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No, billionaires don’t drive economic growth – and crony billionaires strangle it
My research found that the myth of billionaires boosting the economy is untrue – particularly when they amassed their wealth from political connection.
15. 7. 2015 The Guardian, Author: Jan Svejnar
My research found that the myth of billionaires boosting the economy is untrue – particularly when they amassed their wealth from political connection.
After I escaped communist Czechoslovakia in 1970, I enrolled at Cornell University. In my introductory sociology course there, I was taught that becoming a billionaire was impossible – realising the “American dream”, at least at the very top of the income scale, was effectively no longer an option. The last few decades have certainly proved this thesis wrong.
This shift has had significant consequences for income and wealth inequality not just in the US, but also in many countries around the globe. In fact, the top 1% globally will soon hold over half the world’s wealth. And their share is growing. This stunning fact makes it all the more important to ask what this means for the rest of us. Given the amazing level of accumulation of wealth at the top, improving our understanding of the economic role of billionaires has certainly become a public policy issue of the highest order.
In order to make headway on understanding the implications, we must obviously do more than just look from one year to the next at the increasing concentration of wealth. The key questions to answer are: is a greater presence of billionaires in a country a positive, as some might argue? Or is there evidence that it is a negative? Leaving aside moral questions, do billionaires accelerate or slow down a country’s economic growth?
„We discovered that billionaire wealth arising from being politically connected has a strongly negative effect on growth.“