Respectable opinion once fretted about how to distinguish the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, as a prelude to compensating the former with pennies and consigning the latter to the workhouse. Today, as popular sentiment turns against the ultrarich, The Economist, via a 23 June article, has now turned its attention to the plight of the ‘deserving’ rich.
The title of the article (‘The Rise of the Deserving Rich’) is a play on the aforementioned distinction of the poor, while the ensuing ‘expert analysis’ is focused on persuading us that billionaires are entirely deserving of our gratitude, sympathy, and even protection. We are told that: “Today’s billionaires are more likely than yesterday’s to have made their own money”.
This dubious proposition, hardly otherwise worthy of interest, raises the (far more interesting) question of why the article was published at all. The authors cannot help us with this having decided, perhaps wisely, to withhold their identities. This is the house style of the Economist Magazine which presents the opinions of its writers as if they were economic truths, similar to anonymous religious scripture of old.
Every billionaire deserves love
Enlightenment is nonetheless forthcoming in the authors’ observation that “Billionaires have never exactly been popular, but today they are loathed”, a deeply unfortunate development that has apparently fed into the widespread (at least according to the authors) belief that “Every billionaire is a policy failure”.
The article therefore appears to have been written in response to growing opposition to the billionaire class including the fact that, as the authors note, US Democrat Party politicians are now three times more likely (than two years ago) to castigate billionaires in their donation-soliciting emails.
When the writers then suggest that the capping of donations to political parties is a preferable alternative to taxing the billionaires away, we are led to an equally interesting question: who is telling this story, and why? And perhaps, equally importantly: do the (anonymous) writers really believe what they are writing?
Sympathy for the plutocrat (Part One)
After a nod to the tiny number of female billionaires, unaccompanied by any acknowledgement of their critically endangered status, a few of the world’s richest male footballers are name-checked and wheeled out, via a familiar trope that encourages us to believe that Elon Musk’s ability to accumulate astronomical wealth is somehow comparable to the ability to kick a ball.
On the former, we are told that “Mr. [Elon] Musk is self-made, which is all well and good, but he has made no secret of his desire to sway elections, both in America and abroad”.
On the latter, we are not told that international footballers’ ‘compensation’ has relatively little to do with their talent alone and more to do with the fact that they happen to be playing at a moment when football has become more monetised, to an extent unprecedented in history. Had they been equally brilliant a century ago, they would have received peanuts. They are so rich today because of the TV deals, the size of the world audience, and the accountants.
Sympathy for the plutocrat (Part Two)
We are reassured that billionaire status is increasingly earned: whereas inherited wealth directly accounted for roughly half of all billionaire wealth in the early 2000s, this has apparently now changed, to the point where inheritance only accounts for a quarter of the class.
The authors then refer to their own (post-2001) categorisation of roughly 7000 billionaires and claim that “For the first time, half the wealth of the world’s billionaires is reasonably fairly earned”. Here the adverb “reasonably” is doing some heavy lifting, functioning to suggest that a mere billion is entirely ‘reasonable’ if it does not come from gambling, construction, defence, and/or mining. Such activities are apparently less reputable because they require “political access” and are, by virtue of this unfortunate fact, open to corruption (“It is hard to open a mine or a casino, for instance, without friends in the government.”)
In noting companies across the world have given shareholders average returns of 13% for over a little more than a decade the authors add that a great deal of the rise in billionaire wealth has come from unattached holdings (in companies they are not associated with).
However, this appears to reflect the falling concentration of billionaires in the USA and Europe, with enormous fortunes, corporate growth and rising asset values accumulating in other parts of the globe. As Asia becomes more economically important and the US and Europe fade into the background, the composition and geography of billionaire wealth is transforming.
Praise the dynasts
Under any reasonable definition of the word ‘made’, no-one makes, or indeed ever has made, the equivalent of a billion dollars.
Almost all billionaires have never got their hands dirty, with few able to program even the most basic software (including the applications used by their companies), let alone bolt together and wire even a small part of a machine.
Their ‘talents’ tend to lie elsewhere: bean-counting, dealmaking, self-promotion, and/or ruthlessness. Even the ‘self-made’ frequently benefitted from forms of substantial inherited wealth, elite educational credentials, security to take risks, and/or exclusive social connections that regular people lack.
Praising billionaires is a little like praising kings and queens of old or, going further back, the high priests, pharaohs and emperors that preceded them. They too were once worshipped and bestowed with elaborate narratives that, no matter how mad, bad, and/or incapable, elevated their greatness.
Billionaires are not a natural phenomenon
Interestingly, China, which has experienced one of the largest global increases in billionaires, is also one of the few countries where the government has actively sought to curtail billionaire wealth, as the authors acknowledge in alluding to Beijing’s crackdown on gambling (in Macao) that hurt some casino billionaires. They also note the fall in one Chinese property developer’s wealth (from $21bn in 2017 to around $4bn in today’s money).
This, perhaps, is why many Chinese billionaires have only recently tipped into the billionaire wealth bracket. Beijing is however unlikely to celebrate the concentration of wealth in its still-growing economy or the authors’ conclusion that “…a greater share of today’s billionaires spurs employment growth and productivity gains”. Still less is Beijing likely to be positively predisposed to the idea that this concentration of wealth “raises the economic cost of losing [billionaires]” if they “decide to move away, or work less hard, to avoid taxation”.
If the proposition that extraordinarily rich people help to explain productivity and/or the very existence of more jobs in some places, was not so earnestly and desperately peddled today, we would most likely laugh at it. The implication seems to be that democratic societies cannot clamp down on billionaire power. -However, the example of China suggests the opposite, namely that the very existence of billionaires is ultimately a political choice.
Stenographers for the ruling class
The Economist, founded 180 years ago by James Wilson, a banker and businessman, has always championed a particular economic worldview aimed at, and rooted within, particular (economic, social, and/or political) interests. Today, as economic liberalism faces renewed and energetic criticism, it is obliged to intervene on behalf of the rich.
The families who own the magazine enjoy billions of pounds of wealth. The Agnelli (worth more than $20bn) and Smith (around £7bn, held in the Smith Financial Corporation) families are the largest shareholders, with other very rich families, including the Cadburys and Schröders, also holding significant stakes.
Why would these (very rich) families sponsor and shape the direction of this magazine? This is one of the very few respects in which the article is actually enlightening: At a moment when the very rich are under increased public scrutiny, a tract in defence of billionaires suddenly manifests.
The oppressed billionaire class
For those with riches, arguments for greater economic equality can feel like oppression, occasioning concern they may be deemed undeserving and, as a result, consigned to the contemporary equivalent of a workhouse, where those deemed insufficiently well-behaved and industrious were once consigned.
Far from disdaining such sentiments as laughable, the article instead legitimizes them, and telling us that we should extend our gratitude, understanding, and, ultimately, continued subservience to the billionaire class.
The article also refuses to entertain the prospect that there may be a link between the increase in profit-making and the cost-of-living crisis that now confronts the great majority of people across the globe. Instead it offers a more palatable “affordability crisis” caused by “a few years of high inflation hitting living standards”.
At one point, in a rare moment of candidness/insight, the authors concede that democracy might function better with less billionaire influence, although without acknowledging that if democracy did function better, there would be no billionaires, not least because no compelling case can be made for so much wealth nor power over the lives of others. Apparently finding little to acclaim in actual democracy, the authors reserve their praise for the money hoarders who ‘keep the modern world turning’.
An (inadvertent) treatise for equality?
The idea that extraordinary talent deserves extraordinary compensation is our modern-day justification for an increasingly thread-bare myth about inequality. There have always been those who possess vastly more money than others, necessitating a legitimising narrative/myth that will help to sustain inequality.
Societies create positions that must be filled by figureheads, who are mainly interesting when they begin to lose their shine, as supporting edifices fall away. This is when change is coming and society begins to evolve into something new. The very rich become much richer when the rest of us are less/less effectively well organised.
Ultimately, the article’s shrill pleading for special treatment serves only to demonstrate how weak the arguments in support of this action actually are.
This piece was adapted from an article first published in ‘Jacobin Magazine’, 31 July 2026
Comments? We want to hear them. Please write to editor@westenglandbylines.co.uk
Bylines Network Gazette is out!
The latest Bylines Network Gazette is out now. Become a Friend of Bylines Network or upgrade to a paid Substack subscription, and you will get access to a vital collection of citizen articles and stories.
Journalism by the people, for the people.
