What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible?
3rd August 2025
The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.
Note that the headline is (perhaps deliberately) misleading. It suggests that we have here an examination of a world in which ‘extreme wealth were impossible”, whereas it actually discusses a world in which “we make extreme wealth impossible”, which is a different kettle of fish. (“Journalists”, of course, have grown expert at this sort of prestiverbitation.)
Throughout history human societies (and ideological groups within those societies) have attempted to impose their notion of The Good Life on their fellows, and pretend that it is somehow based in reality. They may even believe it. Reality, however, is what happens while you’re dreaming your dreams, and it doesn’t go away just because you imagine things to be a different than they actually are.
Also noticeable is the fact that it is written by a woman, as exemplified by its “FebBot ‘journalism”: Start with a tear-jerking anecdote designed to tell people How To Feel about the situation, then elide smoothly into a lecture based on the confident assumption that the audience will be ready to accept the not-too-hidden political agenda of the author as demonstrated fact, when in fact it is Just Another Story.
The significance of this is rooted in evolutionary psychology. Human beings evolved, both physically and socially, to be nomadic hunter-gatherers, and each sex evolved to fill distinct roles: men are the breadwinners, and women are the homemakers. We didn’t choose these roles–natural selection chose them for us, and wired our “firmware” to support them. As a result, men organize their social groups hierarchically, and women organize their social groups collectively. The hunt requires clear chains of command and structures of authority, because everybody needs to know precisely who’s in charge and where he fits in ongoing operations. Gathering (and nurturing babies) require cooperative work, pooling of resources, and firm social bonds among participants. Historically, men keep trying to make all of society hierarchical and women keep trying to make all of society collectivist. Both sides think that their way is the right way and the other way is the wrong way.
From the beginning of the species down to about the early 18oos, men typically won this particular conflict, because breadwinning was hard–until the coming of industrialization, built upon the invention of portable non-muscular power sources, made “breadwinning” something so easy that even women could do it. This, coupled with hormonal birth control, made the “homemaker” role on the part of women completely voluntary, with the inevitable impact on marriage rates and population growth.
Since a considerable portion of the “breadwinning community” is now composed of women, hardwired to prefer collectivism over hierarchy, we see “wealth inequality”, the social expression of hierarchy, being denigrated in favor of “egalitarianism”, the social expression of collectivism.
Go back and read the article again through that lens, and things become a lot clearer.
Note that the Starting Anecdote is about a rich woman, whose money came from her breadwinner husband, sharing that money with an institution for the collective benefit of a certain group of people, for which she is praised, mostly by other women. Female collectivism on the hoof.
Note that the supposed ill effects of “wealth inequality” are nowhere demonstrated except by some vague handwaving (by a female professor). The author writes in the sure and certain confidence that her feelings-based politically-correct-instructed audience will tag along dutifully and unquestioningly. The plain historical record that collectivism, on a scale larger than a nuclear family, has failed, always and everywhere, is simply ignored. And ignoring reality is what collectivists do best. And we are all doomed to suffer as a result.
(Sorry about beginning sentences with a conjunction; I’ve been reading far too much Greek lately.)