‘No one should have more than €10m’: the author of Limitarianism on why the super-rich need to level down radically

Prof Ingrid Robeyns has spent a decade studying wealth and ethics and says that limits are essential if we want to eradicate poverty and protect social cohesion and the planet

Read a short extract from Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns

Here's a couple of good questions for an election year: while we may talk about minimum wages, why don't we ever discuss maximum wages? And, while our politicians may argue about how little a family can survive on, why do they never address the other end of the inequality scale: just how much accumulated wealth might be too much?

This week in January is always a pertinent one for such questions. As the world's billionaires have private-jetted out to Davos to slap themselves on the back once again for their outrageous fortune, Oxfam has produced its annual report about the growing gap between that happy few and the other 8 billion from whom they profit and with whom they share the planet's resources. This year's report, Inequality Inc, again articulates a trend that we have all witnessed for the past four decades and more. While most people, locally, nationally, globally, try to survive on the same or less, the rich and the very rich become phenomenally more wealthy year by year. Since 2020, the report reveals, 60% of humanity has grown poorer, [while] billionaires are now $3.3tn or 34% richer than they were at the beginning of this decade of crisis." The wealth of the world's five richest men has more than doubled in that period, adding an unprecedented $464bn to their fortunes.