No, billionaires don’t drive economic growth – and crony billionaires strangle it | Jan Svejnar

My research found that the myth of billionaires boosting the economy is untrue - particularly when they amassed their wealth from political connections

After I escaped communist Czechoslovakia in 1970, I enrolled at Cornell University. In my introductory sociology course there, I was taught that becoming a billionaire was impossible - realising the "American dream", at least at the very top of the income scale, was effectively no longer an option. The last few decades have certainly proved this thesis wrong.

This shift has had significant consequences for income and wealth inequality not just in the US, but also in many countries around the globe. In fact, the top 1% globally will soon hold over half the world's wealth. And their share is growing. This stunning fact makes it all the more important to ask what this means for the rest of us. Given the amazing level of accumulation of wealth at the top, improving our understanding of the economic role of billionaires has certainly become a public policy issue of the highest order.

We discovered that billionaire wealth arising from being politically connected has a strongly negative effect on growth

Related: Britain has world's most billionaires per capita

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