Extreme wealth concentration — as strong as ever

A journalist from the Wall Street Journal wrote to me a week ago to ask what the numbers that I use in the opening pages of my book Limitarianism would look like today. In particular, she asked whether I could calculate for her the “lifetime equivalent hourly income” of Elon Musk’s current assets today.

Short answer: today that number is 5 million dollars per hour.

Longer answer: The “lifetime equivalent hourly wage” that I calculated in my book was assuming Musk would never take holidays, work 50 hours a week and work until 65. His 809 billion estimated assets would then translate into an hourly equivalent wage of 6,914,530 dollars per hour (hence almost 7 million per hour). Assuming he works 70 hours a week and until he turns 75, it would still amount to 4,938,950 dollars per hour – almost 5 million per hour.

That is: if Elon Musk were paid an hourly wage for his work, he’d need to earn about 5 million dollars per hour to amass that fortune. Of course, this should not be taken literally. There is no such wage. Moreover, this estimate assumes he doesn’t spend any of it. The point of this “lifetime equivalent hourly wage” is rather to make an extremely abstract number, that most people cannot cognitively process, understandable.

I’m glad this journalist asked, but that doesn’t mean she will use it, or even less so that the WSJ will publish any of this – it has happened a few times that USA/UK journalists interview me for a piece on extreme wealth that then doesn’t get published – sometimes they ghost me, sometimes they tell me they wrote the piece (and even share it) but the paper decides not to publish it.

Rising extreme wealth concentration and the relentless drive of the überwealthy to keep accumulating more lies at the core of almost all the world’s most lethal problems. It takes central stage in Luke Kemp’s masterpiece Goliath’s Curse, in which he asks what makes empires collapse. Kemp argues that our current empire is global because of the way our economic system is so radically global, and that if this empire goes down, it will affect all of us (and not just wipe out a geographically bounded empire as it did in the past, for example with the Aztec or the Roman Empire). While Kemp is pretty pessimistic at our odds of saving ourselves from collapse, he argues that it requires in any case two things – a cap on wealth and deep democracy.

Yet we are still not doing anything about extreme wealth concentration, because (a) most people vote for economically right-wing parties who prefer protecting the (extremely) rich above addressing the serious problems humanity is facing, (b) the extremely rich have in too many places captured our collective decision making (often via their corporate structures), (c) and too many regular people are still ignorant about the harmful effects of extreme wealth.

I think the only reasonable course of action is to double down on our efforts to address (a), (b), and (c).