I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton’s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away.
Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination Library, which sends free books to children every month from birth to age five. There are currently 3 million children enrolled, and the program has given away over 300 million books.
That didn’t leave Parton poor. Her estate was estimated at $400 million, mostly tied up in property rights of the kind discussed below — copyrights and her theme park, Dollywood. She lived well, in a substantial house on 60-odd acres of land just outside Nashville. But lots of people have substantial houses and, at least for an Australian, 60 acres doesn’t sound like much. More notable was her ostentatious, but deliberately cheap, self-presentation — rhinestones rather than diamonds.
Now for a repeat of the Taylor Swift analysis.
The claim “Every billionaire is a policy failure” is pretty widely accepted these days, formulated most clearly in Ingrid’s case for limitarianism (a hard cap on the maximum wealth anyone can have). Looking at the Forbes list of the richest people in the world (one woman in the top 20), it’s hard to disagree. Most are thoroughly objectionable, and even those who aren’t personally appalling mostly made their money from monopoly (for example, Warren Buffett) or inheritance (members of the Walton family).
But what about the good billionaires, a category for which Taylor Swift (ranked about 2000 in the list) seems like the ideal example? Before her, there was J. K. Rowling, but look how that turned out. Swift seems to tick all the boxes. Apparently a nice person (if you ignore the promotional feuds with other celebrities), generous with her money, treats her employees well, politically progressive without being obnoxious about it, and a philanthropist, though nothing like Dolly Parton.
And she’s made her money honestly, selling records and concert tickets to people who want to buy them. Revealed preference arguments need to be treated with care (Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Walmart is the classic here), but Swifties have plenty of alternatives on offer. At the margin, a dollar spent on Swift is a dollar less for other entertainers, but that’s not a consideration we usually regard as relevant in our current system.
So, if there’s a problem with Swift’s wealth, it’s not a problem with her, but with the system that makes such massive wealth possible. For Swift, that comes about in several ways.
First, the money she makes from selling records and merchandise depends on the system of “intellectual property” (in this case, mostly copyrights and trademarks). Unlike many entertainers, she’s been highly successful in capturing this for herself rather than letting record companies grab it.
Second, her returns from ticket sales to her concerts depend on the availability of stadiums. These are sometimes explicitly subsidised by the public and always dependent on land-use regulation.
Finally, the returns she gets when she invests her wealth are higher than those available to ordinary households. This is at the core of the r > g point made by Piketty a while back.
These compounding effects would be greatly reduced by a more progressive income tax system (a top marginal rate of 70 per cent) and by wealth taxes, capturing the excess returns to high wealth. In combination, these would make it very difficult to become a billionaire by entertaining people. Other measures would be needed to deal with the massive accumulations of corporate wealth represented by the multibillionaires.
Given her dependence on the society that made her wealth possible, Swift can have no legitimate moral objection to a tax system that shares it out more evenly. But is there an economic cost here? The standard story is one about incentives and effort. But it’s hard to believe that Swift would write fewer songs, or perform fewer concerts, if the return were in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions. And, as I already observed, most of the ultra-rich have made their money in actively harmful ways. Even where there is an actually useful product involved, the super-profits have come mostly from monopoly or speculation.
In summary, in a society which produces billionaires, there’s no reason to object to Taylor Swift becoming one. But we could have all the music we need or want in a society without billionaires. Indeed, with policies like a participation income or livable income guarantee, we could see a lot more people making music, some of which might turn out better than what the industry currently gives us.
* In support of my fundraising for the Brisbane to Gold Coast ride against cancer, which was hugely successful. Thanks, everyone!
{ 37 comments }
D. S. Battistoli 09.03.26 at 8:52 am
It’s quite heartening to hear about the success of the Brisbane to Gold Coast ride against cancer fundraiser. Props to all involved!
Swift seems to inspire a variant of the “don’t hate the player, hate the game” school of capitalism critique.
Still, even her choices are not above criticism. Swift was already wealthy, with far more capital than she needs to live and a promising career ahead of her, when she set out on her album re-recording exercise. Her fanbase, on the other hand, is part of the largely economically stagnant middle and lower class of the United States and other WEIRD economies. By re-recording her albums and asking her fans to purchase her versions, she was siphoning capital away from the sorts of people that she, as a progressive, cared about, to improve her socio-economic position vis à vis her former producers.
There were points in their careers when Mark Knopfler walked away from Dire Straits, and Darius Rucker from Hootie and the Blowfish, to careers in relatively less lucrative parts of the music industry (though both have remained millionaires, and even seen their wealth grow). Tracey Chapman had a very brief stage in her career during which she played venues like Wembley Stadium, and then pivoted to what was to her a more comfortable relationship between music-making, income, and fame.
The modal billionaire is sufficiently far from the modal non-billionaire that we can say with confidence that no one becomes a billionaire by accident, and there are few enough billionaires in ratio to the world’s total population that the argument that even the most admirable arrive there by merit is hard to sustain.
MisterMr 09.03.26 at 10:15 am
There is a general problem about what counts as “deserved” income; for example it can’t be that J. K. Rowling is deserved or not depending on her opinions on transexuals (since in a free world people will often have different opinions about what is good and what is bad).
There are many moral system, but to a large degree morals are like what parents do to kids to motivate them: punish them if they don’t do the homeworks, give them a gift or a hugh if they get a good results, in order to influence their behaviour, so that moral systems are largely rules to influence behaviours (now of adults) toward the common good.
From this point of view, at what point an high level of income/wealth is necessary to stimulate innovation, e.g. if Swift, Rowling and, say, Zuckelberg had to pay more taxes, or for any reason could reap less profits due to the “winner take all mechanism”, would they also be less productive?
Thus we can have a “rule-utilitarian” concept of just desert: high income is legit and deserved if that high income or the perspective of it makes people create stuff that increases public utility, but is not “deserved” above that level (without any moral judgement onm the guys/gals getting the money).
It seems obvious to me that, while higer income motivates economic activity, the extremely high income that goes to those at the very top of the distribution is many orders of magnitude what is needed to motivate creatives of one sort of the other, so in this sense these high incomes are largely undeserved, again no moral judgement on the guy/gals receiving the windfall.
Pittsburgh Mike 09.03.26 at 10:52 am
“But it’s hard to believe that Swift would write fewer songs, or perform fewer concerts, if the return were in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions. ”
Surely you jest. If Swift’s return for all her work was numbered in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, she’d be better off working as an accountant somewhere. Her shows require lots of work both performed by her and organized by her. Why go through all that effort, compared to just playing some coffee houses, if it doesn’t pay any better than being a local manager at McD’s?
engels 09.03.26 at 10:54 am
Occasional reminder that a billion is not just bigger than a million but a thousand times bigger.
Holding onto a million dollars in a world with rampant poverty might just be understandable, holding onto a billion means you must be a psychopath (luckily for you, you live in a society that is also certifiably insane).
oldster 09.03.26 at 11:02 am
“ But it’s hard to believe that Swift would write fewer songs, or perform fewer concerts, if the return were in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions.”
I’d revise that to:
“…if the return were in the millions rather than the billions.”
I can’t speak to TS’s compositional elasticity. But as a general point, I think there are lots of pairs of persons and jobs, such that P would do J for N millions but not for N hundred thousands.
A hundred thousand, sad to say, just won’t buy what it once would. In the states, about 42% of households earn that or better. Sixteen percent earn 200k or better. And I suspect that many of those sixteen percent would not do the jobs they currently do if you cut their earnings in half.
On the other hand, there is a lot of room between one million and one billion. Seems like TS might be content with a mere hundred million, esp if Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, and the other psychos were also capped at that figure.
John Q 09.03.26 at 11:10 am
Pittsburgh Mike: I didn’t realise the advancement opportunities at Maccas (Oz term) were so rapid, or that US accountants made megabucks. Feel free to adjust my numbers upwards.
MisterMr: you are articulating the common sense of our system clearly, as witness phrases like “it can’t be” and “no moral judgment”. As you can see from the OP, I don’t agree
J-D 09.03.26 at 11:45 am
In the majority of cases, the personal characteristics which assist people to become billionaires are ones which make their actions widely harmful; and in the majority of cases, the experiences associated with becoming a billionaire will affect people’s personalities for the worse; but both of these are only secondary exacerbating factors for the more fundamental and inescapable fact that, independently of the personal characteristics of billionaires, a system with billionaires produces harmful effects. The greater the inequality of wealth, the greater the harm done, regardless of whether the richest people are good or bad (no matter how that is evaluated). The fundamental issue is independent of who becomes billionaires, and therefore whether they deserve to becomes billionaires is not the point.
Society should not be arranged so that people get what they deserve. As Hamlet told Polonius, a sorry fate would be in store for us if we all got what we deserved. Society should be arranged so that everybody gets better than they deserve–but everybody. Again as Hamlet told Polonius, the more what people get exceeds what they deserve, the greater the merit in the bounty: but I mean bounty for all.
Whether Taylor Swift understands this, I don’t know; but whether she understand it or not, her song ‘Long Live’ is about solidarity.
RageQuit 09.03.26 at 3:33 pm
(1) She’s a climate criminal and is utterly unapologetic about that fact.
(2) There’s no accounting for the negative externalities of the mass dissemination of her music on those who find it aggravatingly trite crap.
(3) Why the constant urge to credit what amount (relative to her wealth) to empty gestures? Oh, she’s nice to her employees? Well, that’s economically valuable to her as she works in entertainment, so she’s far more vulnerable to bad press than other billionaires who make their money in more demand inelastic environments. It’s like everyone forgets the point of Nicky Santoro doting on his kid in Casino.
(4) The Wedding, which ties into point (1), but also demonstrates that she’s very willing to impose external costs on the public for frivolity.
(5) Swift’s ascendancy has come at a time that the US concert market has been almost completely captured and controlled by a monopoly. I note that her very brief “stance” on ticket prices seems, in retrospect, to have been mostly a PR push on her part. So I really do question framing her profits as just taking some money from those who are “willing to pay.” She faces far less competition from small venues than she would have in the past, and I am quite skeptical of arguments that she is merely a beneficiary of this environment, as she has a huge effect on this and engineers as much excess demand for her music as possible. (See Battistoli’s comment above.) Similarly, the homogenizing effects of Social Media and the Internet on culture have also benefited her immensely, and while those technologies are not her creation, she has been one of the most successful at exploiting theme for her benefit.
(6) Fandom is a limbic disorder.
RageQuit 09.03.26 at 3:46 pm
FWIW, I liked Dolly’s music more, she came from a lot less, and she rose to prominence in a more competitive era in American music. Her acts were, AFAICT, much more charitable than Taylor’s have been. But I also question the general relevance of “charity” in gauging the moral quality of the wealthy in the current US environment, as that charity is almost always a form of tax avoidance. Why does Bill Gates give to his foundation? Because that foundation lets him spend tax dollars in the way he sees fit rather than giving it to the public fisc. I don’t know the particulars of Taylor’s charitable works, but I am profoundly skeptical they are evidence of much other than another kind of self-serving PR.
steven t johnson 09.03.26 at 5:08 pm
“Apparently a nice person (if you ignore the promotional feuds with other celebrities), generous with her money, treats her employees well, politically progressive without being obnoxious about it, and a philanthropist, though nothing like Dolly Parton.”
This came up first in the OP, but is I suspect the least important consideration. I gather that much of Swift’s oeuvre is breakup songs trashing numerous boyfriends who done her wrong. Are so many boyfriends wrong? As for being politically progressive (she did a role in the movie Amsterdam, the progressive loser at the time of the conservative-ish Babylon?) it is not at all clear to me that never being obnoxious in grave political matters is even a virtue. And never approaching grave matters isn’t I think progressive, not even in the perverse sense of progressing backward.
“And she’s made her money honestly, selling records and concert tickets to people who want to buy them. Revealed preference arguments need to be treated with care (Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Walmart is the classic here), but Swifties have plenty of alternatives on offer. Apparently a nice person (if you ignore the promotional feuds with other celebrities), generous with her money, treats her employees well, politically progressive without being obnoxious about it, and a philanthropist, though nothing like Dolly Parton.
And she’s made her money honestly, selling records and concert tickets to people who want to buy them. Revealed preference arguments need to be treated with care (Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Walmart is the classic here), but Swifties have plenty of alternatives on offer. At the margin, a dollar spent on Swift is a dollar less for other entertainers, but that’s not a consideration we usually regard as relevant in our current system.
So, if there’s a problem with Swift’s wealth, it’s not a problem with her, but with the system that makes such massive wealth possible. For Swift, that comes about in several ways.
First, the money she makes from selling records and merchandise depends on the system of “intellectual property” (in this case, mostly copyrights and trademarks). Unlike many entertainers, she’s been highly successful in capturing this for herself rather than letting record companies grab it.
Second, her returns from ticket sales to her concerts depend on the availability of stadiums. These are sometimes explicitly subsidised by the public and always dependent on land-use regulation.
Finally, the returns she gets when she invests her wealth are higher than those available to ordinary households. This is at the core of the r > g point made by Piketty a while back
It seems to me that revealed preference arguments need to be treated with skepticism, especially when the venues where audiences—consumers in the parlance—discover new artists can be quite limited. Radio stations with disc jockeys who professed to think payola was a Bad Thing, record stores that let customers listen to the product (yes, that was a real thing,) live music in small venues are supposedly replaced by the purported universal availability of streaming.
My personal experience is that streaming isn’t universal. It is a competition to monopolize an exclusive library (a competition between a handful of platforms in which the network effects in large numbers tends towards a natural monopoly.) And given the actual costs in digital reproduction, the charges levied are a astonishingly high. My guess is the direct consumer’s monthly payments for internet are basically amortizing the (admittedly high) costs of building digital infrastructure. Streaming charges for digital music are close to pure profit, especially given what seems to me to be a tendency to fix prices in a gentlemanly way Adam Smith appreciated.
But granting your natural assumption my personal experience is meaningless, the point about intellectual property I think needs expansion. First, it seems clear to me any rational economic principle would mandate that all monopolies should at least be regulated. And the principle applies a fortiori for legal monopolies like copyrights and trademarks. (I gather this principle is *not* accepted by the economics profession but I not at all clear as to why this choice is convincing.)
Never having been convinced that marginal analysis is everything (you may assume that I just don’t understand,) I do not think the point about Swift’s taking marginal profits from other musicians is of much importance. I do think that the notion the music market is the revealed preference of the audience forgets the peculiarly unnoticed First Audience, the producers and marketers. The choices these gentlemen (usually) make are not measures of satisfaction in the music, but gambits in sales.
I’m not sure how marginal analysis applies in a situation where pursuit of the monster hit and the jackpot in profits is the lure for the biggest market, which is generally what is more of the same, except with market reducing idiosyncrasies filed off. That the margins in some cases are anticipated to be increasing, rather than decreasing?
The First Audience, the producers, additionally is incentivized to oil the squeaky wheel: A small but intensely committed group has outsize veto power.
But of course the First Audience, the producers, does in fact have its own genuine preferences in addition to their projected profits. I suggest that carries with it a selection for the convictions and tastes of wealthy people wholly invested in today’s system….and even when those who seem to be pandering to the masses are still censoring outreach, if not content.
“First, the money she makes from selling records and merchandise depends on the system of ‘intellectual property’ (in this case, mostly copyrights and trademarks)….”
As might be inferred, I agree. It is a conclusive objection to seeing the billions held by the industry as entirely legitimate. That Taylor Swift is one of the people who might be argued as the creator, implying that her success in capturing more of the industry’s returns than most entertainers, doesn’t make her I think more of a good billionaire than any of the others owners. Would a producers who was a mere multimillionaire be less bad than Taylor Swift because he extracted less of the monopoly gains than her?
“Second, her returns from ticket sales to her concerts depend on the availability of stadiums. These are sometimes explicitly subsidised by the public and always dependent on land-use regulation.”
How big an issue this is on the national scale is obscure to me. But on a local scale the *arrangements* in subsidizing stadiums seem to me classic examples of privilege, private law, where one party is objectively favored. (Well I think this sort of legal endorsement is a much better measure of so-called privilege.) I suppose it is easier to dismiss this objection as market failures, lapses, rather than market operations and class politics. But this too I agree is a major objection.
“Finally, the returns she gets when she invests her wealth are higher than those available to ordinary households. This is at the core of the r > g point made by Piketty a while back.”
I agree that it is irrelevant to see Taylor Swift as a person when considering our social arrangements. The objection to Taylor Swift billionaire simply *is* the objection to any billionaire. Somebody mentioned JK Rowling. Perhaps she has an even stronger claim to the mantle of revealed preference than Swift, given that Scholastic is not even a major player in publishing. (Or wasn’t.) Personally I find her activities in funding lawsuits reprehensible. And I think it more important because more useful to object to the ability of wealth to intervene in the political system, (Simple torts may be argued not to be political in any meaningful sense I suppose but what Rowling does is.)
Given so much agreement with the OP it is merely garrulous to expand on the agreement this way? Perhaps.
But I must disagree that it is practical to meliorate the distortions to society by the political and legal and economic power of billionaires by clawing back the money after the damage is done. The experience of how all concessions wrought in catastrophe and war have been clawed back in the last ninety years in the US says no. Preventing billionaires from existing is social vaccination, more effective than aspirin for the fever.
MisterMr 09.03.26 at 5:25 pm
@John Q 5
It seems to me that in reality we are more or less in agreement, am I missing something?
Even if you are a GOOD you can become a Billionaire 09.03.26 at 7:37 pm
– and in times when the World seems to agree that you need to be something like trump (terribly bad and awful evil) the US truth about making lots of money by being evil has been successfully contradicted and no Tay Tay is NOT a criminal!
Chet Murthy 09.03.26 at 10:31 pm
First, I agree entirely with your OP, JQ. Entirely. But I thought I’d just note that while these artists might not slow down their -recording- and songwriting, there’s a decent case that they might not perform their shows. I’ve read that the physical regimen required to perform these shows is pretty grueling — both the training, and the experience of performing itself. So the Swifties (of whom I am -not- a member) might not get to see her perform.
engels 09.03.26 at 11:04 pm
I think there are lots of pairs of persons and jobs, such that P would do J for N millions but not for N hundred thousands.
I think many such jobs would be better done by others, or shouldn’t exist. I think music and other creative endeavours fall into the first category.
somebody who remembers the rest of the charts always exist 09.04.26 at 12:42 am
“ah, the american music industry. a true meritocracy! taylor swift, the album by taylor swift, surely was of greater artistic merit in 2006 than madeline peyroux’s half the perfect world (highest position on us charts: 33), ray lamontagne’s til the sun turns black (highest position on chart: 28), and wiz khalifa’s show and prove (did not chart, but rolling stone called him an artist to watch) surely taylor swift D E S E R V E D more for her creation than they did for theirs. that’s true because we currently have the best of all possible music industries, which perfectly matches sales to value, to the decimal point! please don’t look up how long the ub40 ‘can’t help falling in love with you’ cover was at number 1”
John Q 09.04.26 at 2:33 am
Somebody @15 True enough, but why single out America, or music, or even industry. Have popularity and creative merit been closely aligned anywhere, in any field of endeavour or in any economic system?
I’m very keen on utopian visions but even I can’t imagine a utopia in which the people you name have a bigger audience than Taylor Swift or her peers. And my objections would be unchanged if billionaire status were aligned with some measure of artistic merit.
John Q 09.04.26 at 2:38 am
Chet @ 13 A fair point, but having been a musical perfomer (in a very small way) and an academic conference presenting (for a living), presenting to a big live audience that likes you is the best kind of gruelling. The number of non-poor rockstars (and academics) still on the circuit at 80 supports this.
That said, I’m retiring at three-score and ten.
John Q 09.04.26 at 2:39 am
MrMister: we aren’t that far apart, but the fact the current system enriches lots of truly horrible people is a legitimate strike against it
Fraud Guy 09.04.26 at 6:37 am
Thought I recalled a quote from John Lennon talking about paying taxes, but I misremembered it. But his Rolling Stone interview from June 1975 does have a similar sentiment to what I remembered, which is he’s gonna pay the taxes (and that was in a much higher tax bracket period).
Somebody who remembers such poetry - 09.04.26 at 8:06 am
I stay out too late
Got nothin’ in my brain
That’s what people say, mm-mm
That’s what people say, mm-mm
I go on too many dates (Haha)
But I can’t make them stay
At least, that’s what people say, mm-mm
That’s what people say, mm-mm
But I keep cruisin’
Can’t stop, won’t stop movin’
It’s like I got this music in my mind
Sayin’, “It’s gonna be alright”
‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off
Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break
And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off –
David, a Bostonian in Tokyo 09.04.26 at 9:16 am
There’s a bit of irritating innumeracy happening here.
A 70% tax bracket for Taylor Swift would mean earning some multiple of 300 million rather than some multiple of one billion; as a successful accounant’s kid, I’d guess/hope she’d be fine with that. And that 70% bracket, presumably, wouldn’t be applying to folks making some small number of millions or even 10s of millions.
On John Lennon: as I remember reading, he was horrified at G. Harrison’s Taxman, but held his nose and helped Harrison with the tune because of his friendship with Harrison. So yes, he was a good guy.
While I personally have no interest in TS’s music (Rick Beato did a music theory analysis of it, and concluded it was seriously boring harmonically/musically), her schtick of speaking to young women who have or had partner problems is more than fine. As an aging child of the 60s, I don’t expect her to speak to me and write a modern equivalent to Luang Prabang*. But music should speak to it’s audience, and I don’t hear much contemporary music really doing that anywhere near to what Ms. Swift does. (I could be wrong here: argue with me.) There was a guy with headphones on at an event for fellow flaky foreigners here, and I asked him what he was listening to. He couldn’t articulate what music spoke to him, but he listened to music that didn’t speak to him all the time. Go figure.
*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8lypsvs3ls
David, a Bostonian in Tokyo 09.04.26 at 11:15 am
BREAKING NEWS!!!!!!!!!
Molly Tuttle is going after Taylor Swift’s demographic/schtick!!!
(Energetic new song she just put up. It’s lovely. (If you don’t get the wig jokes, read up on her.))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqVl0LmYxXU
Richard Melvin 09.04.26 at 1:21 pm
I’d say the core fact is that with 100 million in capital, an ultra-conservative 2% real rate of return gives you 2 million a year for doing nothing. A billion gets you 20 million a year. Which starts to get to be hard to actually spend, short of renting a private jet and circling the world 24/7.
That fact is a much bigger incentive to cut back on working hard than any plausible level of income tax could be. And in fact you see that 99% of the people who reach that level of wealth do so. Arguably, this applies to Taylor Swift’s closest competitor, Adele. Over abouyt the same length of career, Adele has released 4 albums, and done 3 major tours, compared to 16 and 6 for Swift.
Billionaires are the wierd exception to the normal human reaxtion to being able to get such massive amounts of money for doing nothing. They are the obsessives who keep on working, the subscribers to the much-vaunted Protestant work ethic. From what little I know of her biography, it seems pretty plausible that describes Taylor.
Hot take; the portestant work ethic is the reason capitalism kind of works better in the USA than it does elsewhere. In the USA, some rich people do choose to work voluntarily, despite all the rational eco0mic incentives to take it easy. In most other countries,the entire capitalist class are parasites that the rest of society has to work to support.
In the USA, it is merely most of them.
engels 09.04.26 at 3:52 pm
This is the house George Harrison moved to when his guitar stopped gently weeping about how much he’d paid in taxes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friar_Park
steven t johnson 09.04.26 at 3:54 pm
Richard Melvin@23 “Hot take; the protestant work ethic is the reason capitalism kind of works better in the USA than it does elsewhere.”
As I understand it, the Puritan ethic is as dead as the Spartan “ethic.” And the work ethic of slave holding Protestants at the time (which was, slaves should work hard,) had a great deal to do with accumulating wealth from tobacco, indigo, rice (later cotton,) that also had a great deal to with capitalist development. The premise that the US remained a protestant country relies more on mythologizing the Puritans as *the* American people. I don’t think it was true then. In addition to the presence of a sizable Roman Catholic (and in time Orthodox, Jewish, eventually Muslim) and the rise of new religions. I suppose you could argue that the Latter Day Saints are “protestant” but this is getting rather flexible.
I can’t see how one can even identify an ethic in such an extraordinarily diverse movement as the various denominations developing from the various national reformations and their subsequent missionary work.
Equally I can’t see how one can even identify a singular spirit of “capitalism” (considered as a phenomenon of individual psychology in particular.)
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism seem to me to be a striking candidate for both a Grand Narrative (albeit one purporting to look through the windows into men”s souls) *and* an untestable hypothesis. Max Weber strikes me as a good example of a (largely nineteenth century) figure who should be regarded as obsolete today, primarily of interest in the history of ideas.
steven t johnson 09.04.26 at 4:01 pm
PS I do read “capitalism sort of works” and “In the USA, merely most of them” as deliberate understatement verging on irony.
Arguing about a “hot take” is something like a ten best list, any enlightenment is better attained without too much heat instead.
somebody who knows what good Billionaires are good for - 09.04.26 at 8:03 pm
They are very good for keeping the Worlds Cultural Heritage alive – and even if George Harrison never was a Billionaire he was good enough to purchase one of these old English Estates -(with about 120 rooms) – nobody else than Millionaires or Billionaires can effort to keep. He bought the sprawling 120-room Victorian neo-Gothic mansion from the Salesian Sisters of St John Bosco when the property was in severe disrepair and facing potential demolition – and the good Millionaire restored it for Millions of Pounds –
So much for the economical use of very rich people –
equalitus 09.05.26 at 3:11 am
Taylor Swift might be a good billionaire because she doesn’t own a corporation that directly employs thousands of people. Why aren’t billionaires who only own stocks & bonds good billionaires? They don’t deny workers better wages, or medical insurance which government should provide to all national citizens. Most corporations are dictatorships.
Is Taylor Swift a good billionaire because she is the most popular American billionaire alive today?
Ingrid Robeyns 09.05.26 at 5:05 pm
I’m with J-D @7, that we should focus on the harms that holding extreme wealth can cause. It’s the perspective that the Extreme Wealth line project has taken, in arguing for a Extreme Wealth Line, just like we have a poverty line. So while there are moral differences between Taylor Swift and, say, a typical tech billionaire on other grounds, there is a certain power to do harm that comes from their level of wealth. What we do not know yet (and which the EWL project aims to find out) is at what levels of wealth concentration these different harms kick in, but surely well below 1 billion.
Ingrid Robeyns 09.05.26 at 5:10 pm
Also, fwiw, 2,5 years ago, I was in a debate with a libertarian political philosopher on the Question “Does Taylor Swift Deserve her Billion Dollar Fortune?”. I was, not surprisingly, arguing for the “No” position.
https://opentodebate.org/newsletter-does-taylor-swift-deserve-her-billion-dollar-fortune/
JPL 09.05.26 at 11:45 pm
Extreme concentrations of wealth controlled by a single individual or a small number of individuals are morally hazardous, especially given the fact that an adequate understanding of ethical principles is apparently beyond the abilities of at least half of humanity; in recognition of this fact, there should be limits placed on the accumulation of such concentrations. The amounts of money involved are well beyond what is necessary to live a flourishing life. Gaining wealth by crooked means and exploitation is wrong whether it’s a billion or any lower number; giving away excess wealth to people who might need it is admirable whatever the amount of the donor’s wealth. It’s the concentration of excessive wealth that is objectionable, because, since it is essentially equivalent to an accumulation of unchecked power, it is a potential source of the abuse of that power. The focus should be on the phenomenon of concentration of wealth, not on the deservedness or not of the participating individuals.
But I want to take underscoring the truism expressed by John Q @16 above, “Have popularity and creative merit been closely aligned anywhere, in any field of endeavour or in any economic system?” as an excuse to post some music as a remembrance of a singer who was loved by practically everybody who knew of her music, who passed away and went on to the next world at the ripe young age of 70 (!), leaving us all bereft. (I don’t think she was concerned with not having billions of dollars at her disposal and having to figure out how to dispose of it responsibly.) I’m talking about Cassandra Wilson. The song is a neglected gem composed by David Raksin and Johnny Mercer, “My love and I”, from 1954.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMIPyHywy0
Garrett Wollman 09.06.26 at 8:55 pm
Joining the discussion a bit late, but I wanted to pick on John’s reaction to Dolly’s 60 acres. In the US, “mansion zoning” is generally considered to be two acres per dwelling unit. Forty acres is a quarter-quarter section, west of the Appalachians, and was thought to be a reasonable amount of land for a farm in the 19th c., although if you fly over the middle of the US today you’ll see lots of farms that are most of a section (640 acres, 1 square mile). In the densely populated areas along the coasts, even the very rich live on much smaller plots of land; 8 dwelling units per acre is not uncommon for detached single-family houses.
Richard Melvin 09.07.26 at 9:38 am
Having mentioned Adele, it seems appropriate to remember that one of Count Binfaces’s joke policies was ‘nationalise Adele’.
Taken seriously, what would that mean? Presumably she gets paid an extravagant salary, with hefty profit incentives, by British Talent Ltd. And then all revenue in excess of that needed to fund that indefinitiely gets contributed to the treasury.
Bart Barry 09.07.26 at 9:32 pm
I’ve always thought of Buffet as a canny investor rather than a monopolist. Is there no difference?
J-D 09.09.26 at 12:12 pm
Conceptually, inequality can be reduced by taking money away from rich people or by giving money to poor people or both. The technical problems of figuring out the details of how to do either or both are of little account compared to the political obstacles to doing anything of the kind. I understand the appeal of the idea of deciding on a figure at which wealth should be capped, but effort putting into determining such a figure will be of no help in overcoming those political obstacles.
engels 09.09.26 at 7:17 pm
I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of billionaires (while capitalism continues).
Leaving aside whether billionaire-capitalism is already really something worse: “techno-feudalism” etc.
engels 09.09.26 at 7:28 pm
And yes they’re all evil, if nothing else because their failure to give their wealth away makes them each personally responsible for all the evils snd opportunity costs of their hoarding.
Taylor might not be first before the People’s Court but there are only a few thousand of them to get through. Justice will be swift and certain.
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