"If Hard Work Made You a Billionaire, Every Woman in Rural India Would Be One"
"If Hard Work Made You a Billionaire, Every Woman in Rural India Would Be One"
The destructive nature of the billionaire phenomenon
In recent weeks there has been an excessive focus in the mainstream Indian media on the multi-million-dollar wedding events of Radhika Merchant and Anant Ambani (the latter being the son of a famous Indian billionaire). The topical focus on the wedding is as good an opportunity as any to learn about the weirdness and the destructive nature of the contemporary billionaire phenomenon. I recently wrote a Twitter thread to that end, and am reproducing it below. (The quote in the title, by the way, is taken from a thread penned by the awesome journalist P. Sainath.)
The secret to wealth is not to work hard, but to make others work hard for you.
In the context of the discourse around the Ambani-Merchant wedding, here’s a brief, non-exhaustive educational thread about the destructive nature of the billionaire phenomenon.
Take this 2019 article by @graceblakeley. How billionaires extract wealth rather than create it. Some quotes follow:
Most British billionaires have made their wealth by extracting economic rents from the production process: by monopolising a scarce resource — be that property, commodities, or intellectual property — and over-charging others for its use… According to Oxfam, one-third of global billionaire wealth comes from an inheritance while another third comes from “crony connections to government and monopoly”. Much of the rest originates from land, oil or finance.
It is pertinent to ask ourselves: How can any person “earn” hundreds of millions of dollars, or hundreds of crores of rupees? It’s just not possible, and definitely not through individual “hard work”. Such enormous wealth can only come through the collective work & resources of MANY. When that is then skimmed off by a FEW simply by gaming how the ‘system’ works, we are forced to witness the birth of billionaires.
In the 1974 book “Democracy for the Few”, Michael Parenti provides a helpful explainer:
You are a member of the ‘owning class’ when your income is very large and comes mostly from the labor of other people, that is, when others work for you, either in a company you own or by creating the wealth that allows your investments to give you a handsome return. The secret to great wealth is not to work hard but to have others work hard for you. What transforms a tree into a profitable commodity such as paper or furniture is the labor that goes into harvesting the timber, cutting the lumber, and manufacturing, shipping, advertising, and selling the finished product.
That was Parenti. Then there’s the ‘class traitor’ @NickHanauer, whose 2019 TED talk provides important insights into the evils inherent in contemporary capitalism and mainstream economics. Some quotes:
I’m not just in the top one percent, I’m in the top 0.01 percent of all earners. Today, I have come to share the secrets of our success, because rich capitalists like me have never been richer. So the question is, how do we do it?.. Is it that rich people are smarter than we were 30 years ago? Is it that we’re working harder than we once did? Are we taller, better looking? Sadly, no. It all comes down to just one thing: economics… There was a time in which the economics profession worked in the public interest, but in the neoliberal era, today, they work only for big corporations and billionaires, and that is creating a little bit of a problem.
For more on contemporary mainstream economics — the unfortunate dogmas from which dominate many seen and unseen corners of the internet — this book and its review are good introductory material: The Tyranny of Economists: How can they be so wrong, so often, and yet still exert so much influence on government policy?
Then, here’s a 2012 essay on the myth of billionaires as ‘job creators’, by @AaronRegunberg: “Job creation does not run through the Swiss bank accounts of the 1%, but rather the worn-out wallets of America’s working families.”
Regunberg also quotes Nick Hanauer (referenced above):
The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the median American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000… I [from the top .01%] can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or cars or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the vast majority of American families.
The egregiousness of our present political economic system — a system that has generated the contemporary crop of billionaires all over the world — was on stark display during the coronavirus pandemic. This @EmilyStewartM article is essential reading on that front:
Even as hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, millions of people were laid off and businesses shuttered,.. and the outgoing president refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election — supposedly the market’s nightmare scenario — for weeks, the stock market soared.. The pandemic exposed and reinforced the way the wealthy and powerful experience what’s happening so much differently than those with less power and fewer means — and force the question of how the prosperity of those at the top could be better shared with those at the bottom.
When one’s talking about billionaires, one has to credit @Oxfam for doing an immense service to the world in exposing the skewed nature of how the global political economy works today. Here’s an important report from earlier this year: “The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 — at a rate of $14 million per hour — while nearly five billion people [obviously including hundreds of millions of Indians] have been made poorer.”
$14 million per hour — who works so “hard” to EARN that kind of money? These folks “earn” in just an hour, those amounts of money which most of us reading this, and almost everyone not reading this, will never be able to “earn” in a lifetime. So are we not hard workers?
These are the kinds of agonizing and enraging thoughts that many of us have been expressing in the context of people saying that we should have no issue with the Ambani-Merchant wedding as they are just spending their “own money” on the wedding. If there’s one thing to take from this thread, it’s that we need to unlearn the common idea that the super-wealthy are wealthy because they work harder than others or they are smarter etc. Nopes. Most of their wealth comes not from their own, but from other people’s work & resources.
The more billionaires we have and the “wealthier” they get, the poorer and worse-off we and our planet gets. As Hanaeur said, the primary cause for this is mainstream economics and the choices we have made as part of the current version of capitalism. It’s high time we revisited those choices. Like the venerable Boston Review did in their project Rethinking Political Economy: Rethinking Political Economy asks how we build a new world after forty years of market fundamentalism. We debate new ways to think about protecting the planet, the relationship of equality and democracy, the need for racially inclusive prosperity, the promise of industrial policy, the dangers of concentrated economic power, and a revival of investment in public goods.
Enjoy reading and learning.