News

Time to Limit Wealth?

03/09/2026

For years, philosophers, policymakers and communities have been asking whether there should be a limit to growth accumulation. Since 2020, Patriotic Millionaires – a network of wealthy individuals who advocate for higher taxes on people like themselves – have gathered signatories among the ultra net worth participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos, who essentially demand to be taxed. Oxfam has famously timed the release of its annual inequality report to the same summit, tracking how billionaire fortunes keep outpacing everyone else’s. Scholars like Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, and Ingrid Robeyns have spent years building the case that extreme wealth is both a problem of inequality, and  a driver of democratic distrust and decline. What had been missing has always been a shared reference point – something as widely recognised and politically useful as the so-called “poverty line”- that is the minimum daily income needed to cover basic needs – but for the opposite end of the wealth spectrum. Closing that gap is the objective pursued by a new initiative, the Extreme Wealth Line.

A mirror image of the poverty line

For decades, the so-called poverty line – a World Bank threshold, first set in 1990 and periodically revised, – has told us how little is too little. The world has no equivalent for the other end of the scale – no shared, evidence-based answer to how much is too much. The Extreme Wealth Line initiative proposes a set of indicators that would identify and account for the harms of extreme wealth, so that concentration at the top can be tracked, debated, and challenged with the same rigour we apply to poverty at the bottom. The initiative takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining academic research, narrative crafting , and citizen engagement, and is steered by a group of political, economic, and inequality thinkers working at both national and international levels. It is backed by some of the same voices already introduced above – Oxfam and Patriotic Millionaires – alongside, the London School of Economics, the New Economics Foundation, and the Good Ancestor Movement, and draws directly on the research already cited – from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Saez and Zucman’s The Triumph of Injustice, to Ingrid Robeyns’ work on limitarianism, LSE and Utrecht University studies on public attitudes to a “riches line,” and the Fairness Foundation’s Wealth Gap Risk Register.

The Extreme Wealth Line‘s early output entails: 

  • A report examining the risks extreme wealth poses across seven domains of life – democracy, media, law, the economy, social cohesion, equality, and the environment.
  • An open letter – We Must Draw The Line– signed by more than 370 millionaires and billionaires urging elected leaders to confront the corrosive effect of extreme wealth on democracy and society.
  • A G20 poll of nearly 2,900 millionaires, commissioned by Patriotic Millionaires International, on how the super-rich are seen to influence democratic stability, the media, the justice system, and political integrity.
  • Interviews with political figures, policy experts, and millionaires exploring where a meaningful threshold for harmful wealth might sit.

Perhaps most tellingly, the concept was  featured as a key policy tool in the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty’s report, The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. By Olivier de Schutter.

Our contribution

The Good Lobby threw its support behind the Wealth Cap Project – an initiative born out of Professor Alberto Alemanno’s seminar on power, activism, and change at the European Forum Alpbach 2025. We also endorsed the Wealth Cap Declaration, calling for a European ceiling on how much wealth any one person can hold, as we wrote in A Cap on Extreme Wealth.

The Extreme Wealth Line sits  naturally alongside that work – and adds something we didn’t yet have: a measurement. If a line tells you how to see the problem in the first place, and how to know whether policy is actually closing the gap. A cap tells you where the ceiling should be. Together, they start to look like the beginnings of an infrastructure for tackling extreme wealth the way we already tackle extreme poverty: with data, thresholds, and public accountability, not just moral argument.

And this isn’t theoretical. California’s Proposition 40, on the November 2026 ballot, would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the state’s billionaires to fund healthcare, food assistance, and public education. Rather than let voters decide on the merits, tech moguls have been pumping millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin alone has poured $102 million into a group called Building a Better California, which he co-founded with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and which has also drawn funding from venture capitalist John Doerr and crypto executive Chris Larsen. The group’s strategy includes backing a separate ballot measure designed specifically to invalidate the wealth tax – and Peter Thiel has funnelled money into other groups working toward the same goal. It is a live, real-time demonstration of exactly what the Wealth Cap Project and the Extreme Wealth Line both warn about: concentrated wealth doesn’t just sit passively in bank accounts – it gets spent buying the outcome of democratic votes themselves.

From Davos to your neighbourhood

What makes this moment interesting is that the push to draw a line on extreme wealth is happening not just among economists and millionaires signing open letters at the World Economic Forum, but in the streets closer to home. Here in Brussels, the citizen collective Stop the Rich has been making the same argument in a very different register. Since its first parade through Uccle in June 2025, the group has organised joyful, radical mobilisations calling for the recognition, denunciation, and eradication of “ultra-richesse”, demanding what it calls a Richesse Maximale Autorisée, a maximum allowed wealth. A new parade is planned for 13 September 2026, again in Uccle, and the movement counts organisations like Financité, Attac, and PAC Bruxelles among its allies. Its message is blunt: the problem was never migrants, the poor, or the unemployed – it is the accumulation of wealth at the very top. Seen together, the Extreme Wealth Line and Stop the Rich are two ends of the same rope: one builds the indicators, the coalitions of experts and millionaires, and the policy language; the other builds the street-level pressure and public visibility that keeps the issue impossible to ignore.

To know more