Limitarianism

2 million dollars is a lot of money. With it you could have a house or two, afford the best healthcare and food, travel all you like, send your children through college, and still have money left over to incur interest and grow itself. What more would you need for a fulfilling life? You're rich. But you're not super-rich.

Now, say you gained 2 million dollars every day for the rest of your working life. Even if you saved 100% of it, you still wouldn't have as much money by the end of your life as the world's richest billionaires.

In this book, Ingrid Robeyns asks the question if it is moral to structure our society and world in this way? Where millions of people have the barest minimum to survive while the richest fraction of people can splash millions on a single space ride? After all no one makes it on their own. They only make it in the context of the rules and regulations that their business or investments or inheritance exist in, and the support and infrastructure of the society they're a part of. Robeyns presents many moral arguments, some of which are even raised by wealthy people she interviews, but there are much deeper problems too. Wealth influencing democracy is deeply undemocratic, and through lobbying, media corporations, and campaign contributions, influence democracy it has. We enshrine limits to political power in our society, but not economic power. Why?

Limitarianism is an ideal. Like democracy or racial equality, it is a goal to strive for, but not one we will likely ever reach. We have the tools to work towards this goal without a revolution, many of the same tools that have been repealed or left unenforced one by one for the last 50 years or so. Isn't that a better option?

I do think this is an essential philosophical book to tackle these questions, however I may be pessimistic, but with the way she presents her arguments with left-leaning morals like global equality, and climate justice, I don't think this book will convince anyone who doesn't already agree with the concept.

Limitarianism is an ethical framework advocating for limiting excess wealth and redistributing to the benefit of wider society. The book builds its case by historically analyzing the rise of inequality over the past 50 years through global neoliberal policy; the social problems that inequality cause or exacerbate; how taking a Limitarian stance could improve things for everyone including the wealthy; and what needs to be done to get there. She starts off the book with her proposal that there be a “political” wealth cap of 10mm $/€/£ per person, and an ethical limit of 1mm $/€/£ per person. Basically, she comes out of the book fighting. Then, throughout the author provides many shocking statistics and refers to many different academic studies. Furthermore, she runs though many of the counter arguments that have been posed to her by the public and the media, naming and taking apart each objection as a trained philosopher should. She brings a lot to the fight, and in the end settles basically on a strong welfare state (I would like to a see an anarchist argument). Altogether is a strong package. It is not the kind of thing you pass to the proverbial conservative uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table. He will scoff, reject it outright, and recommend Thomas Sowell or some other ghoul. But for people who do not pray to Ludwig von Mises or one of the Mont Pelerin set, but do not necissarly have a strong critical bent or are not as politically aware, it might serve as a good catch-me-up and help them understand why they think we might be in the Bad Timeline. I really appreciate Robeyns’s call at the end for more political engagement by regular people. Our democratic muscles have atrophied in the decades of consumerist atomization. As the classic Graeber quote goes, “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”