We don’t need billionaires, and we can structure the market so we don’t have them
Extracted from an article by Dean Baker [1]
The Economist gave us a classically sloppy piece recently, telling us that we need the mega-wealthy types like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The argument is largely tautological.
It points out that the mega-rich have been responsible for the diffusion of important technologies. There is considerable truth to that, but this is because we have structured the economy in ways that allowed people to get super-rich by gaining control of important technologies. If we had structured the economy differently, we wouldn’t have super-rich people responsible for its spread.
For example, who was the mega-rich person for the near-universal acceptance of the polio vaccine, not just in the United States but around the world? This vaccine has saved tens of millions of lives over the last 70 years. Its developer, Jonas Salk, never bothered to patent it, saying the knowledge belonged to the world. There is a similar story with insulin. The developers, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip, sold their rights for $1 each in 1923. Tens of millions of diabetes patients have been able to live relatively normal lives as a result of their discovery, but no one got rich from it. (This has not prevented drug companies from making huge sums by patenting various processing techniques and charging markups of several hundred percent.)
We don’t just have to look to medicine. There were great innovations in most areas attributable to people who did not get ridiculously rich. It was not Steve Jobs and Apple who invented the mouse, although they did popularize it. The invention was by Douglas Engelbart in 1963, a researcher at Stanford Research Institute.
1. Source: RWER blog, 24 Apr 2026 https://rwer.wordpress.com/2026/04/24/we-dont-need-billionaires-and-we-can-struct-ure-the-market-so-we-dont-have-them/
Dean Baker is a US macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
