Is it fair that some people have more money than they can possibly spend while others are struggling to pay for essentials? It depends on what you mean by “fair”.

There’s never been a better time to be a billionaire. An Oxfam report released last week reveals that billionaires around the world have added a tidy $3.2 trillion to their wealth in 2024 alone. To put that in context: on average, each billionaire expanded their wallet by 3.2 million bucks every day over the last 12 months. That’s a tidy $400,000 an hour, or over 6,000 times the median hourly rate. 

If you believe that innovation and hard work ought to be well rewarded, you might not be perturbed by these numbers. Except that the Oxfam report found that around 60 percent of the wealth captured by billionaires didn’t come from their labour, but was handed to them via an inheritance, or was secured through cronyism, corruption or their ability to exert monopoly power. So, there’s also never been a better time to have ultra-rich parents, or to have enough power to tilt the playing field in your favour. 

Meanwhile, millions of hard-working people are struggling with cost-of-living pressures while their wages have stagnated. It’s probably no surprise that the phrase “every billionaire is a policy failure” – coined in another Oxfam report from 2023 – is having another surge in popularity. 

But is the existence of billionaires itself a bad thing? Or is the existence of poverty the real problem? Should we change the way our economy works to make it impossible for someone to accrue that much money and power? Should we spread some of that wealth around to people who didn’t happen to be born with wealth and privilege? 

These are not new questions. Ever since human societies started to accumulate wealth, inequality has been a hot topic for philosophers. But questions about inequality are fundamentally questions about fairness. The problem is that there are different ideas about what is fair. 

Just deserts

One way to think about fairness is in terms of what someone deserves. Intuitively, if someone is talented, works hard and produces things that other people want, then they ought to be rewarded for doing so. A society that operates this way is often called a “meritocracy”.  

This approach is often used to justify the vast wealth accrued by billionaires; presumably they’ve earnt their wealth because they’ve worked harder and smarter than most, and produced things that society wants or needs. And, on the flip side, many people assume that someone who’s living in poverty must be lazy or they made some dumb decisions, so they deserve their lot too. 

But things aren’t so simple. Is it talent that we’re rewarding? Or is it effort? Or one’s contribution to society? Because what someone deserve differs depending on which we focus on. 

If we focus on talent, then it’s clear that the world isn’t a level playing field. Some people are genetically endowed with higher intelligence, imagination or tenacity, or they’re born into a family that can afford a top-class education, all of which can give that person a huge boost to their talent. And, if they haven’t earnt any of those advantages, we might be reluctant to say they’ve earnt the disproportionate benefits that accrue because of them. 

If we focus on effort instead, then the harder someone works, the more they deserve in return for their labour. Setting aside the question of whether tenacity is to some degree genetic, by this logic, someone who works long hours doing two jobs – as do many people to make ends meet – ought to be paid more than someone who earns a passive income from huge investments or a trust fund, let alone the significant proportion who were just handed their fortune.  

Perhaps we should focus on contribution instead. Not all work is created equal. Some work only benefits the worker rather than society as a whole, and some is outright destructive or harmful. That brings us to the idea that people ought to be rewarded for what they offer society as a whole. No doubt, many billionaires own or head companies that produce things that people want. But is their personal contribution to society proportionate to the huge salaries they demand or the value of their share portfolio? Is a CEO really contributing more than hundreds of workers who actually produce the products and services? Many people would say no. 

There are also many people performing essential jobs, like nursing, teaching and aged care, who are paid a lot less than people who just shuffle stocks around or who produce things like cigarettes or fast food, which are known to cause harm. 

And there are plenty of people living in poverty who made all the right decisions in life but ended up unlucky. They’ve worked hard, taken risks – as all good entrepreneurs do too – and it just didn’t pay off, or they were struck by some illness or disability that prevented them from hitting the big time. 

Libertarianism

There is another avenue of argument that has been used to justify the wealth of billionaires: libertarianism. American philosopher Robert Nozick argued that people have a fundamental right to own and trade property, and as long as they do so according to principles of justice, then they can accumulate as much as they want. In fact, taking someone’s property away and giving it to someone else, such as through taxation and welfare spending, is unjust. 

Nozick’s argument harkens back to one offered by the English philosopher John Locke. Locke argued that raw natural resources, like land or minerals, start off belonging to no-one, and while they’re left idle, they’re worth nothing. But as soon as someone claims some natural resources (provided there’s still some left for others) and works or improves them to produce value, then they deserve to keep that value. 

The problem is whether those who have amassed great fortunes today actually acquired their original property justly.

If it turns out that the property or resources they are using to generate wealth were appropriated from others, such as through conquest or colonialism, or if others were not given the same opportunity to put a fence around their own bit of nature, then the billionaires have received an unjust and unfair advantage.  

Egalitarianism

If it’s the case that the world isn’t a level playing field, then perhaps we should focus less on what people currently have and do, and focus more on what they are owed as human beings. This brings us to egalitarianism. The most radical version states that every person, having fundamentally equal moral worth, has an equal right to share in what their society produces. According to this view, then everybody would have basically the same amount of wealth at all times.  

However, this might not feel satisfactory if it means that people get the same amount regardless of whether they work hard or not at all, or whether they contribute to society or just laze around the beach.  

Economists have also argued that a world where everyone has the same amount of stuff would be substantially less productive than a world where people are able to accumulate more resources and be rewarded for innovating and investing them efficiently. So, a world with perfect equality might see everyone living in poverty, while a world with some inequality might generate so much more wealth that everyone would, in principle, be better off. 

This has led to yet another approach, called the “difference principle”, which was advocated by the American political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls argued that we should allow some inequality, but only if those inequalities end up benefiting the least advantaged people in society. So, it doesn’t matter if a few people accrue billions, as long as it means that the poorest people also benefit to some degree. One might imagine Rawls saying: “every billionaire is a policy failure as long as there are people in poverty”. 

What’s fair?

No matter which way you think about fairness, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to justify the existence of billionaires in a world where millions of people are struggling to satisfy their basic needs.  

However, while our economic system is geared to generate the maximum possible wealth, if we leave it alone to do its thing, inequality is likely to continue to surge. The challenge of tempering inequality falls into the political sphere, with mechanisms like taxation and welfare spending being highly effective at spreading wealth and opportunity around.  

The problem is that those who are the beneficiaries of the current system – i.e. the billionaires – have a strong vested interested in preserving the status quo in order to maintain their wealth and lavish lifestyles. And it certainly helps their cause that wealth buys power and influence on the political level, as described in the Oxfam report. 

Even if we can solve the question of how best to distribute wealth in our society, which is no easy task, we are still faced by an even harder question of how to change the system to make it just. 

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