Business Daily meets: Ingrid Robeyns
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, the richest 10 per cent of the world’s population own more than three quarters of its wealth, while the bottom half have 2%.
To halt the growing wealth gap, one economic philosopher, Ingrid Robeyns, has come up with a striking proposal - to impose legally enforced limits on people’s personal wealth. No one individual, Professor Robeyns suggests, should be allowed to have more than 10 million dollars.
It's a provocative idea. And would it work in practice?
(Picture: Ingrid Robeyns. Credit: Keke Keukelaar/United Agents)
Presented and produced by Ed Butler
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We lost our humanity. We lost our dignity. We got punished for something we did not do. |
| 0:07.1 | Amazing sports stories from the BBC World Service tells the story of The Black 14. |
| 0:12.2 | Our young lives were flipped upside down. |
| 0:14.7 | Search for amazing sports stories wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:19.6 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC, where today we're meeting |
| 0:25.1 | a philosopher and economist with a very particular idea to place a cap on the rich to close |
| 0:31.8 | the wealth gap with the poor. It's not just that those who now earn many, many more millions |
| 0:37.3 | will then see their personal wealth |
| 0:40.2 | kept, but it's also that if you use that money in a smart way, that you will enable many |
| 0:46.1 | who are now stunned because they don't have proper education, because they don't have a good |
| 0:51.0 | starting life, to actually contribute much more. |
| 0:56.1 | A world without billionaires. |
| 1:00.1 | Blue Sky Thinking here on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:09.6 | So my full name is Ingrid Robbins, but I'm totally fine if you pronounce that in a different way. |
| 1:10.2 | Many friends call me Robbins, so no worries. And I'm totally fine if you pronounce that in a different way. Many friends call me a Robin, |
| 1:12.1 | so no worries. And I'm a professor of philosophy at the Addix Institute of Utrecht University. |
| 1:18.9 | Ingrid Robbins is an unusual personality. The 51-year-old Belgian scholar with |
| 1:24.1 | interests that span both philosophy and economics has written several books |
| 1:28.5 | and is clearly not afraid of annoying people with her sometimes provocative ideas. |
| 1:34.3 | Like many economists, she's been struck by the extraordinary growth in the global wealth gap, |
| 1:39.6 | the division between rich and poor. That has more than doubled over the last 40 years, according to the IMF. |
| 1:46.1 | Today, the richest 10% of the world's population |
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