Salon: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

"No-one deserves to be a millionaire", says leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns. Should we put a hard limit on the amount of wealth one person can hoard? 

We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers, food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn’t change. Or at least, not immediately. 

Ingrid joins us for an eye-opening talk, exposing the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental, and psychological terms, she will show, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all – the rich included. 

She will offer a breathtakingly clear alternative to our current system: limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism – and the opportunity for a vastly better world – lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. It's one of the most critical public debates of our times. Join us.

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ABOUT

Ingrid Robeyns holds the Chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She works on issues in contemporary political philosophy and applied ethics. Much of her research in the last 20 years has been on the capability approach, social justice, or desirable institutional change. Her academic work has been supported by several grants, including the ERC Consolidator Grant that funded the Fair Limits Project and the highest personal research grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research 'Vici', with which Ingrid’s team is currently investigating the ethical and political-philosophical structure of visions for the future. She is also involved in other reserach projects, most prominently the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT). She holds master’s degrees in economics and philosophy, and obtained her PhD at Cambridge University under the supervision of Amartya Sen. Both in the Netherlands and Internationally, Ingrid Robeyns is a frequent commentator providing ethical/philosophical reflections on public affairs.