Billionaires Row
3 years, 1 month, 10 days, 2 hours
12 June 2026
Growth which destroys our planet is growth none of us should want.
‘At the end of the day we’ll have to come to this kind of cooperative redistribution of resources and power because the alternative will simply lead to disastrous outcomes both on the environment, on the climate, but also on social grounds.’
Thomas Piketty, whose book Equality I covered last year in the blog on my website Winner Takes it All, was quoted in The Guardian newspaper on 4 June, on the launch of the Global Justice Report to which he contributed.
I strongly recommend reading at least the summary, which is only 20 pages. It is a breathtaking, if utopian, recipe for a future world that provides sustainable quality of life for everyone, everywhere. It encompasses most of the big geopolitical challenges that I write about, including climate change, nature degradation and global inequality, and attempts to resolve them with a single blueprint.
Striking elements of the envisaged outcomes include a halving in the average time we will spend working, redistribution of 10 percent of the world’s GDP annually, to support poorer countries, and a radical redistribution of wealth which lifts the share of the poorest from 2 percent to 30 percent and wipes out the “Billionaire Class”. The latter I strongly support - see the graph below from the report which illustrates so clearly how we are nearly back to the levels of inequality of the Victorian era, when a tiny number of the super-rich owned and controlled almost everything.
But there is one disappointment for me in the report. One glaring gap. It is practically silent on the role of businesses. And it therefore plays straight into the argument of the leader article in this week’s The Economist, ’The rise of Gen-Z socialism’, which talks of a ‘zero-sum mindset’ where ’spending can be paid for by the richest’ and ‘growth does little to help ordinary people’.
On balance my sympathies still lie with the arguments of the Global Justice Report. Growth which destroys our planet with carbon emissions, fuels consumerism, and creates more billionaires who, like Elon Musk, use their money to incite hatred and intolerance, is growth none of us should want. But we do want businesses, for local employment, for innovation in medicine and science, for rapid roll-out of renewables, and a million other things that bring quality of life and no national or global government will ever do well.
So that chapter of the Global Justice Report is still to be written. Perhaps that should be my next job.
The Rise and Fall of the Billionaire Class
Image credit: Fig 15. The Global Justice Report. Global Justice Project