I know this gets said about a lot of book all the time but this really is a book everyone should read. We all know wealth inequality exists but none of us are aware of just how bad it is and that it will only get worse if nothing changes. Ingrid Robeyns makes a compelling case against extreme wealth and how wealth concentrations damage everyone on the planet. With ten years of research she covers the issues that extreme wealth causes such as; skewing politics in favour of those who have money in ways that are not even publically perceptable, keeping the poor in poverty, damaging the plant and contributing to global temperature rise unfathomly more than the average person, and how the global north has siphoned billions of pounds of wealth from the global south over the past few hundred years. Robeyns also dares to ask: • Is there an upper limit of money where most humans agree that no one needs any more. • Does anyone actually deserve to be a multi-millionaire? • What could be done with the tax that Amazon avoids paying? • Is the inheritance tax really that bad? • Are the extremely rich even that happy? There is an interestingly researched chapter where Robeyns has spoken multi-millionaires and discovers that a lot of them want to be taxed, those who want to do good with the money don't want the responsibility of deciding how it should be spent or where it should go. She speaks to Abigail Disney who reveals the psychological damage of having extreme wealth, how the weight of knowing you could change a person's life with a fraction of your money is exhausting and makes you isolated and paranoid. Another person says aquiring more wealth becomes identical to an addiction with the need to chase bigger and bigger numbers overriding any rational thought. Some others who have given their fortunes away speak of feeling spiritually lighter, and that it is the actions of a greedy few who block wealth redistribution. There are some insane stats in this book such as: if you wanted to become as rich as Elon Musk was in 2023 you would need to work a 40 hour week between the ages of 20-65, and you would have to earn 1.2 million dollars.... PER HOUR! The first half of this book was eye opening and made me infuriaringly angry, but the second half was slightly more hopeful and has some ideas for how we could implement changes that would drastically reduce wealth inequality. If you'd like a sense of what this book is about there is a fantastic conversation video on YouTube with the author, I really recommend you check it out. The more people read this book the greater the demand for change will be.

I am working my way through this book and it is superb and I plan to re-read it again and again. It is a monumental representation of the callous greedy sector that dominates our world. Absolutely brilliant.

The global West is accustomed now to the moral and practical necessity of a minimum wage, so why should we resist the idea of there being a maximum wage as well? Surely there is a level of wealth at which further accumulation becomes unnecessary, or even counter-productive? How much more could we accomplish, and how much poverty could we reduce, if the 1%, or even the 0.01%, were forced by concerted international political and moral pressure to relinquish the excess wealth sitting inertly in offshore tax havens and devote that immense pile of money to improving the lives of the poor in the global South? These and other related questions of economic inequality and injustice are fascinatingly and coherently addressed in this urgent and stirring call to action by a major philosopher and economist, which will leave the reader initially enraged, but ultimately inspired.