This week I found myself in a perilous setting: the comments section under a social media post. Specifically, remarks beneath a link to an article in The Irish Times about an Oxfam report on inequality. The headline read: Ireland’s 11 billionaires are wealthier than 85% of adults in State, says Oxfam.
A number of commenters were appalled by the title’s (putatively) negative gloss. They claimed the piece was “stirring jealousy” and the headline was “written like there’s something wrong with being successful”. Others praised the financial landscape described in the article as proof that “hard work pays off” and evidence of “hard work and a bit of luck”. Social media isn’t real life, but still it was depressing.
The article details the increased wealth of Ireland’s billionaires. It notes that the 12 richest international billionaires – topped by Tesla CEO and professional-grotesque-artist Elon Musk, Google cofounder Larry Page and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos – are wealthier than the poorest half of the global population.
Here, the CSO’s 2024 Survey on Income and Living Conditions showed 11.7 per cent of Irish people at risk of poverty and 15.7 per cent experiencing enforced deprivation. As Oxfam’s report explains 48 per cent of the world’s people lived in poverty in 2022. The document reveals an economically egregious and morally repugnant concentration of wealth and highlights how billionaires can manipulate systems to further entrench their advantage.
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We often talk about schemes to alleviate poverty without much discussion of controlling inordinate wealth – perhaps because institutions often corrupted by wealth have worked hard to impose narratives according to which the two have little to do with one another.
Prosperity benefits all, apparently. We used to worry about billionaires owning half of major media outlets, but newly pernicious is their almost total ownership of the artificial intelligence (AI) platforms that increasingly impose on all aspects of life online.
In The Wealth of Nations, the 18th-century economist and philosopher Adam Smith acknowledged the rich-poor relationship candidly. “Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many,” he wrote. Oxfam’s report reveals a much bleaker ratio.
Smith’s remarks appeared amid discussion of the need of civil government to protect wealthy people’s property (so they can “sleep a single night in security”, bless them) against poor people who might rebel against the inequality.
Nowadays, as the wealth of the super-rich has sprung exponentially to levels where the actual quantities are basically abstract to ordinary individuals, and where attempts to discuss limits on wealth or firm wealth taxation are dismissed as communism, the super-rich sleep soundly.
These days, the richest get richer (in some cases with little labour beyond merely already being very rich) while poverty and homelessness increase, and many basic services barely meet people’s needs. This situation forces us further into divisive tribalism as people fight for scraps of available resources, a situation which affects everyone except those at a complete remove from the ordinary social world.
I’ve always understood “begrudgery” as an unjust reluctance to let people enjoy what they have. So, I wonder, what would it mean to have justly earned billionaire-level wealth? I can understand a meritocracy which believes people performing at a very high level deserve more than others, but I can’t think of any series of acts a person could carry out that could justify this scale of resource inequality.
Under neoliberalism, we are fed scripts that certain jobs are inherently valuable. However, this is often a contingent fact about the circumstances surrounding work. Care work, historically performed exclusively by marginalised groups, is underpaid because of that legacy. This remains even when we know how vital this work is to basic economic functioning.
Even at the most dispassionate level of analysis, an economy needs children to grow up and become workers (and care for retired workers), and someone needs to protect their path into adulthood. Care-work has obvious economic and moral value and is systematically undervalued, socially and financially.
At the other end, wealth multiplies freely. That it should be hindered in this process seemed clear to notorious-non-communist George Berkeley in 1735. He asked: “Whether a door ought not to be shut against all other methods of growing rich, save only by industry and merit? And whether wealth got otherwise would not be ruinous to the public?”
Suggesting wealth caps isn’t communism; it’s fixing the boundaries to prevent the skyrocketing inequality that emerges in a world with limited resources and where interest allows large pots to increase automatically.
It’s hard to say at exactly what point extreme wealth becomes immoral. But let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good. In Limitarianism, Ingrid Robeyns proposed €10 million as an absolute maximum (in countries similar to the Netherlands where she lives).
To regard the critiquing of the current state of inequality as begrudgery is normalised psychosis. When I try to imagine how I would feel hoarding so much wealth, while so many live in such disadvantage and hardship, it produces anything but envy. If you couldn’t feel happy and safe with less than €10 million then money is not the problem. My trouble sleeping at night would spring from a very different source than possible marauders at the castle gate.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a research fellow at the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
