I had been thinking about writing an article about how necessary or unnecessary billionaires are, and then I saw that someone from The Atlantic beat me to it.
If you get the Atlantic, which I highly recommend, check out this recent article by Christine Emba, titled What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible? I'm not going to summarize it here, because that wouldn't be fair to Christine or the Atlantic. It is behind a paywall if you don't subscribe to the Atlantic, but again I think that's worth it. Check it out if you can.
What are we doing here?
Billionaires weren't planned, but they've evolved out of this economic system we have, and they cause a lot of damage.
Let’s start by looking at the richest 10% in the world. I’ve written about this before. This graphic from Oxfam’s Inequality Report 2024 is a great way to set the scene. The richest 10% in the world produce about half of the world’s CO2 emissions. I’m in this group, as are many people reading this article.
I wrote about this back in November in The 10% problem, where I used the Oxfam graphic from last year – which looks pretty much the same as the one above.
But that is just the richest 10%, we are nowhere near the 1%, or billionaire territory. To see how ridiculously skewed our global wealth dynamic is, look at this chart:
This is from a 2021 article from Business Insider, so the numbers will have changed some. But look how small the average wealth of the top 1% in America (only $13.7M) is when compared to billionaires. The wealth of the average American had to be circled because it was so small you couldn’t see it with the naked eye.
Your average billionaire emits about 1 million times more greenhouse gases than the average person. Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions out pollute 2.1m homes according to a recent report. This is just greenhouse gas emissions. The activities of billionaires undoubtedly have similar impacts on the other 5 planetary boundaries we have breached.
What are we getting out of this deal?
Economic growth in the short-term. A dying planet in the long-term. Not a good deal.
What is the purpose of a billionaire?
Most global GHG emissions come from the wealthy and ultrawealthy. That is no surprise. The next question we should ask is, is it worth it?
Well of course not for the rest of humanity who will suffer the consequences of increased GHG emissions, but we should ask the wealthy and ultrawealthy, is it worth it for them?
The answer is of course no.
There is no other planet to go to if this one is ruined.
What is the plan of billionaires when the seas rise, when the famines come when civilization collapses? Do they think their money can isolate them in some kind of bubble? Do they have homes in Ireland, Iceland, New Zealand, or some other island nations that they think they can ultimately escape to and be fine?
Yes, many of them make nice virtue-signaling sounds, but their actions by and large are just assuming business as usual. To better understand their thinking, we should survey them.
Let’s survey at least 1,000 billionaires to get a statistically significant sample – but the more the better. Feel free to add to this, but I’ll start things off with a few sample questions:
1. Do you see climate change as an existential threat to your life in your lifetime? (yes/no)
2. Do you see climate change as an existential threat to your children in their lifetimes? (yes/no/no children)
3. Do you see climate change as a threat to your way of life in your lifetime? (yes/no)
4. Do you see climate change as a threat to your children’s way of life in their lifetimes? (yes/no/no children)
5. Do you have a plan for surviving/adapting to climate change (yes/no)
6. If yes, what is that plan (ride it out, it won’t be that bad, my wealth will protect me, fight climate change with all I can, retreat to a home on an island in the rich world, other)?
7. If they say to fight climate change with all I can – ask them how?
8. What percentage of wealth would you be willing to be taxed to fix the problem? (0,1,2,3,5,10,20,30, 40)?
9. Open-ended question. What is the biggest thing we can do to fix climate change?
We should also give this survey to 1,000 people in the middle class. Then compare the results.
Eat the rich? No. Just don’t let them get that rich, or tax the destructive behavior to the point it stops.
I don’t see the purpose of billionaires. It is becoming increasingly evident that billionaires signal a failure in our society.
What we have now has failed because it rewards and incentivizes the empire-building and unbelievable overconsumption of human beings. If the world’s billionaires lived like the middle class in the rich world, we would still have a climate problem, but it wouldn’t be nearly as large, and we’d have more time to tackle it. But that isn’t the world we live in.
We are destroying the future of humanity for the consumption and accumulation habits of a fraction of our global population.
People aren’t evil because they are billionaires, but there is no good societal reason for billionaires other than to give people another kind of celebrity to follow or to ensure we always have a supply of people to buy football teams. What is the purpose of that? An answer that is often trotted out is, “They created jobs.” True, they create some jobs, and large corporations create some jobs, but more jobs are created by small businesses than by huge corporations in the United States (about 2/3 of jobs are created by small businesses). And even if the 1% create jobs, it isn’t worth destroying our future for those jobs.
The old axiom that money can’t buy happiness is true. Several studies have shown that money can buy increased opportunity and power, but not happiness. A 2020 study showed that over an annual income of about $105,000, increased wealth stops increasing the amount of happiness and satisfaction people feel with life.
So, what is the purpose of billionaires? I still haven’t figured it out.
Let me know if you know.
Thanks for commenting Chris. That sounds about right.
Just like there’s a minimum wage, there needs to be a maximum wage.