Ich fand die Überschrift bei ZEIT-Online ganz nett. Leider ist der Artikel hinter der Paywall:
Deshalb habe ich mal nach Ingrid Robeyns gesucht und auch zwei Beiträge bei TheGuardian gefunden:
Here’s a couple of good questions for an election year: while we may talk about minimum wages, why don’t we ever discuss maximum wages? And, while our politicians may argue about how little a family can survive on, why do they never address the other end of the inequality scale: just how much accumulated
Critics of Robeyn’s ideas tend to fall into two camps; she is either naive or a communist (or both). She insists she is neither and counters these arguments by making the case that placing an upper limit on earnings and wealth is not only ethical but also rational. In this argument she can not only cite the likes of Thomas Piketty, author of the bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, as a fellow traveller, but also philosophers of democracy going back to Plato (the latter argued that no cohesive society could ever be created if the richest citizens earned more than four times the wages of the poorest; last year, Jeff Bezos earned the average wage of one of his Amazon employees every nine seconds).wealth might be too much?
In 2022, Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, was ranked first in the billionaires list published by the US business magazine Forbes. Suppose you worked 50 hours a week between the ages of 20 and 65 – week in week out, year in year out – how much would your hourly wage need to be so that by the end you had amassed Musk’s wealth? The answer is: $1,871,794 per hour. Almost two million dollars per hour. Every working hour for 45 years.
Elon Musk might be seen as exceptional, but there were 2,668 other billionaires on that Forbes list. Together they held $12,700,000,000,000. Do you, like me, see all those zeros dancing before your eyes? That’s because we don’t know how to take in that number. On average the value of their assets is $4.75bn. If we ask the same question again – what’s the average lifetime hourly wage? – we get $40,598 per hour, the equivalent to what many Americans hope to earn in a year.