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One of the most puzzling aspects of life in our era of globalisation and rapid technological change is the feeling that everything is changing, alongside a widespread conviction that nothing can be changed.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that our global economic system has been transformed beyond recognition in the lifetimes of anyone over 50, alongside the belief that the current system is immutable, based on truths of human nature and laws of economics beyond human control. These contradictory stances create widespread resignation among many, combined with an upsurge in support among others for razing the system to its foundations.
One means of rectifying this untenable situation is to try to gain a widespread understanding of what is happening in the hope that it might. lead to sufficient consensus on ways to ameliorate the mounting damage that our current economic system is wreaking.
One of the places to start, of course, is books. To paraphrase the Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy, the everyday news can only give us a snapshot of events. Books, on the other hand, can give us a wider frame that allows us to make meaning from the relentless snapshots of reality that assail us daily.
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Enough: Why It’s Time to Abolish the Super-Rich by Luke Hildyard, and Technocapitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barons and the Fight for the Common Good by Loretta Napoleoni both aim to provide this wider frame.
The juxtaposition of collapsing public services and widespread hardship, alongside the accumulation of vast riches by a tiny number of super rich, is Hildyard’s focus in Enough. Hildyard cites, for example, the impacts of austerity in the UK following the 2008 financial crisis, from which the super-rich benefited enormously. Cuts to public services and social security coincided with 335,000 excess deaths in 2010-2018 and have resulted in about 250,000 more UK children living in poverty.
Hildyard estimates that there are 3,500 bankers in the UK who are each paid more than €1 million annually. Billionaire wealth is on another scale. The American billionaire class, which comprises about 735 individuals, has a combined wealth of $4.5 trillion. This is greater than all the household wealth of entire countries, including, for example, Russia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or Sweden.
[ Richest 10% of Irish households have almost half of all wealth ]
Enough is both a passionate repudiation of the idea that such disparities should be seen as either normal or acceptable, and an evidence-based manifesto for change.
While Hildyard clearly lays out the economic arguments for redistribution of excess wealth, it is the practical and moral arguments he makes that stand out. The money that the super-rich have accumulated is urgently needed to address existential crises such as climate change and environmental destruction, and to reverse decades of underinvestment in infrastructure and public services.
Hildyard’s moral arguments expose searing injustices. How can one individual justify their wealth as being equal to that of the 274 million people of Indonesia? How can a single banker justify earnings that exceed the combined earnings of dozens of healthcare workers whose work is harder, exposes them to greater risks and who contribute in more meaningful ways to society?
Hildyard presses home this point of social utility by showing that it is easy to find instances of highly-paid professionals who are actively harming society. Research by the Schroders investment fund, for example, estimates that about a third of the world’s biggest companies would no longer be profitable if they bore the costs of the social and environmental problems that emerge as byproducts of their business. Looking at the UK rich list, the top 20 billionaires include seven individuals whose fortune results wholly or in part from assets in the oil, gas and petrochemicals industries that are worsening climate change.
Despite the economic and moral arguments he makes, Hildyard acknowledges that capture of the state by the super-rich is a big obstacle to reform. Trenchant opposition to sharing incomes and wealth more evenly is core to the identity of the modern Conservative Party in the UK. In the United States the notion of mitigating inequality or rebalancing income and wealth is eviscerated as an enemy ideology – “socialism” or “Marxism” – designed to destroy the US.
In Technocapitalism Napoleoni offers a complementary analysis by focusing on the tech industry. The concentration of wealth and power in a small number of tech giants now affords a handful of individuals the ability to determine which technologies are being developed and for what purpose. For the most part, Napoleoni argues, technological development is now driven by the twin forces of narcissism and profit, rather than the public good.
Technocapitalism echoes Hildyard’s argument in Enough that the wealth of the super-rich has been enabled by the state. As a result of the bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis, the financial sector had sufficient funds to invest in new high-earning ventures, and the tech sector offered them. By the end of 2009 a large proportion of the bailout funds were flowing towards Silicon Valley, helping to create a global tech oligopoly comprising a handful of mostly US firms. During the pandemic, for example, with a market capitalisation of more than $4 trillion, the five largest US tech companies – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft – outperformed the GDP of Germany, the fourth-largest economy in the world.
Having amassed huge fortunes, the owners of some of these companies have become big players in space. So-called “space barons” Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Richard Branson dream of building space colonies and terraforming Mars. For some, their control of satellite technology is enabling them to acquire dangerous and unprecedented levels of power. Musk’s Starlink satellite network, for example, has become an integral part of Ukraine’s military and civil response to Russia’s invasion.
The reality that some people in our grossly unequal world have more money than they know what to do with is strongly reinforced by Napoleoni’s description of emerging technologies. A substantial part of Technocapitalism is devoted to a description of blockchain technology and the applications it is enabling in terms of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens. For the uninitiated, Napoleoni’s explanations are clear and accessible. They magnify incredulity that excess wealth is being wasted in such meaningless ways.
Technocapitalism tells of the “sale” in 2021 of digital artist Beeple’s online collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days, for $69.3 million. Everydays was sold as a non-fungible token or NFT, which is a cyber certificate of authenticity. Everydays is still available for everyone to see online. The purchaser, Vignesh Sundaresan, a Singapore-based entrepreneur, paid $69.3 million for a certification to prove that he, and he alone, “owns” the original digital work of art. The motivation for such a purchase is twofold. First, as a source of possible future profit, if demand for “ownership” of online art increases, and second, pride in holding the NFT and the ability to show off “ownership”.
[ The slightly rich pay their taxes these days, but what about the super rich? ]
Variations on such digital ownership are multiplying. In 2017 the Vancouver-based company Axiom Zen launched the first blockchain virtual gaming hit CryptoKitties. This allows players to buy NFTs that certify their ownership of virtual cats, which they can then breed and trade as “furrever friends’=”. Ownership of single CrytpoKittie images have changed hands for up to $170,000. Bored Ape Yacht Club similarly offers ownership of digital images, this time of uninterested looking apes, through purchase of a corresponding NFT. In September 2021 a single Bored Ape image was sold for cryptocurrency equivalent to $2.9 million. As Napoleoni explains, Bored Ape images are particularly popular among celebrities who can easily afford $1 million-$2 million on a digital drawing of a fed-up primate to use as their picture on social media. Justin Bieber reportedly paid $1.3 million for his, and Madonna $466,000 for hers, before losing most of their money as prices plummeted.
Amid such madness, where lies wisdom? Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus categorised human desires on a spectrum between what he called necessary desires and corrosive desires. Necessary desires, he said, are those for food, shelter, clothing and medicine, as well as for friendship and love. Corrosive desires include cravings for status, wealth and power. The wealth required to satisfy our necessary desires is limited and easy to attain, Epicurus advised, but the wealth required to satisfy corrosive desires extends to infinity.
Above a certain level of income and wealth, further increases have marginal impacts on wellbeing and financial security, and money becomes an expression of narcissistic excess. Enough and Technocapitalism both make the case that our admiration for, and tolerance of, such excessive narcissism comes at a price we can no longer afford to pay.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy
Further reading
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (Basic Books, 2023) by Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu is a powerful critique of the dominant technology-equals-progress narrative. This study of the past millennium of technological change argues that technological revolutions, whether agricultural, industrial, or digital, have all too often benefited the rich.
Hype Machine: How Greed, Fraud and Free Money Crashed Crypto (Heligo Books, 2024) by Financial Times journalist Joshua Oliver looks behind the hype of the cryptocurrency mania at deep-rooted problems that are enabling massive fraud and allowing the rich to get richer at a cost to everyone else.
Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State (Verso Books, 2023) by Danny Dorling documents the devastating consequences of the decades-long pursuit of growth-without-redistribution in the UK, which, in Dorling’s words, is leading it to become a second-world country on the fringe of Europe.
Emily Austin’s Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life (Oxford University Press, 2023) is essential reading for those seeking escape from the meaningless materialism and joyless urgency of our grossly unequal technocapitalist world.
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