Recently Published Book Spotlight: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

Ingrid Robeyns is Professor of Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University’s Ethics Institute. Her research spans political philosophy and applied ethics, with a particular focus on justice, inequality, human wellbeing, and economic institutions. She is the author of Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice and her latest book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, which examines the ethical and political case for limiting extreme wealth. In this Book Spotlight, Robeyns discusses Limitarianism, the problems associated with extreme concentrations of wealth, and what a more just economic system might look like.

What is your work about?

My book Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth explains what is wrong with extreme wealth concentration. It is written for a broad audience; hence, it is a work of “public philosophy.” But it builds on my earlier papers in the 2017 NOMOS volume on Wealth, an exchange in The Journal of Political Philosophy, work by other political philosophers who have written on limitarianism, as well as some interdisciplinary work I did on these questions. It also builds on the work political philosophers have been doing for decades on inequality, as well as work from other disciplines on the harms of wealth concentration, and the unjust nature of the current economic system, globally and domestically.

How does it fit in with your larger research project?

In the post-Rawlsian literature on theories of distributive justice, or egalitarian theories, there have been many contributions at a highly abstract level, and many more applied and interdisciplinary contributions on the bottom of the income distribution—the poor and deprived. I’ve tried to shift the focus to the upper tail of the wealth distribution, in a more applied and empirically informed way. That analysis seems to be touching a nerve with the wider public, since the book has been published in nine languages so far, with five more following next year.

I have broad research interests in political philosophy and applied ethics, and also do quite a bit of inter- and transdisciplinary work. Over time, I have become increasingly interested in studying problems and how they can be understood and solved, rather than in a precise understanding of existing theories, their various interpretations, and what makes one view distinct from another. In my PhD dissertation and subsequent years, I did a lot of work on the capability approach. I wasn’t satisfied with Martha Nussbaum’s account in her book Creating Capabilities, which theorized the capability approach as consisting of two strands of work: on the one hand, the capability-based theories of justice as in her work, and on the other hand, quality-of-life assessments as in the work of Amartya Sen. This couldn’t be true since much valuable work done by capability scholars didn’t fit this dichotomy. I worked for many years on a generalization of the capability approach, which would include all its aspects. That has resulted in my 2017 book Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice. But I also worked on many other aspects of social and distributive justice—applied, abstract, interpreting main theorists, and developing methodological contributions. For me, almost all the work I’ve done in my professional life has had something to do with justice.

Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?

One chapter in Limitarianism argues that no one deserves to be extremely wealthy, since too many factors influencing our opportunities to generate material success are due to luck and therefore beyond our control. There is John Rawls’ national lottery—you didn’t create yourself, and thus your innate talents are not yours in a relevant sense to make a claim based on desert. Moreover, our ability to put in effort is also to a large extent a matter of luck. There is the huge influence of one’s social background—also a matter of luck since we don’t pick our parents, or the social class in which we are born. There is also what economists have called “market luck”—the notion that luck plays a small but nevertheless pivotal part in our success on the market. Yet I am not ready to embrace something akin to full determinism; if I read them correctly, the political theorist T. Malleson in their fantastic book Against Inequality takes that position. I still think we have room to choose among the options open to us in life, even though those choices are unmistakably made against vastly unequal backgrounds. But that position is strongly at odds with how we have organized society, which is deeply meritocratic, both for the multimillionaires, as well as for those who are living in the gutter.

Now, what does all of that have to do with my personal life? In Limitarianism, I build the argument based on empirical evidence from a variety of disciplines. But it also resonates with how I experience my personal life. I have both hugely successful as well as very vulnerable people in my life, and if one knows these individuals well, one sees how deeply unequal their chances in life have been, because of how the dice rolled for them. This implies that the right attitude for successful people should be “sharing and caring,” yet that’s sadly not what we are often seeing. 

What directions would you like to take your work in the future?

In the book, I defended the claim that a good and just society should impose limits on how much wealth a person can have. But clearly that’s only one desideratum. I think there is a lot of good work in political philosophy (and other disciplines) arguing what those other desiderata should be—such as meeting everyone’s basic needs, bringing our global economy back within planetary boundaries, protecting human rights, minimizing alienation and domination, and creating or redesigning institutions such that they are above all just, although it’s also desirable that those institutions are efficient in the sense of not being wasteful. The big question is which economic system best meets those desiderata. There seems to be a revival of scholarship in political philosophy on economic systems, and I hope to contribute more to that debate in the near future. I’m currently directing a project called “Visions for the Future” that aims to make philosophical contributions on these questions.

How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?

When I wrote this book in 2022 and 2023, it was probably not a widely shared view that we should ask whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, that people hold hundreds of millions, or even hundreds of billions of dollars (or pounds or euros). Sadly, recent events in the world have made it pretty clear that we need to ask those questions—just think of the image of the men (and two of their wives) who were sitting in the front row when Trump was inaugurated. Plato already warned that democracy cannot go together with wealth differences that are too large. So the first way my book is relevant is that it helps inform the societal debate on the harms of wealth concentration. Several readers have written that they had a nagging feeling something was wrong with wealth concentration, but they couldn’t express what exactly, and that the book helped by providing arguments for their intuitions.

In more practical terms, my book has led the UK Patriotic Millionaires to take the lead in putting together a transdisciplinary group of scholars (colleagues at the LSE and myself) as well as civil society organizations (Oxfam, the New Economics Foundation, and the Good Ancestor Movement) to launch the Extreme Wealth Line Initiative. This project aims to develop a methodologically sound extreme wealth line as a social indicator, which we hope will eventually be endorsed globally, just as we have an extreme poverty line. But it requires economists to accept that wealth can be harmful, rather than just a resource that can be used to generate welfare. It would also require a shift from evaluating taxation designs in terms of their revenue-generating potential and distortive behavioral effects to the reduction of harms that taxation can lead to. Some economists use those concepts, such as those from the World Inequality Lab in Paris, but they are probably a minority.

What advice do you have for others seeking to produce such a work?

When writing for a broader audience, most professional philosophers will have to take a big leap in their writing styles. In the end, whatever one writes, one always has to keep the audience or readers in mind. And that readership is radically different if one writes for “all citizens” versus “my peers in academic political philosophy.” It is almost as if one has to start from scratch in developing another writing style, since it doesn’t work to just “simplify” one’s academic writing style.

Another thing I learned is that the academic publishing world, and the so-called “trade” publishing world, are very different. In academia, the main question is how a work contributes to scholarship, or whether it will be widely adopted for courses—although it seems very likely that undesirable biases such as one’s pedigree also influence one’s chances at publishing a book. In trade publishing, the decision whether to offer a contract is made on very different grounds. Serious trade publishers will of course want something that is solid, but they will also want something that will appeal to a wide range of readers, that doesn’t require too much background knowledge, and that above all is written in a style that is so engaging that one wants to keep on reading. Despite that, my academic work has always been pretty accessible and not excessively technical; it was nevertheless a steep learning curve for me. For example, I was told repeatedly by my editor to bring in more narratives, and some non-academic readers who read my book still felt that it was “difficult.” Whereas by academic standards, this is a very easy-to-read book!

I have more advice, but since I wrote a long blog post on this on Crooked Timber, I’d better not repeat all of it here.

What writing tips do you have?

Finding time to write is hard, because academia is a time-greedy beast—there is always work that needs to be done. I doubt whether, if I hadn’t enjoyed a sabbatical, I would have been able to write Limitarianism. I published another blog post on how to make sure the writing gets done, which I should probably reread myself, since I’m now trying to write a new trade book without having a sabbatical. I find the challenge of giving priority to working on the book over tasks that either involve others (students, colleagues) or that can be done in a few hours the hardest thing—but teaming up with a writing buddy who will hold you accountable is probably the best strategy. Also, go to a place where other people in the room discipline you—whether that is a café or the public library.