All life happens within limits – we all get 24 hours a day and our allotted lifespan. Everything unfolds within the natural laws of gravity and thermodynamics and a thousand others. Living things find a balance within a network of relationships.
Economics refutes this, insisting that growth is infinite and that economic activity must expand forever. Wealth can accumulate without limit, and there is no such thing as enough. This is misguided, and it is also corrosive. Inequality divides us and warps our priorities. And we know it: most people agree that there is such a thing as too much inequality, and 84% of people in the UK think we’re already past it.
It’s time to start talking more purposefully about limits, argues Ingrid Robeyns in her book Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth. An academic based in the Netherlands, Robeyns has spent the last ten years researching economic inequality and has this is what she has concluded: “We must create a world in which no one is super-rich. There must be a cap on the amount of wealth any one person can have.”
In response to these kinds of statements, a lot of people want to discuss where to draw the ‘enough’ line and what qualifies as ‘super-rich’. (Preferably somewhere above their own income, naturally.) But that’s something of a sideshow for now, the book argues. While Robeyns has a clear idea of what enough might be, it’s more important to agree that there is such a point. If there is, then we ought to be able to find ways to keep incomes within it, so that nobody ever acquires vast fortunes out of all proportion to the rest of society.
In a series of clear and practical chapters, Robeyns explains why this is necessary. The most powerful is the way that the global economy is designed to stack more and more on the plates of those who already have too much, while the poorest get very little. The trite justifications of trickledown or rising tides are myths that protect the wealthy.
This imbalance is morally wrong, and indefensible if we take the Bible seriously on social justice. It’s also deeply futile. Economists identified the ‘declining marginal value of money’ 150 years ago, giving a fancy name to the common sense observation that more money means less to those who already have lots of it. More money for the rich is essentially waste, while it could be life-saving for the poorest. Extreme wealth is a pointless hoarding of resources that others could put to good use.
Limitarianism calls for a halt to accumulation beyond ‘the riches line’ – “the level at which additional money cannot increase your standard of living.” Because it only targets the excess, there are billions of winners from such a policy and no genuine losers. “There is so much good our governments could do with the excess money of the super-rich. And taking it from them would probably not affect their welfare at all – not in any meaningful sense.”
Robeyns goes on to describe the connection between extreme wealth and climate change, how democracy is undermined by inequality, and why philanthrophy doesn’t solve the problem. She presents her case without party politics and old ideological divides, which is refreshing. The book is rigorously researched and well balanced, giving weight to something that a lot of people feel intuitively. It puts contemporary political language to some principles of fairness that many Christians would already support, which makes it useful reading for Joy in Enough.
Appropriately, Robeyns knows the limits of her own book too. It’s not a manifesto for a new world order or a detailed and prescriptive solution. It’s a well explained idea, dropped into a wider debate. “The limitarian project contributes one clear demand to our quest for a new economic system.” A vital demand it is too, and I hope the book is widely read.
Joy in Enough 