel.org
https://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/675683
https://nos.nl/artikel/2501978-utrecht-opkoopbescherming-werkt-meer-woningen-naar-starters
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/748745/invisible-doctrine-by-george-monbiot-and-peter-hutchison
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/25/perfect-days-review-wim-wenders-koji-yakusho-tokyo-toilet-cleaner