The Empirical Premises of Economic Limitarianism

This chapter interrogates the empirical commitments of economic limitarianism: the view that there should be an upper limit to the amount of monetary resources any individual can have. Responding to the charge that limitarianism relies on unrealistic empirical claims, the authors distinguish two sets of limitarian empirical premises, one concerning the reasons invoked to justify limitarianism, and the other concerning the economic viability of real-world measures that contribute to capping wealth. They argue that the empirical premises in the reasons for limitarianism are strongly supported by social scientific evidence. In relation to the viability of limitarian policies, their conclusion is more cautious: Whilst there is no direct evidence that wealth-capping measures are infeasible, truly evaluating the viability of limitarianism requires evaluating the effects of a set of predistributive and redistributive limitarian policies – not just once, but over a longer period of time. And those evaluations have not been conducted yet.