Can we afford the super-rich?

我们负担得起超级富豪吗?

LSE IQ podcast

教育

2020-09-01

35 分钟
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Contributor(s): Paul Krugman, Andy Summers, Dr Luna Glucksberg | The coronavirus crisis has devastated economies and brought existing inequalities into sharper focus. Will it result in higher taxes on income and wealth, as we saw after the Great Depression and WWII? Or will the top 1 per cent continue to pull away from the rest of society? Exploring the question, ‘Can we afford the super-rich?’, Joanna Bale talks to Paul Krugman, Andy Summers and Luna Glucksberg. Research links: Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman. Capital Gains and UK Inequality by Arun Advani and Andy Summers. A gendered ethnography of elites by Luna Glucksberg.
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  • It's an output measure that if you look at the financial success of Amazon and the stock, I own 16% of Amazon.

  • Amazon's worth roughly a trillion dollars.

  • That means that what we have built over 20 years, we have built 840 billion dollars of wealth for other people.

  • And that's great.

  • That's how it should be.

  • You know,

  • I believe so powerfully in the ability of entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets to solve so many of the world's problems.

  • Not all of them, but so many of them.

  • The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is the world's richest person.

  • He has seen his fortune swell by 75 billion dollars so far this year to a record 189 billion dollars due to the COVID-19 pandemic's online shopping boom.

  • Bezos insists that free markets help to solve many of the world's problems.

  • But as his wealth and that of many other billionaires continues to grow,

  • millions of people have been thrown out of work and,

  • according to the World Bank, almost half of humanity is living on less than $5.50 a day.

  • Welcome to LSEIQ.

  • I'm Joanna Bale and this is the podcast where we are social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question.

  • In this episode, I ask, can we afford the super-rich?

  • As COVID-19 strikes the world, millionaires like us have a critical role to play in healing our world.

  • No, we're not the ones caring for the sick and intensive care wards.

  • We're not driving the ambulances that will bring the ill to hospitals.