Do billionaires deserve their wealth? | The Economist

the example of a uh self-made billionaires is really someone like uh the purest example is really someone like uh Taylor Swift or J.K. Rowling.

>> Yeah. And these examples >> tend not to motivate the same kind of visceral opera- opposition in people. I think that people do respect uh uh wealth that they can very clearly see as being self-made uh more.

>> You can certainly say, "Look, Taylor Swift could not put on the Eras Tour. What made her a billionaire were it not for a crew of technicians and people around the world running the ticketing systems and building stadiums and so on." And and yet, just because you can see so so clearly that she is the

determinant that she's the thing that determines whether that works or doesn't work, whether it happens at all, it kind of cuts across a lot of the noise where something like Jeff Bezos, let's say, exactly as you were saying, you can certainly argue both that actually required a kind of singular focus and

vision to deliver a company like Amazon, and also that we live in a free capitalistic society, at least in much of the world, and this was lots of people making their own free decisions that led to that wealth accruing, and so it's difficult to kind of see some sort of exploitation in any

of the individual acts that you might kind of lead to those sorts of Marxist concerns Josh was worrying about. Uh but nonetheless, you can see the vast network of warehouses. It's a little bit harder to see Jeff's singular vision Jeff Bezos's singular vision there.

Whereas with Taylor, it's 1989 was her worst album, none of that would have happened. >> I did not realize you were on first name terms with Taylor Swift. Excellent.

>> So, Archie, what have economists found about this uh question of uh of of the value that billionaires create?

>> So, there's a moral desert as a kind of thorny concept in economics, one people try to generally stay away from in the field. But no, the the the finding that I think is most relevant here is one from William Nordhaus, the the Nobel Prize winning economist, where he tried to do some sort of estimate of, okay,

what is the the sort of social value created by entrepreneurship and these sorts of So, again, if you go back to Jeff Bezos, by the fact that you can now go on Amazon, press a button, and have a book or indeed almost what's delivered to you at very short notice and his estimate is about 2% of that is actually

captured by those founders often the successful ones become billionaires themselves and the rest is something that kind of accrues to society in general and so if you go back to that Bezos and Taylor Swift example, I think it's very helpful in the sense of in a world where Amazon wasn't founded or frankly Tesla

wasn't founded even although there's a government contracts question there a little bit, you do have society at large being poorer and you have society at large being poorer to a much greater degree than you have Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk being poorer.