How Much Is Enough?: A Stone Center Event Discusses Whether Billionaires Should Exist

As personal fortunes of the super-rich hurtle toward the half-trillion-dollar mark, some people are starting to ask, “how much money is enough”?

In search of an answer to that question and many others, the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility hosted limitarianism proponent Ingrid Robeyns, who argues that the world’s billionaires have gone far beyond enough.   

“I'm in favor of wealth,” Robeyns, the Chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University, said at a Feb. 19 Keller Center event, adding: “I want all of us to have wealth.”

But, she added, concentration of extreme wealth “causes all sorts of risks and dangers.”

Robeyns outlines those risks and dangers in her 2024 book Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.  In it, she pushes for an upper limit to how much personal wealth any individual can have, with the surplus redistributed for societal good.

Limitarianism has sparked intense debate, and that continued as Robeyns joined Steven N. Durlauf, the Stone Center’s Director and Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, for a 90-minute conversation moderated by political scientist David Lay Williams of DePaul University.

The event was an example of the fresh-off-the-headlines programming that is a hallmark of both the Stone Center and the Harris School of Public Policy. Just one month earlier, Williams noted, billionaires Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Apple CEO Tim Cook; and Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were in VIP seats as President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term. Billionaires LVMH Chief Bernard Arnault and Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani also attended inaugural events.

“This image, as much as anything in recent memory, speaks to both the incredible concentration of wealth in recent times as well as ambitions to direct and control public policy,” Williams said. “The combined wealth of Trump's small handful of guests has been estimated to exceed $1 trillion, which is about as much as the combined GDPs of Argentina and Denmark.” 

The inauguration guests illustrate what Robeyns calls the “staggering” wealth inequalities across the globe. 

Citing figures from the 2023 UBS Global Wealth Report, she said that half of the people in the world have virtually no wealth. Wealth, she explained, is having more than enough to pay the bills; it’s having enough money to do such things as invest. Meanwhile, the richest 10% have two-thirds or more of all wealth, she said.

“This is causing a lot of political and social problems,” she said. “And for me, most importantly, this distribution is morally unjustified.”

Robeyns’ book is important, Durlauf said, and one he said he endorses both as a citizen and as a social scientist.

“Extreme wealth inequality really becomes a mechanism for producing segregation,” he said. “Segregation of neighborhoods, schools, firms, and all of those are unjust forms of inequality.”

But not everyone favors these arguments. Critics point to lack of economic efficiency as one danger posed by limitarianism. They also say it could curtail innovation by stifling entrepreneurs and end philanthropy. 

Government investment is one way to address threats to innovations that rely on taking on financial risks, Robeyns noted. “But I think science and academia are actually still very driven by this idea that we do something for the public good,” she said.

If so many smart people across the world can work “bloody hard” to do amazing things without having a chance of becoming “ridiculously rich,”  why, she asked, would we assume that entrepreneurs can't?

A particularly timely additional concern is that extreme wealth concentration “undermines democracy via different mechanisms, such as lobbying and donations, but also in what we might be seeing right now, that the billionaires are actually seizing the executive power,” she said.

“Such wealth is also incompatible with ecological sustainability,” she added. “And … definitely the billionaires have lifestyles that are incompatible with keeping the planet inhabitable for everybody in the future.”

What kind of limit does Robeyns suggest?

For what she describes as the sake of discussion, that number is $10 million.  

“You do need to have enough space so that those citizens who may be motivated by financial gain in order to contribute to the economy would still be willing to do so,” she said.

And what are the policy instruments that could be used to enforce limitarianism?

Wealth, inheritance, and income taxes are all options, Durlauf said, “but each is going to have very complicated design issues.”

Robeyns added that she believes “it's theoretically possible but practically impossible to reduce inequalities without government intervention.”

Robeyns’ book comes as extreme wealth levels are climbing, with Robeyns noting that “the number of billionaires and the amount of billions they have are increasing.”

“Right now, under neoliberal capitalism, the sky's the limit,” Robeyns said. “You can become as rich as you want and there are very few hurdles that prevent you from becoming a $400 billion billionaire (as Musk nearly is) or in the future a trillionaire.”

Such wealth concentration means, Durlauf argued, that “there's a very small number of individuals that have extraordinary influence and that's quite different than saying there are many people who have a certain amount of influence. And so, the more possibility that individual idiosyncrasies, to put it mildly, can have pernicious effects.”

As Robeyns, Durlauf, and Williams explored the myriad reasons of how the world got to this point, they discussed policy, politicians, and steps governments took or didn’t. And they also touched on the arbitrariness of inheritance and luck.

“Neoliberal capitalism tells us that if we are successful, we should take all the credit for it,” Robeyns said. “And if we happen to become destitute, then possibly, or presumably, we made some wrong choices and we can be blamed for it.”

“But that is not in line with what we know about the immense influence of luck in our life,” she said, and the impact it has on how successful people are. That includes natural luck, like being born highly intelligent; social luck, that traces back to one’s parents; and market luck. 

In addition to luck, Durlauf added, “I want to mention the arbitrariness of the price system. In other words, the fact that we like diamonds more than we like emeralds has implications for the wealth of people who own them.”

Will the world ever see the kinds of wealth caps limitarianism calls for? 

“Actually, I'm increasingly pessimistic,” Robeyns said. “It's more likely that we will get to a very bloody revolution than we will get to peaceful limitarianism. But even if we will never reach it, the reasons are sound and hence we should strive to move in that direction.”