Maximum Wage

 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...

Are electorates and politicians across the world prepared just to shrug for ever about that widening wealth gap. It can seem as they are. Our own shameful government, led by a man worth £529m at the last count, seems to be pinning its slim chances of re-election on drastically reducing or abolishing inheritance tax, the single policy that most benefits the vanishingly small number of families as rich as the prime minister's. At what point does the question arise: enough is enough.

For Ingrid Robeyns, a professor of philosophy and economics at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands the urgency of that question is long overdue. Not only does Robeyns argue for a limit to wealth, she is prepared to put a number on it...

Utrecht
George Jones (1786 -1869)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] 

"In a country with a socioeconomic profile similar to the Netherlands, where I live, we should aim to create a society in which no one has more than £10m... I contend that for people who live in a society with a solid pension system, the ethical limit on wealth will be around 1 million pounds, dollars or euros per person.

A lot of people say: "I've been thinking this all my life." And then there's those who just freak out and tell me: "This is crazy!" And I can understand that if you have been raised in this neoliberal capitalist paradigm, which I think almost everybody now has, it is an essence of that ideology that there should be no limit to rewards."...

The idea that any discussion of a limit to wealth must be born out of envy, for example; or that most seductive of all myths, (or poverty) of their lives - that multimillions are made mostly by hard work and talent, not by luck and vast inequalities of opportunity that people somehow deserve the wealth...

Her book [Limitarianism: The case Against Extreme Wealth] explores the negative consequences not only on social cohesion and democracy, but on productivity, on mental and physical health and on climate change..

"We regulate markets in different ways all the time... I think if citizens were to understand that better - that we really can choose between many different options of economic system - then we can start a proper debate."

Critics of Robeyn's ideas tend to fall into two camps; she is neither naive or a communist (or both). She insists she is neither and counters these arguments by making the case that placing an upper limit on earnings and wealth is not only ethical but also rational. In this argument she can not only cite the likes of Thomas Piketty, author of the bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, as a fellow traveller, but also philosophers of democracy going back to Plato - the latter argued that no cohesive society could ever be created if the richest citizens earned more that four times the wages of the poorest; last year, Jeff Bezos earned the average wage of one of his Amazon employees every nine seconds...

(Tim Adams, The Observer, 2024)