The human rights community has long held that inequality is inconsistent with human rights. It has tended to focus its analysis and advocacy on those living in poverty, but what if it focused on the rich? Establishing an extreme wealth line (EWL) is a good place to start. This would draw attention to the point above which wealth concentration is harmful to society as a whole, much as the poverty line notes a level beneath which individuals have too little to thrive or survive.
Billionaires’ wealth increased by $2 trillion in 2024, while the number of people living below the poverty line hardly changed. The top ten wealthiest people in the world now own more than the poorest three billion combined, and the average billionaire’s carbon footprint is one million times that of the average person.
These mind-boggling figures mask the simple ways that extreme wealth is undermining the safety and stability of all our lives and weakening the foundational principles of human rights. In recent reports, the Good Ancestor Movement, Patriotic Millionaires, and the New Economics Foundation document seven areas that the increasing concentration of wealth is harming: democracy, media, the rule of law, the economy, social cohesion, equality, and the environment.
Excessive wealth: An inherent danger to human rights
Take for instance democracy, which extreme wealth erodes in a number of ways. One problem is political capture, which ranges from regulated lobbying to outright corruption, and can operate via campaign donations, privileged access to elected officials, or the purchase of favorable media coverage. Studies find that affluent individuals not only have an undue influence on policy debates but also prioritize their personal interests over the wider public benefit. Moreover, as political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns has noted, “much of the political influence of rich people escapes the workings of formal institutions, such as legislation and regulation.”
The current United States presidential administration is a chilling example of this. Dozens of United Nations-appointed human rights experts have called out the problematic role of ultra-wealthy individuals in the administration. These individuals exert undue influence even as mechanisms to protect human rights are weakened through the firing of independent oversight officials and members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, for instance, or the rolling back of legal protections for minorities.
Extreme wealth affects the rule of law in other insidious ways. The Pandora Papers investigations revealed numerous examples of multi-millionaires retaining the services of expensive legal teams to leverage tax or property law loopholes to their benefit, or to circumvent the law altogether, often to avoid paying taxes. States have an obligation to mobilize resources, including through taxation, to safeguard human rights, but are not always able to keep up with the tactics used by lawyers for the ultra-wealthy.
A particularly pernicious effect of extreme wealth is the way it upholds the illusion of meritocracy. Websites like Forbes offer examples of billionaires who have become rich through hard work, successful business ventures, or canny investments. But these are anecdotal exceptions: in fact, 60% of billionaires’ riches come from inheritance, cronyism, or monopoly power. Meanwhile, diligent workers around the world struggle to make ends meet. This discrepancy contributes to social unrest and polarisation, which are growing in many countries as inequality rises.
Extreme wealth is corroding citizens’ trust in the democratic process in all parts of the world. An increasing number of people no longer believe in the principle of equal representation (“one person, one vote”) as they witness a small segment of the electorate wielding disproportionate influence. The Open Society Barometer, which studies global public opinion on human rights and democracy, found in 2023 that 35% of 18–35 year olds felt that a “strong leader”—that is, one who did not hold elections or consult parliament—was “a good way to run a country.”
Drawing a line
Extreme wealth poses an inherent danger to the institutions that strengthen, sustain, and stabilize society and guarantee protection of human rights. The work documenting the harms of extreme wealth has culminated in a simple yet powerful proposal: to set an extreme wealth line (EWL) to mark the point at which the concentration of wealth becomes unacceptable and harmful to society as a whole.
Like the poverty line, the level at which the EWL is set will be a matter of debate. Some suggest an absolute value, between $10 million and $1 billion. Others advocate a relative measure based, for example, on the size of the wealth gap in a country, or a ratio between individual wealth and the size of the national economy.
Regardless of the level at which it is set, the very idea of an EWL focuses public and political thinking and narratives around the question of how much is too much. It fosters meaningful discussion about the origin, accumulation, and distribution of extreme wealth and the harms it causes.
The human rights community can both benefit from and contribute to this discussion.
Human rights, inequality, and the extreme wealth line
The research in favour of an EWL has not drawn out the human rights dimensions of excessive inequalities, but the links are clear. Inequality is clearly recognized as a human rights issue, with NGOs, UN independent experts, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and several treaty bodies having weighed in on the topic, usually centering those at the less privileged end of the inequality spectrum.
The EWL offers a new angle that can support human rights work on inequalities. Excessive wealth offers a powerful entry point to special procedures and treaty body discussions with states about measures to safeguard their societies. It can prompt collective thinking and action on a wide range of human rights issues related to extreme wealth, such as taxation or the realization of economic, social, and cultural rights. For instance, in their dialogues with government representatives, the bodies that monitor the implementation of human rights treaties could make a policy of asking how many billionaires reside in the state whose report they are considering. They might also inquire what monetary resources are necessary for the realization of the rights protected by the specific treaty under discussion. This line of questioning would make visible the fact that resources exist but are unevenly distributed.
Such an approach could also elicit a better understanding of the threshold at which extreme wealth locks out the majority of the population from economic opportunities, as well as directing us to remember that human rights are not just about ensuring a bare minimum—they are about associating liberty with equality.
At their core, human rights are about limits on power. The human rights community has developed strong analytical frameworks and mechanisms to guard against abuses of power. Bringing the human rights conceptual and legal framework to bear in the discussion about a limit to extreme wealth could inform and enrich ongoing work in favour of an EWL.
Moreover, the global human rights movement has been at the forefront of major political changes in all regions of the world. It is in its power to bring this experience to bear in favor of the needed economic system change.
Supporting an extreme wealth line would be a good place to start.