What are rich people for ?
The answer to this question fundamentally is akin to the answer to the question ‘why are wasps?’. They are, because they are part of a self-organizing ecosystem that generates components via natural selection to create a self-sustainable balance between all its parts. However, as human beings, more than any other inhabitant of the planet, we can make choices to change our environment and enhance the sustainability of our civilizations. So do we just accept that there are super-rich people just as ‘ the poor are always with us,’ or do we make the bold assertion that the amount of resources appropriated by the super-rich constitute an unsustainable imbalance that cries out for correction.
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Wealth and Politics
The political labels conservative, liberal and socialist are broadly redundant now when we consider the need for leadership and peaceful order among large groups of people. Instead the question is whether leaders encourage and develop open government, to the benefit of the people as a whole without favouring any particular sub-groups, pressure groups or factions, or whether the leadership rules with a view to extracting benefits for one group (naturally the group to which it belongs) at the expense of others.
So the true political debate is about open government versus extractive government, not about traditional owner versus worker confrontation. The failure of the 20th century communist experiment revealed many important truths about human nature, but in particular that any group that gains power will become just as corrupt and exploitative as those it replaces, unless there is a failsafe system of checks and balances in place.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at the juncture between wealth and politics. Rich people can exert influence on politicians by many forms of bribery, in which I include donations to political parties. Donations nearly always come with a quid pro quo attached. It can be very subtle, but it’s there. The idea is to back the political faction that will favour the backer most. This sounds like democratic choice, but it is actually corruption because the option is not open to the majority of voters.
It is not to the benefit of open government that rich people can influence the outcome of elections either through the brute force of large donations or by lending their business profile pro bono to political marketing or by enabling campaign contribution rules to be transgressed by funding the pumping of false information to the electorate via, for example, social media. These are all activities carried out by the rich in many democracies to favour themselves at the expense of the less wealthy.
The Billionaire Bubble and Inequality
There are nearly 3000 billionaires at present on the planet; 0.00003% of the population. They command 13% of global wealth. As Steven Pinker, social psychologist turned influential pundit, points out , inequality of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, since there will always be disparities in skills and opportunities that will lead to unequal outcomes, but poverty rates tend to decrease at the same time as high incomes increase, so everyone benefits from the increase of wealth of the very wealthy. But it is poverty amongst plenty that is the key problem, the figures show that. “The extent of income inequality is a major predictor of rates of violent crime” across western countries. However, there is inequality and inequality. What we see today is a large increase in the concentration of wealth at the top end, and that wealth greatly influences politics. That is the worst thing about inequality. Recent pay rises awarded to a top billionaire, for example, reveal an obscene amount of money and hence power to influence being put into the hands of one individual human being. This is clearly an inequality that will lead to trouble.
And it can only go so far before enough people say, “This has got to stop” and big trouble erupts. Unfortunately, rebellions against the wealthy led by the poor have a history of resulting in more violence against the poor – so more poverty, not less inequality .
Inequality has increased in recent decades partly because of technology. Looking back at the first industrial revolution, it was some time before the shift from agricultural to industrial employment took place, and the same thing is happening now in the “Second Machine Age” . There is a time gap between the innovations becoming widely used and the settling in of new lifestyles. Interestingly this did not happen so much in the late 20th century with rudimentary information technology. New types of job emerged, supported by the new technologies and offered new opportunities, but not to all groups. After all, it is not easy (but not impossible) for a farm labourer to become a Java programmer.
The problem is that routine tasks can be more readily automated than high-value tasks such as data analytics, global marketing, innovative product development and management of large companies. This increases the need for creative people with effective reasoning and design skills, who are already people with a big investment in education, which gives them an income advantage over less-educated people – the ones losing their jobs. Delivery of a basic income and the pleasure of leisure is not the answer. Work is not only necessary for income, but also for satisfaction in life. Under-employed people are not only a wasted resource, but also a pool of dissatisfaction. This is partly what has led to political polarisation in Europe and the US in recent years as the under-employed feel alienated from the run of society and resentful of those who are benefitting from change, which include the political elites.
The result is that many people in post-industrial societies like the US and Britain experience falls not only in relative income but in absolute buying power. Acemoglu and Robinson in the classic “Why Nations Fail” suggest that economic inequality leads to the “capture” of government resources by the richest and most influential, thus reducing opportunities for the rest of us. We see this, for example, in the Brexit billionaires who backed the futile Brexit exercise and made huge windfall profits while leaving the British economy to tank and the British public to sink. Another extraordinary case is that of the Gupta brothers in South Africa who, with ex-President (now convicted criminal) Zuma’s connivance, gained vast wealth and power including control of important companies and public utilities . In general, rising inequality leads to longer term economic decline and the lessening of opportunities for everyone, which is not counteracted by the access to information resources provided universally by technology .
Medieval Venice is an example. In the late 13th century, Venice was the most prosperous city in Europe. However, as the rich merchants concentrated more of the wealth for themselves, new entrepreneurial generations could not access the trade opportunities. Quite rapidly, helped it must be said by war and the Black Death, the Venetian domination of Mediterranean trade came to an end.
How to get super-rich
How do billionaires amass their wealth ? Some benefit from inherited wealth, such as the offspring of Royal families. Some were lucky – in the right place at the right time. Some worked very hard, had unusually good fortune in networking and building alliances – and were lucky. Some built up a little wealth and invested wisely, letting compound interest do the work for them. Some cut some corners, trod on others on the way up and played at the fringes of business ethics. And some are just crooks, capable of astonishing dishonesty and cruelty – irredeemable psychopaths but high functioning enough not to be rumbled.
I can tell you for sure that being intelligent, well-educated, working extremely hard and being astute enough to take opportunities is not enough to make you a billionaire. It can make you comfortably off – a dollar millionaire probably – but it will not make you super-rich. It will not get you a ticket to Davos or the Cannes film festival. It will not get you into the private jet class. It will not get you the ear of the powerful.
The inevitable conclusion is that most billionaires got there either by adding a great deal of luck into the mix; or criminality; or both. Now I’m not saying that everyone in the billionaires list should really be in jail, but I am saying that those who have been fortunate enough to amass very large fortunes owe it to the ecosystem that made them to plough some of it back. Could you as a billionaire see poverty, ignorance and preventable disease and not want to do something about it ? In fact there are many philanthropists in the billionaires list and I applaud them. They are doing what they are there for, in my view, and I will come back to that point.
But how does the origination of wealth work. It must be driven by human motivation – it is a byword of economics that the only value of anything is the value that human beings place on it. When you ask very rich people about their motivation for amassing wealth, the answers range widely. There are individuals who seem to become rich as a by-product of hard work and luck and almost don’t notice what is happening. Others are motivated by austerity, spend little and invest well. Others are internally driven to amass wealth and try to achieve security in their lives by so doing . It doesn’t work. The more security you gain by amassing wealth, the more you want. But most billionaires are very driven people who feel unsatisfied and restless, but are also ambitious and clever and in some cases highly manipulative and even sociopathic. They have an emotional drive and the skills to turn their ideas into reality. You would expect that such people would be capable of contributing something important to the welfare of humankind and the planet, not only by their skills but by deploying the wealth they have amassed.
Unfortunately, studies show that the super-rich do not like to contribute much to the public good. “But the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average… thus the less direct benefit the wealthy feel from improving public good. Instead they benefit more from dodging taxes and spending on their private good” . That includes lobbying to further improve their position. So it is not surprising that income inequality in a state predicts that less will be spent on education – the best tool to fight crime .
Wealth and luck
To understand the nature of super-wealth, you have to think about where it comes from. If we discount criminality for the moment, which may be somewhat unjust, and focus on wealth amassed by luck, we immediately come across the technology billionaires. The technology billionaires succeeded because they were in the right place at the right time with the right ideas – and they worked very hard. But so did lots of others who did not become billionaires. Much of the difference, when you allow for the fact that some tech entrepreneurs are cleverer than others and work harder than others, is on the turn of a coin – a guy you meet in an airport; a sympathetic venture capitalist introduced by a friend of a friend; an investor “angel” with time and money on their hands; an experimental idea that works first time.
The successful ones will argue, and extreme conservatives everywhere will argue, that you must allow people with clever ideas to be able to exploit the ideas and bring valuable products to everyone else. But markets are not free, they are creatures of their environment and are biased towards the benefit of those who influence the rules . The successes of the tech entrepreneurs are perhaps as much to do with the American system as they are to do with the inventors. And maybe that’s why there are so few tech billionaires in Europe. The successful entrepreneur always needs a good dose of luck, and part of that is the nature of the market in which he or she operates. But what the clever entrepreneur brings to the game is the psychological appetite for risk. Very few people have this capacity .
Valuing risk and luck
Now valuation of risk against luck is the core reason that billionaires cannot just be allowed to amass as much wealth as they like. Because we can value risk, but we can’t value luck. In fact we tend to overvalue risk appetite and vastly undervalue luck. That is why we allow the tech billionaires to reward themselves – to a seemingly unlimited extent. You can apply the same argument to professional footballers, but there the skills are physical, and the risk is much higher – one bad tackle and your career is over. But with intellectual risk, the downside is less obvious. We say, “They have taken all the risk, so they should take all the profit.” That is fallacious in itself, as most of the human effort that has gone into the success of a product and certainly its marketing and distribution is done by a large number of people who are often reasonably but not generously paid. Even more than that it is the much larger number of people who have bought the products, clearly at an excessive price, if the billionaire at the top has been able to amass so much.
So, to put it crudely, there are two types of tech entrepreneur, the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones. Both have an appetite for risk, both owe any riches they have to the people who work for them and the people who have bought the products . That’s where the money comes from- there is nowhere else. Entrepreneurs will correctly point out that reducing margins during a growth period is likely to be a mistake as you have to allow for less favourable trading later. Many products have only flash in the pan success – for example, the CP/M operating system and the Blackberry. However, amassing personal wealth is not a way to maintain corporate profits in a downturn.
So there are few rockstars, film stars or sports stars who are super-rich, but there are a few movie producers – and a lot of tech billionaires.
As we have seen inequality can make people unhappy with their lot, but not everyone. Some admire the super-rich as they once admired kings .. and gods. Because they are so different from us they must be superhuman and to be admired on the off-chance that we may receive some scraps from their tables.
Others more pragmatically, will recognize that the source of riches is human effort and those with an excess of wealth cannot possibly have put in the commensurate amounts of effort. As I have said, being intelligent, careful and working extremely hard will make you comfortably off, but not super-rich. Luck or exploiting the work of others or exploiting a seller’s market will. You can be sure that if someone commands resources for which they have not worked, somebody who has worked has not received a fair reward for their labour.
So, billionaires – once you have a sustainable business and you have amassed those personal profits it is time to give some of them back to us from whom your wealth has come, in the form of public goods. To put it bluntly, It is our money you hold and you should give it back to the society that enabled you to amass it.
The problem is fair return for effort. Vast inequalities imply that the return is not fair, but that concept in itself requires some analysis. Talent is not fairly distributed among human beings and talent is one factor that determines returns on effort. I can, and have, made efforts to become a rock star and a successful writer as well as running a technology consulting business. Certainly in the former case talent has hit its limits. In the technology business I have had success, but not like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk because I do not have the single-minded ambition and drive of the tech billionaires. That’s a kind of talent. All talents can be nurtured, but there are inbuilt limits which we can broadly describe as personality factors- especially self-motivation, business nous, willingness to take calculated risks, and often a degree of ruthlessness – the ‘killer instinct’ – which I do not have.
Can you learn these skills ? Yes, but that learning comes naturally only to a few. Many over-reach and fail; or end up as criminals by taking short cuts that, step by step, lead them into the territory of the irredeemable. We only hear about the ones that get the balance of talent, learning and drive right. The characterisation of personalities as tending to fall into type A and Type B is part of this, but having a Type A personality is not a guarantee of entrepreneurial success, not is a Type B personality an automatic disqualification from the billionaires club. Take Howard Hughes for example .
Even with all those skills, success awaits only those who have the great idea at just the right time for the market to accept . If all those factors come together you still need something else in this uncertain world of countless interpersonal interactions – luck.
So when we talk about fair return for effort in the calculus of inequality we need to be clear how we manage all these factors. Many of the most important innovations come about because of people with these qualities. What is a fair return for that ? There needs to be some kind of social concept of value that does not assign to skill the proportion of wealth that is due to luck. Such a value system would need a lot more education in the wild west of American capitalism than it does in China, where government is trying to enforce such values on its entrepreneurs. Or even in Scandinavia, where the sense of social cohesion and shared responsibility for welfare has a strong cultural footing. It remains to be seen which approach creates the most stable and happy societies in the long term.
The influence of the wealthy
Do we look to people with those successful innovative skills, drive, vision – and luck – as major influences on the way we live our lives ? Yes, they will influence us via their innovations, social media has changed us all, but we don’t want them paying off politicians and forcing us into insane policies like Brexit, dismantling of railways , raising trade barriers or encouraging armed conflict.
So are the denizens of Davos the people who we want to have influencing our lives. At Davos what we see is top businesspeople, many of whom are super-rich, getting together with government representatives, most of whom are not. Neither of these groups should be exclusively shaping society, but it is likely that among that group of clever people some good ideas will emerge that may turn out to be valuable to us all. Ideas about technology, education, global health, social welfare, the promotion of peace and equitable ways to manage societies do indeed emerge from organisations like the World Economic Forum, but they are ideas which someone else will have to implement by their intellectual and physical work on the ground. It is that grunt work, not just the idea, that changes things.
That is why, arguably, the people who have made the greatest contributions to human welfare in the 20th Century were not politicians or corporate fat cats, nor were they super-rich. No; those who have the biggest impact on human welfare are often individuals (with dedicated teams) making big improvements through that grunt work on the ground yielding hard-won scientific discoveries. We would all be starving if it wasn’t for Norman Borlaug , for example, and dead from infectious diseases if it wasn’t for epidemiologists like Macfarlane Burnet, neither of whose names the general public would recognize. They both won Nobel prizes, but I don’t think either of them would have made Davos.
So are people like Elon Musk the kind of people that we wish to have exercising leadership over our lives ? Musk has often been known for his unwise twitterings, but there is no doubt that he is a talented innovator. He is a man of immense cleverness who had been able to successfully revolutionize whole industries by applying solid and innovative engineering principles. Post the Twitter purchase, however, he seems to be courting the conspiracy network by acting like a Roman general rather than a modern businessman – authoritarian, capricious, oppressive and careless about truth and security.
In my view, it is a golden principle that rich people should not control media organizations because we all know how dangerous media moguls are – from Randolph Hearst to the shadowy billionaires who control large parts of the UK media. These people have always exerted their influence for personal enrichment, dragging down the people in the process via half-truths, innuendo and misinformation. The role of sections of the British media in spreading misinformation to cover up the inevitably disastrous consequences of Brexit, for example, was despicable and some of them are now realizing how stupid they were. Partisan media cultivate the political gangs and prevent open government by raising imaginary spectres to scare people into submission. Will Musk be any different as Twitterer in chief ? The vast inequality that Musk embodies and his limited philanthropic profile do not augur well, and it will only be the polished lens of history that can judge the way in which he uses media power. Musk claims that he has given more back to the world than he has taken for himself. It remains to be seen whether this claim has any substance.
Nevertheless, the self-made billionaires can redeem themselves in the eyes of history by the way they use their wealth as we shall see below. But there is a further class of billionaire, who can be more roundly condemned. They can readily be compared to the robber barons of medieval times before the Rule of Law was established across the democratic world . There are numerous ‘democratically’ elected leaders who have subverted democracy in order to gain absolute control, and with it an absolute ability to grasp wealth .
What of those who amass wealth for themselves only and use their political power to do so ? Musk also claims that he is not really the richest man in the world as the published information says, but that a certain Putin has that title. If that is true, and there seems to be good evidence for it, then we must ask how he has come upon such riches. There can only be one main answer. He has obtained his riches from the people he governs, just like a medieval king. And now he has gone out to war, disastrously, just like his tsarist and soviet predecessors.
The hereditary super-rich are the third class. Perhaps royal, which means their ancestors probably won some violent (or should we say glorious) victories on their behalf; perhaps the descendants of the barons, engineers or corrupt politicians of previous generations. However, in practice most modern monarchies have their merits. There is a lot to be said for constitutional monarchies over Presidential systems, since the monarch does not wield absolute power, but does wield a great deal of influence. The late, lamented Queen Elizabeth II of the UK and King Rama IX of Thailand are good examples. The wealth of monarchies for the most part is dwarfed these days, however, by the wealth of the corporate, financial and techno moguls. We note that the former British Prime Minister Mr Sunak is said to have twice the wealth of the Royal Family, and he is not even a billionaire.
The really wealthy families are those who have created and grown their wealth through generations of successful business. The fashion industry being an important example. That wealth and that degree of influence over people’s expectations and the way they spend their money comes with responsibilities. ‘The fashion industry is responsible for as much as 8 percent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the U.N. estimates, more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.’ Here again, we would expect in a fair society to see some of that personal wealth ploughed back into renewable anergy schemes and other beneficial projects, not spent on extravagant lifestyles designed to make ordinary people sufficiently envious to spend large amounts of money unnecessarily on ephemeral fashion trends. But “If you scroll through the first 10 or so pages of Google results for the charitable giving of the world’s on- and off-again wealthiest man, Bernard Arnault, you’ll find … practically nothing.”
Indeed, I often consider when I see a fake Rolex in the Souq that works as well as the real thing and looks pretty much the same, even though it may not last as long, whether it is the Bangladeshi watchmaker who put it together with an old Japanese movement and some clever metalwork or the fashion mogul with his private jet and his Caribbean bank accounts who is the bigger rip-off artist. Or perhaps I am being unfair to the intrinsic value of design and the huge risks that fashion moguls have to take in order to make their billions. What I know is this. If my business had failed I would have been just as broke as the fashion mogul if his business had failed – no more, no less. So who was exposed to the bigger risk ?
What to do with all that wealth – and all that inequality
What wealth does is to enable the command of resources. When this includes the ability to use wealth to divert national policies and resources to the benefit of any particular group it is to be opposed. There are countless examples. The mobilisation of vast wealth to influence the structure of society makes a mockery of any distinction between democratic and authoritarian states.
We can agree that wealth should not be used in such a way, but it’s all a question of incentives. Show most people that kind of temptation – the opportunity to tilt the scales in your favour or in favour of your mates and you will do it. Look at the history of Europe. As Rome was crumbling in the West, those client kings on the frontier were acquiring less wealth from their raids on Roman territories and could see that the only way to get enough booty to buy the loyalty of their supporters was to build bigger political units and change the game . Result – the fall of Rome. The temptation for the wealthy to dabble in politics or even try to overturn it – as in Brexit and the influence of Russian oligarchs in Britain before Putin’s War – is not going to go away because we don’t like it. That kind of opportunism is hard-wired, and one of the reasons we have survived and prospered as a species. It needs to be recognized, controlled and diverted into less harmful directions.
However, that option is not there for the mass of people who are neither privileged by their family or social networks or by the ability to command resources. Their aspirations and desires are inflated by what they see in the Press and Media, but unreachable in practice. Clearly no government is going to be able to give everyone what they want but the idea of open government is to aspire to provide an adequate quality of life for everyone.
The danger of inequality is its impact on social cohesion and contentment. This is one reason for the strange observation that happiness is higher in highly taxed countries . The fact is intuitively odd, since having your money taken away by other people you can’t control is on the face of it not at all desirable. These countries, however (especially in Scandinavia), do tend to have less inequality and better social services. The Happiness could be down to both, and needs investigating further.
Inequality is a much broader problem than the billionaires, however. Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2018 p9: “While the bottom half of adults collectively owns less than 1% of total wealth, the richest decile (top 10% of adults) owns 85% of global wealth, and the top percentile alone accounts for almost half of all household wealth (47%)”.
However, this position is fairly stable. What we have seen in recent years is the growth of the super-rich, and it is this question which is of most concern, because it is the super-rich, not the bulk of the top percentile, that are in a position to influence politics to the detriment of ordinary people.
A positive role for the super-rich
So what is the role of the super-rich ? We have identified philanthropy as one aspect, and that is a worthwhile phenomenon to encourage if not enforce. But what else ? How should the wealthy be using their ability to control resources. In my view the key issue is innovation. If you look at history you will see that innovation was often discouraged by monarchs and dictators as it would potentially enable someone else – the inventor – to become more useful, more famous, more loved, or more wealthy, than the ruler. There is the case of the Roman craftsman who invented flexible and unbreakable glass, and was promptly executed by the Emperor Tiberius to whom he had brought the idea .
But in our day and age the reverse seems to be true. Entrepreneurs who are not dependent on external funding and especially government funding are much better placed to carry through innovations to both commercial success and to the benefit of ordinary people. Examples Gates, Jobs, Musk, Branson and Bezos in modern times. But in the past too, before government had any role in economic development, we see the Wright Bros, Watt, Trevithick, Brunel and the 19th and early 20th century pioneers creating the ability, after centuries of stagnation, to deliver vast quantities of mechanical energy at low cost – more than any men, army of men and army of animals could ever do. Those inventions underwrote the Industrial revolution. Arguably it was the rise of the British Middle Class after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 and the success of global merchants that drove the impetus for change.
In our Information Age, we see the next step. Inventions that provide a boost to our mental abilities rather than our physical ones. Indeed if you look at the degree of innovation through the centuries, the figures are virtually a flat line close to zero until the seventeenth century when it started to climb and by now has become exponential . The advent of useable AI (although what we are seeing now is not remotely intelligent) will bring about another boost to creativity and is not the threat some suppose.
Many who have not thought it through would contend that innovations have not helped us to live better -ie more comfortable ? more contented ? – lives as human beings and point to the appalling example of the Manhattan project where a large number of otherwise highly respectable physicists were harnessed by the American government to invent the atomic bomb . But then what would have happened if Hitler had got there first ?
Nevertheless, once beyond the massive pressures created by human conflict, there are other conflicts that need close attention – the conflicts with nature. The most immediate are global health and climate change. I will focus here on public health as an example.
Despite the risks of opprobrium from conspiracy theorists, there is, in my view, a major role for rich philanthropists in public health. Virologists talk about the “next big one” the NBO. Zoonotic viruses are a major threat to human health as we have seen with Covid-19, and spillovers from animals to man are more common than you might expect. Viruses are part of the overall global ecosystem, and RNA viruses, (like Covid) which contain a tiny amount of genetic material and mutate fast are among the most dangerous when they jump from one host (often bats, from whom direct infections are rare) to humans, usually via a third animal in which the virus finds a happy home and incubates quietly .
When that happens, the chances of human infection greatly increase (for example Hendra virus which infects people via horses and H5N1 bird flu which has been passed to humans via dairy cows and is a strong candidate for the NBO). An outbreak like Covid demands immediate international mobilisation and that takes money. In such circumstances, the international health authorities (supported but hopefully not constrained by national politicians) should be able, automatically in my view, to call on the resources of the super-rich. This requires a kind of social contract between the most successful capitalists and their customer base, with product boycotts as the ultimate sanction, although that would hurt the customer more than the super-rich entrepreneurs in many cases.
Few of the super-rich have donated with the effectiveness of the Gates Foundation. Jamsetji Tata, Warren Buffet, George Soros and Michael Bloomberg are also big donors, and Mark Zuckerberg claims he will give away 99% of his fortune. Musk has diverted some Tesla shares into a charitable fund for unspecified purposes. Even Jeff Bezos donated a small amount (for him) to US Food Aid during the pandemic. However, we may see in these donors, a model of how it might work. The super-rich reserving a (significant) proportion of their resources – which, remember, have been accumulated through all the rest of us buying the entrepreneur’s products and boosting share prices – to be fed back into projects to the benefit of the planet and humankind.
Vaccination methodology development to combat the NBO is a very important example of that kind of initiative. Combined with the funding of instant action to develop specific vaccines and curative agents when (not if) the next outbreak occurs. Initiatives to help communities through climatic disasters similarly.
That is what super-rich people are for.
Solutions
The question is how to create a consensus across human societies that such philanthropy is part of what being super-rich entails. And it must be philanthropy whose purpose is controlled by competent experts, not by the whims of a single individual. True philanthropy is to let go of your resources and let someone more competent decide how to use them. We are a long way from that ideal, but in the end it may be cultural pressure that is most effective. Some of the solutions proposed by economists such as a focus on land taxes and asset taxes may create a greater incentive. The regulations must be such so as not to stifle innovation, but to harness the benefits of it for the common good as well as that of the entrepreneur. A reasonable share of the benefits should go where the money came from.
Such windfall taxes have to impact the very rich not the middle class. Taxes should be fair and not serve to increase inequalities. Tax havens (such as the ‘Panama Papers’ case involving Mossack and Fonseca ) need to be regulated fairly and according to international conventions to hit the right groups. Unfortunately, as an example, the introduction of wealth tax in Germany in 2022 that has to be paid to the state over 30 years does not achieve this – it does not draw back wealth from the super-rich but from the middle-class, which should be the engine of innovation and growth.
Recovering the money is one thing. Limiting power is another. Political contributions from billionaires unfairly skew election results away from democratic norms, especially in the US. Campaign contributions must be limited with no quid pro quos allowed and severe sanctions imposed when breaches are uncovered.
All these measures are hard to implement when the very people with the power to enact them are those that benefit from the present state of corruption. What can we do ? Stop buying the products is one answer – that could be easy to do with the fashion brands, but much harder with the technologies that we depend on every day at work and at leisure. When one billionaire falls maybe others will take notice.
There are no easy answers. Perhaps we may find that the super-rich discover a conscience, and clever as they are, realise that this state of inequality cannot go on indefinitely, or sanctions will one day hit them very hard indeed. We can keep pushing the case – write letters, suggest worthy causes for the super-rich to support, complain to the politicians who are supposed to represent us. Maybe even the religious people can put some kind of pressure on the super-rich towards fairness. Maybe the mores of society will gradually move away from greed. Maybe it will be conflict that will destroy the empires of the billionaires, but other billionaires are likely to profit from conflict so that is not an answer.
We can also applaud the work of those, often much maligned rich individuals who do contribute to the public good so that others may feel it is to their benefit to follow the good example. Rewarding the most generous billionaires by shifting to their products could be a good strategy. But let us keep the dialogue going and not let this situation slip any further out of control. The billionaires, remembering the fate of Venice, must recognize their responsibility to the societies that allowed them to succeed. We are no longer in an age where the super-rich can afford to ignore those responsibilities. Eventually, the pigeon will come home to roost and we know what a messy business that can be.
GRC June 2024