We used to think the rich had a social function. What are they good for now?
Around the start of the twenty-first century, the Oxford sociologist
Jonathan Gershuny noticed a change in the way the privileged behaved:
the leisure class that the economist Thorstein Veblen had described
during the Gilded Age seemed no longer to exist. The farther up people
were on the income ladder, the harder they worked. “Busyness,” Gershuny
concluded, was “the badge of honor for the new superordinate working
class.” These days, even the highest-profile billionaires tend to be a
little grim-faced. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos—they practice judo
throws, but do they ever smile? Recently, the Wall Street Journal
reported on the minting of a new mega-billionaire, the
eighty-six-year-old Texas wildcatter Autry Stephens, who, in February,
sold his company and its meticulously assembled Permian drilling rights
for twenty-six billion dollars. Stephens had driven to his office every
day for forty-five years, lately in an old Toyota Land Cruiser. Was he
looking forward to enjoying his extraordinary gains? Not really—he would
miss the grind. “There is certainly some sadness on my part,” Stephens
said.
Why work this hard? Doesn’t a life of ease
beckon? Aren’t there polo ponies to raise? The traditional rationale is
to provide comforts to those you love. “Familia, id est substantia,”
the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century southern-European jurists
argued—in other words, the family is the patrimony. But, at Stephens’s
level, the logic dissolves. No family needs the twenty-sixth billion. In
the early twentieth century, the Texas oil tycoon Haroldson L. Hunt,
then one of the richest men in the world, remarked that, “for practical
purposes, someone who has $200,000 a year is as well off as I am.” As he
explained, “Money’s just a way of keeping score. It’s the game that
matters.”
That game—the competition among
the ultra-wealthy for influence, legacy, and fortune—came to seem
somewhat more sinister after the Great Recession steepened social
inequality. Following the lead of Thomas Piketty, whose “Capital in the
Twenty-first Century” was published in 2013, some like-minded scholars
probed the distant past, seeking to learn how deeply ingrained
inequality had been in societies dissimilar to our own. “As Gods Among
Men: A History of the Rich in the West” (Princeton), a new book by the
Italian historian Guido Alfani, shares these scholars’ political
perspective and their emphasis on the extremely long arc. But Alfani is
interested less in the patterns of inequality than in the assemblage,
use, and justification of great fortunes. The anxieties about extreme
wealth which have recently shaped public debate—regarding its influence
on politics, the way it tests the reach of states, and the ethics of
philanthropy and private investment—turn out to be extraordinarily old.
The rich have confused the rest of us from the beginning. When, in
northern Italy on the cusp of the Renaissance, something like the modern
mogul emerged (urban, financial, ostensibly meritocratic), many members
of society were “troubled by the very existence of the rich,” Alfani
writes. “Indeed, it would not be too far-fetched to state they did not
know precisely what to do with them.”
In the more recent past, the super-rich
themselves often dealt with the social problems of wealth simply by
declining to discuss them. “The only time a whale gets harpooned is when
he surfaces,” the reticent billionaire investor David Gottesman told
the Times a decade ago. But lately whales have been surfacing
everywhere. This past winter alone, the plutocrats Marc Rowan and Bill
Ackman campaigned very publicly to remove the presidents of Penn and
Harvard, and the investor Jeffrey Yass sought to have the Republican
Party reverse itself on the sale of TikTok, in which he had a stake. The
defining billionaire of the moment is Elon Musk, not just because of
his trolling presence on social media but because of his salvific
ambitions. Projects such as Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency and
effective-altruism initiatives, and Sam Altman’s simultaneous warnings
about and development of artificial intelligence, carry with them a
similar imprint; for-profit maneuvers are described in the language of
an encompassing idealism, as if those people in charge were envisioning
not Q3 returns but the future of humanity itself.
As
revelations of inequality have kept a spotlight on the wealthy, some of
them, notably the heiress and philanthropist Abigail Disney, have
argued for greater public giving. “It’s taxes or pitchforks,” a worried
coalition wrote in an open letter released as the World Economic Forum
convened in Davos in 2022. Those are the liberals; the more audible
reaction has been a bristling insistence that the super-rich deserve
their outsized fortune. “Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition,
anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness,” Marc Andreessen wrote
in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” widely applauded in Silicon Valley
last fall. Speaking before the global élite at Davos this January,
Javier Milei, the libertarian President of Argentina, declared, “Let no
one tell you your ambition is immoral. . . . You are social benefactors.
You are heroes.” Musk himself tweeted an enthusiastic reply by way of a
meme: a man having sex with an attractive woman stares at a laptop
screen on which Milei is speaking.
Critics of the ultra-wealthy have tended to
describe them with analogies from the animal kingdom—pigs at a trough,
vampire squid. Alfani offers a gentler comparison. “They are like the
pearl in the oyster: shiny indeed, and produced by the living body of
the oyster, but at the same time somewhat extraneous to the organism,”
he writes. The question that animates his book also haunts our politics:
What, exactly, do we want the rich to do, and how do we want them to
be?
In
the beginning, the job was to plunder and protect. Wealth lay in land,
and in medieval Europe one amassed and held land by force of arms. In
1066, a Breton nobleman named Alan Rufus crossed the English Channel
with his second cousin William the Conqueror, whose left flank he’d
helped hold in a crucial battle. For this, he was granted a broad
portfolio of lands in Cambridgeshire, many of which had belonged to the
vanquished queen Edith the Fair. “But that was just the beginning of
Rufus’ path to immense wealth,” Alfani writes. Soon, there was a
rebellion in York, and Rufus was summoned to help suppress it, which he
did in a brutal campaign that is thought to have killed as many as a
hundred thousand people. The territories given to him grew and grew,
until, Alfani reports, their net revenue may have exceeded seven per
cent of England’s. No Englishman has ever again controlled such a large
share.
Within a couple of hundred years,
however, the richest Europeans were increasingly emerging not from real
estate but from commerce and finance. The epicenter was northern Italy,
where the traders of the so-called commercial revolution had followed
old Roman caravan routes into the Middle East, returning to Genoa,
Ragusa, and Pisa laden with goods, and where innovative Italian bankers
had developed double-entry bookkeeping, letters of credit, and bills of
exchange, in part to help manage papal taxes flowing from across
Christendom to the Vatican. When the English Crown fought the Hundred
Years’ War, it did so on credit extended by two Florentine family banks.
When the Hapsburgs wanted to unify their empire, they contracted with
Francesco Tasso of Bergamo to create a postal service; by the early
sixteenth century, a package sent from Brussels could reach Innsbruck in
five days.
These changes aroused the philosophers. Theologians emphasized the unnaturalness of finance: “Nummus non parit nummos,” Thomas Aquinas insisted—money does not generate money. “As they approached their deathbeds, usury was not a but the
sin on the minds of the wealthy,” Tim Parks wrote in “Medici Money”
(2006). Objections to the source of banking fortunes were intertwined
with concerns about their scale. Nicole Oresme, an adviser to Charles V
of France, argued, in the thirteen-seventies, that the rich ought to be
banished to preserve the social balance in democratically governed
cities: “The superabundantes are so unequal and exceed and
overcome the others regarding their political power so much that it is
reasonable to think that they are among the others as God is among men.”
In the letters that the Renaissance wealthy wrote one another, there
are traces of anxiety that both God and the public might disapprove of
what they are doing. An associate of the fantastically rich Florentine
merchant Francesco Datini warns him against opening a bank, arguing that
he will be disdained even if he leaves the bulk of his fortune to found
a hospital for the poor, and that he will lose his buona fama—his good name.
The
hinge figure in Alfani’s history is Cosimo de’ Medici, who offered one
solution to the problem of the rich. The Rome branch of the Banco de
Medici already held the Vatican’s deposits when Cosimo took over the
bank, in 1420, and he lent cautiously, married strategically, and
expanded relentlessly. Parks writes, “Nothing in the history books gives
us the sense of the man’s ever having been young.” In time, Cosimo
antagonized the Florentine landowning dynasty headed by Rinaldo degli
Albizzi, in part because of Cosimo’s financial ties to rival Italian
republics. When Cosimo opposed a war with the state of Lucca, which the
Albizzi family had pushed for, Rinaldo angled to have Cosimo imprisoned
and charged with treason, punishable by death, in 1433. Cosimo managed
to have his sentence commuted to exile, and took his banking operations
and his favorite architect, Michelozzo, to Venice, giving the city a
monastery with a new library and building for himself a spectacular
palazzo. Within a year, the Albizzi war proved disastrous, and Florence
was in financial ruin. It was a good time to have a phenomenal amount of
cash. Cosimo agreed to pay off the Florentine war debt, and, as Niccolò
Machiavelli wrote a century later, he was “hailed as the benefactor of
the people and the father of his country.”
During
the next thirty years, Cosimo schemed and maneuvered, holding power,
deflecting allegations that he was a sponsor of sodomites, and beheading
his political enemies (including two cousins of Machiavelli’s father).
But he also endowed: he sponsored the Council of Florence, in 1438, to
reconcile the Roman and Byzantine Churches, and he built the Platonic
Academy and the Medici Library, likely the first public library in
Renaissance Europe. Among his public-relations agents was the Tuscan
scholar Poggio Bracciolini, once his tutor, whose view of the two roles
the rich could play matched Cosimo’s example. They could beautify the
city through philanthropy, Poggio wrote, and they could supply “barns of
money” to rescue it from a crisis. With their “abundant means to aid
the sick, the weak, to benefit many in their needs,” the rich were the
“nervous system of the city.” You couldn’t function without them.
But
the wealthy men of early modern Europe didn’t act much like Poggio had
envisioned. Florence was an exception, both in its republican politics
and in its humanist splendor; great fortunes were still often made
through ambition and cunning at court. The indebted sixteenth-century
privateer Francisco Pizarro held the Incan emperor Atahualpa hostage for
a ransom of eighty-five cubic metres of gold and twice as much silver
(Atahualpa paid; Pizarro killed him anyway) and used the money to buy
political influence in Spain and a South American empire for his
brother. In the late seventeenth century, the French merchant Antoine
Crozat won a place at court through his loans to the Crown; his sons
exploited the position to make advantageous loans to other nobles, and
eventually secured the Crown’s monopoly on trade in the Louisiana
Territory.
These were tempestuous centuries, with the
social order regularly restructured, but Alfani seems little interested
in political change, acknowledging the French Revolution and Karl Marx
only in passing. He emphasizes instead the constant pattern of dynastic
entrenchment. However much creativity and innovation were required to
build the “massive number of wealthy dynasties” spawned during
industrialization, he writes, those fortunes “often quickly took a
different direction after the founders had passed away, for example, by
pursuing politics and high office and/or merging with the nobility.”
Give the Musk and Andreessen families a single generation, his account
suggests, and their fortunes will be no more justifiable than that of
the rentiers—which could help explain why present-day billionaires so
want to demonstrate how hard they are working. Historically, some of
this entrenchment happened almost naturally. In eighteenth-century
Holland, the riches that arrived following a broad colonial and
commercial expansion entirely upended the economic order, whereupon the
insurgents swiftly became oligarchs: within a generation, eighty-three
per cent of Rotterdam’s city councillors were a close relation of one
another. At other times, the dynastic entrenchment was engineered. Of
the eighteen marriages entered into by the grandchildren of Mayer
Amschel Rothschild, sixteen were between an uncle and a niece or between
first cousins.
That the politics of
wealth are, irreducibly, the politics of inherited wealth was once much
more obvious in Europe than in the United States. In 1910, a little more
than half of the largest American fortunes derived primarily from
inheritance, whereas in most European countries the figure was about
seventy-five per cent. Then, after the shocks of the nineteen-thirties
and the Second World War, those positions flipped. By the mid-twentieth
century, the inheritance share of wealth was higher in the U.S. than in
Europe. Perhaps because of the scale of fortunes that arose in America,
or because of our explicitly democratic covenants, the rich here have
tended to wrestle more directly with the contradictions of their
position: There was the model of Andrew Carnegie, exploiting his workers
while worrying over the possibility of a “rigid caste” system and
establishing public libraries to help alleviate it. Then, there was Jay
Gould, who denied that there was anything to apologize for, and forwent
philanthropy in favor of building a railroad empire and marrying his
daughter into the French nobility. What, really, are the rich supposed
to do with their fortunes? They can spend their money lavishly, which
everyone agrees is profligate and gross. Or they can save it, which
deepens inequality and is probably worse. “Whatever they do, the rich
attract criticism,” Alfani writes.
In
the case of the robber barons, it took until 1907 for that criticism to
break their system. The immediate cause was a failed effort by a trio
of Montana magnates to corner the market on copper; when their position
was exposed, there was a run on one of the banks that had backed them,
the third largest trust on Wall Street, which soon collapsed. Very
quickly, the brokerages and banks linked to the principals in the copper
escapade came under threat, too. J. P. Morgan convened a coalition of
the wealthy who plowed in their own cash to stop the run and perhaps
saved the banking system. He had repeated Cosimo’s trick. But this time
the public was appalled at the influence that a few plutocrats could
have. After some antagonistic hearings, a progressive Congress created
the Federal Reserve. Henceforth, the “barns of money” would be much
larger, and everyone would contribute, not just the ultra-wealthy. Since
the Renaissance, the rich had had two roles. Now they were down to one:
charity.
In
the past generation, the ranks of the super-rich have grown
dramatically. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of billionaires in the
U.S. increased ninefold. In China, the growth of the super-wealthy has
been more explosive still: in a single year, between 2020 and 2021, that
country’s billionaire count grew by sixty per cent. Private fortunes of
this scale are fundamentally transnational and less moored to
individual nations that might make demands of them. Consultancies now
track the movement of high-net-worth individuals across borders—almost
eleven thousand left China in 2022 alone. If the twenty-tens were the
decade of tax offshoring, the twenty-twenties are the era of the
Singapore family office: private-investment-and-philanthropy hubs for
vast fortunes.
Progressives, for much of
the past century, have seen the problem of wealth through the lens of
redistribution: what they want of the rich is that they pay their fair
share. Taxes “are the proper way (institutionally and culturally) for
the rich to contribute to society,” Alfani concludes. “Not giving, but
taxes.” This can seem a little quaint and unadventurous. But, in this
jittery, politically tenuous post-pandemic period, the sentiment has
weakened. Throughout the pandemic, at a time when public resources were
under strain, and aggressive emergency aid for the poor made for an
immediate reduction to inequality, no advanced economy (with the
exception of Spain) meaningfully raised taxes on the rich.
The
idea that the rich could have a role as a class is more than a little
antiquated. Jeff Bezos and Abigail Disney have very different abilities,
powers, and insights; we shouldn’t want them to do the same thing. But
Alfani’s observation that the rich as a group have no clear social
function is borne out by the fact that, in the Musk era, they have
reacted to populist pressures largely by justifying their fortunes as
individuals. When they maintain a combative social-media presence,
fixate on meritocracy, employ idealistic language to describe for-profit
enterprises, and draw attention to their heroic personal labors, the
aim isn’t to rationalize concentrations of wealth generally but to
defend one pile of wealth specifically. The class consciousness of our
tycoons is fragile.
The threat that
fortunes of such size inherently pose to democracy rightly preoccupies
Alfani, though he comes to no firm conclusion about it. At the moment,
the number of great fortunes and the difficulty of balancing their
interests have made it difficult for an individual billionaire to exert
influence over the rest. (The donations of the super-wealthy to the
Republican and Democratic parties, for instance, roughly cancel each
other out.) But that could change, which leaves the rest of us, and the
legacy of the anti-inequality movement, in an anxious and contingent
position. Instead of fighting a class war against the rich, we now find
ourselves swimming with whales.
