Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

Basically, what this book says is that the ultra-rich are a policy failure, but the market economy is good, so we have to make it morally wrong to hoard wealth so that eventually it'll become the rule to cap wealth at a certain amount. It makes the case for that idea by providing examples of rich people who separated themselves from much of their wealth and by looking at the outsized impact of the ultra-rich on the world.

The book itself is approachable but I felt like it really aimed to speak to the ultra-rich and not the everyday person such as myself and personally I don't believe that appealing to morality when it comes to most of these people will be any kind of effective (something that doesn't seem to be lost on Robeyns herself). I also found it to be quite repetitive.

I also don't see how the idea holds any chance to be applied without the end of corporatism and in a context where wealth is so largely abstract and not made of liquid assets and where our political class has a vested interest in not even marginally inconveniencing the moneyed class, but I think that aspect was beyond the scope the book aimed to cover.

Many thanks to Astra Publishing House for providing me a digital copy of this book for review consideration.

It gets pretty in the weeds but it is a really solid guide to understanding the harms extreme wealth brings to our society and how to fix it!