Thammasat University students interested in economics, business, history, development studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 8 October Zoom book talk on As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West.
The event, on Tuesday, 8 October 2024 at 3pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://hku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dKHuU5KIQ0OBDABJreXdyw#/registration
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of wealth.
The event website explains:
The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act ‘as gods among men’; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the West, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into antiquity, and integrating recent research on economic inequality, Alfani finds—despite the different paths to wealth in different eras—fundamental continuities in the behaviour of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history. His account offers a novel perspective on current debates about wealth and income disparity. Alfani argues that the position of the rich and super-rich in Western society has always been intrinsically fragile; their very presence has inspired social unease. In the Middle Ages, an excessive accumulation of wealth was considered sinful; the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy. Eventually, the rich were deemed useful when they used their wealth to help their communities in times of crisis. Yet in the twenty-first century, Alfani points out, the rich and the super-rich—their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and COVID-19—have been exceptionally reluctant to contribute to the common good in times of crisis, rejecting even such stopgap measures as temporary tax increases. History suggests that this is a troubling development—for the rich, and for everyone else.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Guido Alfani is professor of economic history at Bocconi University, Milan. He is the author of Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy: The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the coauthor of The Lion’s Share: Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe.
TU students may access Professor Alfani’s books through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
With any questions or for further information, students may write to
gmoazzin@hku.hk
A review of Professor Alfani’s book posted online earlier this year stated in part:
The core of the book, however, is an analysis of how these men (and they were almost all men) built and maintained their fortunes, why they did so and what their societies thought of their achievements. Throughout two millennia most of the rich have been rich because of inheritance. They had rich fathers or uncles; the prime examples are nobles, closely associated with royal dynasties. There have been periods when great fortunes have been made, such as the opening up of Atlantic trade in early modern times and the second industrial revolution of the late 19th century, but those who made their wealth then are small in number compared to the recipients of inheritances. In such periods, predictably, merchants, entrepreneurs and financiers typically sought to use their new-found riches to try to insert themselves into the older elites – and to pass on their wealth to their children and grandchildren.
Alfani says little about the initial motivation of the founders of rich dynasties. Presumably they did not set out to become billionaires, with more money than they could possibly spend, but once they became wealthy they often seem to have been unable to stop accumulating. He describes this as the ‘curse of Smaug’, after Tolkien’s dragon who piled up more and more treasure. Some – Andrew Carnegie, for example – did decide to give away their wealth, but he was an exception. Rich men during the medieval and early modern periods were encouraged to give away some or all of their wealth to charity in the hope of saving their souls; some did, but in later ages gifts to charity have diminished. Although a few such as Bill and Melinda Gates have set up foundations to distribute some of their wealth, Gordon Brown has recently pointed out that ‘the top one per cent typically declare donations averaging just £10 a week, much of which they can set against tax, their generosity extending to just 0.21 per cent of their income’.
Oddly, the book also has little to say about how the rich spent their wealth. Alfani describes the beautiful buildings with which the wealthy of Renaissance Italy endowed their cities, but why, for example, did hundreds of British landowners decide, in the middle of the 18th century, to do away with the older formal gardens around their mansions and employ Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and many other designers to set out sweeping landscapes? It is sometimes argued that they were trying to save money in maintenance, but few of them needed to do so; the Duke of Marlborough alone spent what equates to £35 million today to build a larger lake beside Blenheim Palace. Fashion, allied to what Thorstein Veblen was later to describe as ‘conspicuous consumption’, was a powerful motivation; it has led, today, to massive ocean-going yachts, private jets and the helicopters which the (current) prime minister uses to save himself a few minutes. The rich care little for the consequences; the richest one per cent of humanity are responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 per cent.
Alfani persuasively links together increasing inequality with the exercise of political power to maintain or increase the privileges of the rich. The Reagan-Thatcher reforms of the 1980s were accompanied by severe reductions in high marginal rates of income tax and by capital gains being taxed less than income; successive reductions in inheritance taxes were specifically designed to make it easier to preserve inherited wealth. The rich now lobby and donate to political parties in Britain and America to abolish such taxes entirely, although they are paid by only four per cent of the British population; we have regressed considerably since Winston Churchill argued in 1924 that death duties were a ‘corrective against the development of a race of idle rich’. Meanwhile, the wealthy take advantage of tax deductions for charitable gifts to direct money to their preferred causes at the expense of priorities decided by governments and other democratic institutions. They demand the right to spend their money as they wish, rather than contributing to the common good.
It may be that, as Alfani argues, the rich can never win public esteem. They will always attract jealousy, even if they have achieved their wealth by innovation and hard work. But now, as ever, they need to be careful in displaying their wealth; as a few of them have recently realised, ‘it’s taxes or pitchforks’.
He told an interviewer last year:
I do a lot of work on inequality, and what happens at the top of distribution is very important, because what happens to wealth concentration among the top 5 percent of the distribution tends to shape long-term trends, in terms of overall inequality.
But maybe the most important reason is that nobody has ever done a book on the rich as a category, defined only by their wealth and no other characteristics.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)