Harare Review of Books

288 pages.

First published Jan. 16, 2024 (Astra Publishing House)

Non-fiction.

How much is too much? How much money is too much money? Ingrid Robeyns has a couple of figures: ten million; or, alternatively, one million.

“Limitarianism” is Robeyns’s answer to the big question of our time: how do we address the fact that the climate catastrophe is being driven by overconsumption, and mainly that by billionaires? Here’s a thought:

Suppose you work fifty hours a week, between the ages of twenty and sixty-five—week in, week out; year in, year out. How much would your hourly wage need to be so that, by the end, you’d have amassed $219 billion? (i.e., Elon Musk’s estimated assets in 2022) The answer is $1,871,794 per hour. Almost two million dollars per hour. Every working hour for forty-five years.

Robeyn’s limitarianism is a cap on individual wealth. Most people probably agree that there should be a cap of some kind, but few agree on the amount. Robeyns understands this, and says it is at best a “regulative ideal”—something to aim for, even if it can’t be achieved. Per Robeyns, limitarianism would require of three kinds of action: structural, to make changes to policies and to bring about equality; fiscal, through modifications of things like tax and benefit systems; and ethical. To my mind, that last one is where most of the trouble is: how do you persuade generations of Global Northerners brought up on capitalism to believe there should be an ethical limit to accumulation?

Strangely, Robeyns believes in maintaining things like the free market economy and private property, while arguing that people are not in fact entitled to limitless wealth. She gets around the problem by arguing that the wealth of high net worth individuals does not in fact belong to them. Perhaps one may consider how such individuals have acquired their wealth: through inheritance, through work (like Oprah), through start-up loans from their parents or relations, and so on. However, many have made eye-watering sums of money not through honest labour, but by cheating society and governments—you and me, in other words—through tax evasion.

To address the limits above, Robeyns proposes at least two: a political limit, and an ethical one. The political one is to be enforced by governing systems, so that any wealth above, say, ten million (Euros, pounds, dollars, or whatever currency applies) is forfeited to the state. This money can be given to other citizens (a hint of universal basic income, or the wealth sharing that some coutries already practise), or it could be used for projects that benefit everyone. A limit of one million (again, in whichever currency) is what Robeyns tries to persuade us (or, more accurately, extremely high-wealth individuals) is an ethical limit; it affords a good lifestyle for anyone and their children.

Robeyns has been talking about limitarianism for a while and, understandably, has received a lot of push-back, which she addresses in the book. However, and perhaps surprisingly, there are high-wealth individuals who are actively working to address the issue of limitless accumulation. Robeyns spoke to some of them both on and off the record for the book, including Abigail Disney, who has been vocal, as well as a group called Resource Generation.

An important point from the book:
[The] question we should really be asking is: how were the gains from globalization distributed? … As Piketty summarized, “slavery and colonialism played a central role in the Western world’s acquisition of wealth.”

The outrageous results of a 2021 study by Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala show the flow of wealth away from the Global South to the Global North through “unequal exchange”. One of the measures Global North countries use is to outsource labour to the South, and then pay unfairly low wages. Another has been the use of things like coups to remove labour-supporting governments.
Hinkel et al estimate a loss of $62 trillion in the period 1960–2017, or around $9,951 per person (!) and a gain of $68 trillion to the North, or on average $65,517 per person.

This is the crux of limitarianism’s problem: The power of the 1 percent has become so great and their influence so outsized that they can no longer be held to account by governments. This is why it would be an uphill battle to make changes that would affect individual wealth. Perhaps this is why Robeyns’s arguments mainly appeal to ethics and morality.

Do I agree with Robeyns? I think anyone who isn’t a high net worth individual would support putting a cap on how much wealth you can hog: there should NOT be billionaires in such an unequal world, and there can only be billionaires because of inequaility. Robeyns’s belief in maintaining elements of the system that got us here in the first place would seem irreconcilable, however, with mine that we must burn it all down. Still, the struggle for a more equal world (and against those who are worsening the climate crisis) makes strange bedfellows; no matter how it looks, Robeyns and I are on the same side, along with Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Kohei Saito.

Read Limitarianism with Chaudhary’s The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics of a Burning World and Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.

Thank you to Astra Publishing House and NetGalley for access.

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