Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Billionaires and Everyone Else

Will Wilkinson, former libertarian and now a professed "centrist," goes after Democrats who think the mere existence of billionaires is a sign of something very wrong with a country. Wilkinson compares a country's rank on the Human Development Index, a generally left-leaning assessment, with the number of billionaires per capita, and he finds that six countries have both higher HDI ranks and more billionaires than the US:


Human Development
Index rank
Billionaires
per capita rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
17
19
20
Norway
Switzerland
Australia
Ireland
Germany
Iceland
Hong Kong
Sweden
Singapore
Netherlands
Denmark
Canada
United States
Britain
Finland
New Zealand
Liechtenstein
Belgium
Japan
Austria
8
4
13
11
12
7
2
6
5
27
16
15
10
19
14
31
1
44
41
18
Personally I would be happy to run up taxes on the rich and redistribute some of their money to the poor, but I am as uncomfortable as Wilkinson with some of the "eat the rich" rhetoric coming from the American left these days. The countries on the list above are good places to live in large part because they try to follow their own rules and treat everyone decently. All people in these societies have rights, including rich people. I think inequality is a threat to our democracies but it might be true that anger is a worse one, and that always needs to be guarded against.

All the best places in the world to live have mixed economies with a large element of capitalism. There are no socialist nations anywhere near as nice. Under capitalism, some people get really rich. You may not like it, but that just seems to be how things are at this stage of technological and social development.
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 27, 2019 at 2:08 PM

    "that just seems to be how things are at this stage of technological and social development"

    And you claim to have spent your career as an innovator and educator of some sort?

    You and David Brooks need to take a cabana somewhere together. Vulture capitalism thrives because it never runs short of unpaid, unthinking apologists.

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  2. Mário R. GonçalvesFebruary 27, 2019 at 3:19 PM

    I couldn't agree more, John. Capitalism lives beacause it is the model of society that most people still prefer. I suppose that's democracy. Switzerland, or Austria, or Norway, that's my idea of a welfare and well-being society where I'd like to live.

    Myself, I'd call "vulture", instead, those predator birds of death who 'sing' socialism, or bolivarism, or guevarism, or jihad, or other dark songs of evil to haunt our lives.

    Capitalism = BOAPW, TINA. That said, a savage or wild capitalism is as bad as any socialism.

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