Billionaires devote vast sums of money to anti-poverty initiatives and green energy reforms. But the world’s wealthiest also cause disproportionate harm to the environment.

A rousing debate, hosted last week by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, wrestled with the issues of extreme wealth and growing income inequality. Panelists representing fields including philosophy, political economy, and business administration staked contrasting and occasionally unexpected positions on whether the super-rich are a net positive for society.

“The top 1 percent emit the same amount of carbon as 5 billion human beings,” said Tom Malleson, associate professor of social justice and peace studies at King’s University College at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “The best thing you can do is to get rid of those billionaires by redistributing the wealth, particularly if you redistribute it to green technology.”

But billionaires like Bill Gates have invested in poor countries ravaged by climate disaster, argued Jessica Flanigan, Richard L. Morrill Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values at the University of Richmond. Market forces further incentivize the world’s wealthiest to provide jobs and pursue improvements to clean energy infrastructure, she added.

“Those are all presumptive reasons to think that billionaires are helpful toward the global poor and more reliably beneficial to those people than public officials, who are beholden to people in their own political community” who usually are not badly off.

Moderator Christopher Robichaud, a senior lecturer in ethics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, kicked off the conversation by citing recent reports that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is poised to become history’s first trillionaire. “What should we think about a world, maybe right around the corner, that has trillionaires?” he asked.

“Could you imagine a society or a set of institutions in which it would be perfectly just for there to be trillionaires?” asked Nien-hê Hsieh, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. “It probably has features to ensure people’s basic needs are met. It probably has features to ensure that great inequality doesn’t lead to the corruption of public officials, or the breaking of the democratic fabric … Whatever that system is, it is not the system we have today.”

Shruti Rajagopalan, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, noted how few of today’s billionaires inherited their money. Most of the modern era’s richest people earned their fortunes, she emphasized, largely through the stock market.

“There’s a big difference between Genghis Khan and Elon Musk,” she quipped. “And if Elon Musk is getting wealthy, it’s also every single schoolteacher out there whose retirement is invested in one of these funds.”

At one point, Malleson highlighted the role of luck in wealth creation.

“If you have a more productive body — if you have Michael Phelps’ wingspan or Taylor Swift’s voice — good for you,” they said, citing the late Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls’ writings on the arbitrary nature of these traits. “We should think of meritocracy as part of a doctrine of ableism. It’s a prejudice doctrine that says people should be rewarded for factors that are outside their control and others should be punished — particularly disabled people — for their lack of productivity.”

The conversation expanded to cover big business and low-wage workers, with Walmart proving a favorite lightning rod.

“The poorest families in the United States want to shop at Walmart because the prices are going to be the best,” Rajagopalan noted. “Your stereotypical single mother — trying to feed her children, trying to keep very difficult hours at her job — can walk into a Walmart and get all the basics cheaper than pretty much anywhere else.”

But the company “exploits its employees, crushes unions, and takes out dead peasant insurance policies on workers who are going to die,” Malleson countered. “Its products are cheap because they’re made in sweatshops with abysmal conditions.”

The solution is not so easy as taxing Walmart for redistribution to low-income employees and consumers, Rajagopalan said. “Then we’re assuming there’s a bureaucrat or central allocation plan that can provide those same loaves of bread and cans of milk. … That has been done before and hasn’t worked pretty much anywhere in the world.”

Nobody is talking about communist-style central planning, Malleson said. Alternatives include some form of democratic socialism.

“It would mean Walmart has unions,” they said. “It would mean Walmart has co-determination, where workers are allowed to elect half the board like in Germany. It would mean there are basic labor conditions; there are basic rights and regulations that are very common in many parts of the world, particularly the Nordic countries.”

Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the U.S., Flanigan pointed out, because it still has a market economy that generates sufficient wealth for financing its public institutions.

“How do we materially improve the conditions of the worst off? The best thing we have is a market-based society that encourages investment and innovation; that’s it!” she said. “And the kind of society that produces billionaires is the very same society that’s going to improve conditions for the worst off.”

Hsieh chimed in with yet another option for curbing inequality.

“As somebody here at Harvard who is a good Rawlsian, I want to put forward the idea of property-owning democracy,” he said. “There’s an idea where you do allow for market exchange. You do allow for the private accumulation of wealth. You do allow for private capital … but with a much more egalitarian distribution of property.”

The event was part of the Ethics Center’s Civil Disagreement Series, founded in 2019 to engage policy and subject experts on pressing current issues. Attendees included undergraduates from five universities participating in the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership and well as proctors and tutors from Harvard College’s Houses who were selected for the 2024-2025 Fellowship in Values in Engagement.

In the discussion’s final minutes, Robichaud picked up on one of their questions about what constitutes a minimum standard of living. He asked panelists how each would propose meeting such a standard for all.

“To lift the poor, we shouldn’t just look at taxation,” Rajagopalan said. The world’s poorest 2 billion people are “living in conditions that are entirely unjust. … There won’t be many takers for this politically, but the single best way to improve their lives is to allow immigration to rich countries.”