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DonateTaylor Swift’s billionaire status stands out among her financial peers from the business community who are often scrutinized for their extreme wealth. Swift became a self-made billionaire because of her unparalleled talent, relentless work ethic, and passionate support from millions of fans. If Swift’s fortune is because of these factors, isn’t it a desirable and inspiring outcome? Those who agree would point to philosopher Robert Nozick, who says if someone acquires wealth through just means without violating others’ rights, they are entitled to the rewards of their labor. However, philosophers with an opposing view are concerned about whether any individual, including Swift, should be able to amass such fortunes. To them, every billionaire created is a policy failure and they tend to prioritize equality of outcomes versus equality of opportunity. They question the fairness of a system that permits vast wealth accumulation and argue that luck and systemic advantages often play a role and in some cases, involve exploitation.
With this background, we debate the question: Does Taylor Swift Deserve Her Billion Dollar Fortune?
John Donvan
This is Open to Debate. Hi, everybody. I’m John Donvan. In this episode, music, money, and one very successful pop star. 2023 was the year in which Taylor Swift recorded and sang her way to billionaire hood. It was her Eras Tour last summer that put her net worth at just over a billion, a tour in which she worked very hard and made her fans very happy. According to Forbes, she is the first musician to make that kind of money purely through the art.
There were no endorsement deals. She didn’t have a cosmetic line or anything like that. It’s all been the music and the effort. In a very obvious way, she earned that billion, but does she deserve it? That’s a different question, more of a philosophical question. It’s one that often divides opinion when we see individuals accumulating great wealth, and even more so when we’re in periods of profound economic inequality.
So, for this debate, we’ve invited two philosophers to look through the lens of an amazing musical career to answer this question. Does Taylor Swift deserve her billion dollar fortune, or really does any billionaire? So, let’s meet our debaters. Answering yes to that question, I’d like to introduce Jessica Flanigan. Jessica is a political philosopher at the University of Richmond where she is the chair in ethics and democratic values. She is also putting together a book about Taylor Swift and the philosophy behind her music. Jessica, welcome to Open to Debate.
And, uh, answering no to the question, which, again, does Taylor Swift deserve her billion-dollar fortune, we have another political philosopher, Ingrid Robeyns. Ingrid is chair of ethics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. And she’s the author of the recent book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth. Welcome, Ingrid, to the program. Thanks so much for joining us.
Before we start, I just wanted to get a sense from each of you about, i- in a sense, what motivates you to be involved even in this argument? Uh, really, how long have you been thinking about and focusing on the phenomenon of billionaires? So, I’ll go with you first, Jessica. When, when did you start thinking about billionaires as a topic?
Um, well, as a political philosopher, we talk about wealth inequality a lot. And income inequality is just part of distributive justice. It’s, sort of, one of the core topics in political philosophy. I first started thinking about billionaires, um, probably in about 2018 or so when that became much more of a topic of public conversation and also a conversation within the philosophical literature. And I wrote a piece about billionaire philanthropy, billionaires be involved in charity. And I’ve been a Swiftie since debut. So, just to-
Uh, Ingrid, same question for you, not the Swiftie part, but the billionaire part. When did you get interested in, in talking about and thinking about the phenomenon of billionaires?
Yeah, just like Jessica, I’ve been thinking about distributive justice and inequality, um, since I became a political philosopher, but specifically, about wealth concentration and billionaires since, uh, 2012, when I fir… for the first time, gave, uh, a keynote lecture on the idea of a richest line, just like the poverty line that you have a richest line.
So, it’s, it’s a hot topic. And we’re, we’re glad to be, uh, tapping into it and for the two of you to confirm that for us. So, we wanna move on to our opening statements. We wanna give each of you, uh, up to four minutes to explain your position in this debate. Um, Jessica, you are up first, and you are answering yes to the question, does Taylor Swift deserve her billion-dollar fortune? Here’s your chance, please, to tell us why.
Thank you so much. So, my central argument is that if anyone deserves to be a billionaire, it would be Taylor. And so, in order to refute the claim that Taylor Swift deserves to be a billionaire, I think someone would need to argue that billionaires just shouldn’t exist at all, or, as Ingrid was saying, that there should be an upper line.
But I’ll give three reasons why a billionaire like Taylor Swift would deserve to be a, a billionaire without any, kind of, upper limit. And I think that Taylor Swift’s example will refute the more general claim, the billionaire shouldn’t exist at all. So, the three arguments are the freedom argument, the prosperity argument, and the comparative argument.
The freedom argument is that Taylor Swift is a billionaire because millions and millions and millions of Swifties, like me, have chosen to trade their own hard-earned income for the chance to listen to her music, or to see her on tour, or to participate in the general Taylor Swift experience that she’s providing for everybody.
And so, as the philosopher, Robert Nozick, has argued, public officials, people in the government, they could only maintain an egalitarian or limitarian distribution of resources that prevented people like Taylor from being billionaires.
If they were to interfere with other working people’s property rights by preventing them from purchasing this type of music or also with people like Taylor’s occupational freedom to decide how and what terms they’ll labor under or the conditions of their own labor, any policy that prevented people from paying Taylor from her music or for her performances would violate the occupational rights of people like Taylor and the property rights of people like all of the Swifties like me.
And because so many people currently benefit from Taylor songwriting, from her just general creative genius, um, a policy that reduced Taylor’s incentives to produce would seriously backfire, insofar as it reduced the supply of Swiftie content.
And so, I think she’s currently creating some of her very best work. And so, putting any kind of limits on that, sort of, creative production would be really detrimental not just to people like Taylor Swift, but also to everybody who so much appreciates her work. The prosperity argument is, um, the second argument.
And that’s you might think people like Taylor shouldn’t have the freedom to become billionaires, um, because it’s so unequal, but her billionaire status arises not just because she was free to be highly productive and innovative and, um, you know, uh, enjoy this prosperity, but because the rest of us have this freedom to. As societies become more innovative and more productive, they get richer.
And more and more people are able to meet their basic needs in those richer societies, but there’s also more wealth and income inequality. And this trade-off, I’ll argue, is worth it because the absolute position of the worst-off people in society, you know, prosperous and innovation… innovatio… innovative society that allows for billionaires is better than ho… what it would be in comparable ones.
So, extreme inequality, which is marked by the presence of billionaires, when it arises in these proc… prosperous and productive societies, um, happens because there are some industries in those societies where the cost of producing more of a product, like a song, are very low during… due to technological innovation, um, so that people can digitally relay songs to billions of people, to billions of listeners.
And that billionaire status she has therefore reflects the fact that people are able to access her product at a low price, which means that people are able to choose their first-choice favorite music. And there’s an egalitarian reason for, like, allowing and celebrating those types of markets as well. So, the prosperity argument is a society that produces billionaires like Taylor Swift is good for everybody, including the worst-off.
And then the comparative argument is, what is the alternative? I think it’s better that Taylor Swift has $1 billion than having that money be tacked away to a politician or a public official. When you think about how the government uses resources, I am not confident that public officials would be a better steward of any kind of tax revenue that they were to impose onto billionaires, um, like Taylor Swift to the extent that would prevent them from being billionaires better than the billionaires would use it themselves.
And not only am I not confident that they would use those resources well, even if they were to use those resources well, I don’t think that taxing billionaires out of existence or limiting billionaires would really meaningfully improve overall large-scale conditions in society anyhow. So, the comparative argument is just to say better that Taylor have it than paying it in taxes. Thanks.
Thanks very much, Jessica. Um, Ingrid, this is now your turn. Uh, tell us why you are answering no to the question, does Taylor Swift deserve her billion-dollar fortune?
Yes. Thanks. I want to start by saying that I think this sho… debate should not be about Taylor Swift, but about any billionaire, as I think, uh, Jessica also agrees. And I should say I also haven’t done any research on Taylor Swift, and… but I hear that she’s a very good person, that she’s generous with her wealth, that she’s a role model for girls, that she has to fi… had to fight the sexist industry.
And these are all qualities that one should receive a lot of praise for. I do not have a problem with sky-high admiration for somebody who creates something of value, but I am against sky-high wealth concentration. So, the question should be, can any person ever deserve to be a billionaire? And to my mind, the answer is no. The main reason is that the influence of luck in our lives is so pervasive. Luck is something that we cannot choose or control.
So, it follows that whatever comes from luck is undeserved. And luck is of pervasive influence in our economic success. First, there’s luck from the natural lottery, which is the genetic makeup we’re born with, which strongly influences our talents, but also our opportunities for good health and for exerting high levels of effort.
Second, there’s a sec… the social lottery, where we were born, who our parents are, the environment we grew up in, who nurtured us, and so on. And research has shown that the first 1,000 days in our lives are crucial for determining our chances in life and our potential to become a billionaire, among other things. And obviously, we can’t hold babies and toddlers responsible for their environment. Third, there’s market luck.
And as the economist, Robert Frank, explains in so-called winner-takes-all market, there are many highly talented people who are all, all extremely talented, so they all could do the job, but, um, when we examine the determinants of who exactly gets picked by the market to be the winner, the role of luck is small, but since it’s the only thing that varies between di- different people, luck is what ultimately makes a difference in explaining who will be the one that dominates the market.
Now, all of this, of course, goes against our self-understanding and neoliberal societies, where we’re constantly told that we are responsible for how well-off or how poor we are, and that we can also take credit, yet the influence of luck on our success is much la- larger than we like to acknowledge. And what follows from luck is undeserved. In addition to luck, there’s also the deeply social nature of what we can achieve as an individual.
There is a huge background structure to our economy, which was largely enabled by previous generations. So, think of infrastructure, um, legal and political rules, ins… technologies. And without that background structure, it’s impossible to become a billionaire. According to a recent estimate by the political theorist, Tom Mollison, up to 99.9% of the income of billionaires is due to this societal background structure.
Now, take any of the current billionaires and put them when they were a child in a country, say, Afghanistan. And we immediately understand the huge importance of those structures to explain economic success. And finally, uh, moral worries about billionaires are not just about dessert.
When we talk about millionaire wealth, we should talk about equal opportunities, about eliminating the harms from wealth concentration, and also about, um, vast… uh, and also the harms from vast inequalities. And I, I have argued in our… my book in here, Jessica, and I surely agree, or disagree, uh, strongly that extreme wealth concentration is often based on dirty money.
It undermines democracy. It’s incompatible with the principle of ecological sustainability. And it’s wasteful because the excess money could be used much better elsewhere to meet urgent needs. So, I think no matter how amazing a person Taylor Swift is, she shouldn’t be a billionaire because no one should be a billionaire.
So, we’re gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re gonna get into a conversation with one another. And we’re also gonna introduce some other voices into the conversation as well. This is Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan. And we’ll be right back. Welcome back to Open to Debate. I’m your moderator, John Donvan. And we’re taking on this question, does Taylor Swift deserve her billion-dollar fortune?
We’ve heard opening statements from our two debaters, Jessica Flanigan and Ingrid Robeyns, both political philosophers, Jessica at the University of Richmond and Ingrid at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Um, I wanna summarize your arguments very briefly, but I also wanna point out that both of you have made the case that this debate is not really strictly about Taylor Swift herself, that we’re talking about the phenomenon of billionaires more generally.
We did focus on Taylor Swift, not just because she’s in the news very much right now and just reached that mark herself, but also because her reputation is for being, kind of, a, you know, pretty decent, nice, respectful person. And that’s a profile that is often at least stereotypically not applied to many, many billionaires. And we can talk a little bit about that.
But to summarize your arguments, um, I heard Jessica arguing that, um, the ability of, of society to produce billionaires rests on principles of freedom and prosperity. She, she also makes the point that, that freedom is good for all.
Even those who are not billionaires are better off when there are billionaires because of the output of allocation of resources and also the fact that it, it indicates there are mechanisms in society that allow for people who want to buy the stuff that billionaires produce, and in this case, Taylor Swift’s music, that they’re able to, and that that’s a good thing.
And it’s good for society overall. But we’re hearing back from Ingrid that we’re overlooking the fact in that argument that so many billionaires are actually the, uh, the result of luck. And also, i- it’s, as she says, ultimately undermining the democracy to have a society in which that can be such unequal wealth.
So, very, very different views there, but I wanna take to you first, Jessica, the Taylor Swift is nice question. I think your point would be that, that is irrelevant, that even if she were a nasty piece of work, she would still deserve her billions if she is, in fact, giving the audience what the audience wants to do with its money.
Well, I think some billionaires, it is possible for them to become billionaires through immoral action, of course, but I do think that when people provide a profitable service, even if they’re personally not as agreeable and cool as Taylor, I think that they’re providing a benefit to people, and that the presence of a profit is a sign that they’re engaged in an exchange that’s mutually beneficial with the people who they’re trading with.
And so, even billionaires that aren’t necessarily as friendly and agreeable are still, to the extent that people are freely exchanging with them, providing a benefit to people by their own lights. So, that’s nice.
What I’m hearing, Ingrid, there is a, a, a real emphasis on individual freedom, and that the freedom is not only to make your billion but to participate in the, uh, in the interaction-
… with the billionaire. W- W- What is your response to that point that there’s a… there’s an, there’s an, an exercise of freedom happening there?
Yes. So, I, I actually agree with Jessica, that the, the exchange, that is a positive sum game as it has a positive value, and that we should protect it. The question is, if you zoom out from that, uh, exchange between two persons, two individuals to the broader structure, you have to ask questions such as, how is it determined what the outcomes are? But my view is that we do need a government.
I actually also think we need a very good government and a transparent and accountable government, which means that, uh, for me, taxes are unavoidable. And then really the question about, it’s not about do… is there a positive exchange? Yes, and that we should protect that.
But the question is, how much can be gained from profit? I’m in favor of profit, but I’m in favor of limiting profit so that the people who accumulate the profit do not come in a position of power where they create negative externalities for others in society and in the world.
Jessica, you mentioned in your opening that, um, to set a limit to the am- amount of money that, um, Taylor Swift could make would reduce her incentives to do the work. Are you sure about that? Does that seem to be the thing that drives her?
Well, I don’t know what drives Taylor Swift because she’s just such an incredible songwriter, but that’s not just the songwriting is the work of the touring, and then the risks, the risks that she has to take by investing in setting up the whole infrastructure to produce this kind of work. And so, there is a, sort of, risk reward calculus that everybody makes when they decide how to allocate their labor and their resources.
And the profit incentive is an inducement for people to try, in some ways, to make it so that benefiting others is also going to be rewarding to them on the back end given the risks on investment or devoting a lot of time to a difficult project. And so, you know, when we were talking about the tax system, there’s just a trade-off.
And so, there’s the question of, like, how much do we want to let the positive sum exchange of the market system generate growth and prosperity, versus, uh, potentially limiting that for the sake of some amount of, like, redistribution? I think that the desire to focus on billionaires, there’s, last I look, like, fewer than 1,000 billionaires in the United States. That is really individualizing social problems.
The, the issue is just brought up, Ingrid, of people who are willing to take the risk that ultimately can pay off with a very, very, very big payday is the thing that, number one, acts as an incentive for some people, and number two, is a way to get a, kind of, engine going that results in prosperity for more people than just the individual billionaire. Can you take on that point of view?
Yeah, sure. So, the incentives problem, uh, plays out for all of us in the sense that, like, will we work more? Will we put in extra hours if there’s no, no material gain? And then there’s a special case of risks that would lead to possibly very high rewards. I, I think the incentive, uh, issue is a real one.
I also think that how I, uh, pro… uh, defend a limit to wealth accumulation would really allow for incentives, uh, but… and find an equilibrium where, where, uh, I think the harms to society of wealth concentration are minimized but it’s brought an equilibrium with still allowing for incentives.
I think the, the view of human nature in mainstream economics, which im… which is actually the, the, the discipline in which I spent most years of my, my life studying, um, is one where we are only driven by material incentives. And that’s not how people are. People actually are… have a lot of intrinsic motivation. All of us do lots of things, uh, because we believe in a cause, because we think something is good for society.
And so, I think the incentive argument is sometimes abused by those who just want to have more, but actually, they would also do the work. So, in my book, I cite the former CEO of Shell who said in an interview to the Times that he had a… I can’t remember how many million euro income a year.
He said, “If I had earned half, I would have done exactly the same.” He didn’t need it in order to perform. And the other thing is about whether people are willing to take risks so that there will then be a big reward at the end, the big prize, and that all of society would benefit.
Yes, we should probably allow for that, too, but then the question is, should that reward at the end be so big that it might create a situation of wealth concentration that could, for example, lead to, uh, disproportion of political influence or harm to, uh, ecosystems because we know that, uh, multimillionaires and billionaires actually have a lifestyle that are ecologically unsustainable, and so on?
And if the end goal is to create new products that are for, for the benefit of everybody’s prosperity, then somebody like, uh, the economist, Mariana Mazzucato, will tell us, yes, but ve… you know, in the ’60s, and the ’50s, and the ’70s, the government also took a lead in this. We had an entrepreneurial state.
What we’ve had with 50 years of neoliberalism is that the government no longer has the capacity to do this. So, this is also, I think, this debate about billionaires underl- underlying it is a debate about values, but it’s also a view on human nature and on, on what kind of government we want and we need.
Well, speaking of, of it being a debate on human nature, Jessica, you’re a follower of the, uh, philosopher, uh, Robert Nozick. Describe that worldview and how that fits into your argument.
I mean, I think that Nozick, like Adam Smith says, people have very strong interest in esteem, as well as interest in their, like, material wellbeing. Um, people are motivated by lots of things, not just money. But also, thinking about human nature and, like, the market motives, there is an expressive element to when people are paid for their labor. That does matter for a lot of people in terms of incentives.
So, Taylor Swift has a song called The Man. And a lot of what the Taylor Swift song, The Man, is about, is about how people are often very uncomfortable with women who make a lot of money. And they have this, kind of, suspicion of her raking in dollars and becoming, like, a capitalist girlboss. And she resents that because she thinks that, in part, like, that, you know, her prosperity, her, like, doing so well, um, if she were a man, would have been viewed as a sign of, like, expressive admiration, but peo- peoples are, kind of, um, suspicious of that.
And so, I think that suggests that part of her motivation is expressive. It’s about having recognition for all of the value of her songwriting and her labor. And that it’s important to her that, that not be kept in some way that she would view as artificial. And so, the profit motive is mixed up with the status motive for a lot of people.
I really like it that you point this, uh, uh, to this feminist reason because in the longer statement that I have prepared for the intro actually had raised the issue, why focus on Taylor Swift? And we have a woman who beats the man at their game, and now we’re gonna put her on… So, I really agree with that. If anybody, then perhaps Taylor Swift, that then we disagree that I think, no-
… nobody can guess she, she can, uh, do it. But what you said about participation in the market, that it also has this altruistic mo- motive, I think, yes, definitely. That’s also why I am… despite that some people push me on this, I’m not an anti-capitalist, if capitalism means pre- preserving the markets and some other features. I am, however, really worried about the endless drive for accumulation.
Ingrid, let me, let me let me just break it on the point that you’re making right now because we heard Jessica say, in her opening, she would prefer that Taylor Swift have the money than the government have the money. What’s your response to that?
Many of our pro… uh, governments are actually deeply problematic right now, but I just think we cannot do without the government. And I don’t, I don’t want to say it’s an ideal, but I think the, kind of, mixture between government and private parties that we had in the years after the Second World War was better because I think it provided for more prosperity and more higher quality of life than the government we now have, which has eroded the welfare state, and which has enabled those who have already most to, for example, uh, influence the tax system in a way that, for example, in the U.S., you now currently have a regressive taxation system.
The richest 400 families pay lower taxes than any of the others. And we know that, uh, the richest people get their income from capital rather than from labor. And they just found w… the rich influence the political system to pay fewer taxes. So, all of this is deeply problematic.
So, I actually think we should really work hard, fight, to get our decent governments back, but then I don’t think… I don’t see how we can solve a variety of collective action problem and properly care for those who are really unlucky with our natural lottery tickets and with our social lottery tickets in lives.
So, for example, the… we’ve seen that social mobility is getting worse, inequalities are growing, and we invest less in education, and so on. This is not something you can leave to private parties. So, that is why I think philanthropy is not solving the solu… solving problems.
I need, I need to just give, uh, gi- give Jessica a chance to break in, but you, you put a lot out there just now. Which part of that would you like to respond to, Jessica?*
So, if the argument is, well, we should have… we should tax billionaires, but then we should also have a better government, I think if we had a more functional, equitable, and fair government, it would be unnecessary to have a redistributive tax system that was setting a hard limit on weal… the accumulation of wealth.
Like, you might have a redistributive tax system, but you could, I would think, in a, in a good government, be able to capture the gains of productive exchanges without placing hard limits on the market in this way. If you have a non-functional government, then you shouldn’t do it because you’d be diverting resources.
So, either way, if, like, the government is a high-quality or low-quality government, I think both of those are difficult for making the case to tax billionaires. And just to talk a little bit more about the, kind of, solidaristic welfare state type values, Jesse Spafford talks about… the philosopher, talks about how a value of socialism is this value of unconditional exchange, and that, you know, we want people to be able to have valuable exchanges that aren’t just based on conditional market interactions.
But, like, we have that, kind of… Look, this is friendship bracelets for Taylor, right? There’s a lot of unconditional exchange and community and solidarity that is fostered within the context of the, kind of, Swiftie universe, right? Governments also shouldn’t have a monopoly on claiming to be, like, sites of solidarity, and that market interactions or market cons… exchanges don’t have to be incompatible with values of solidarity and unconditional exchange as well.
So, it does sound like we have some disagreement over the value of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes, I think, but I, I wanna bring in, uh, journalists and experts on this topic, some of whom are Taylor Swift fans. Um, and first up, we have Anne Helen Petersen, who writes the substack, Culture Study, and her most recent book is out. It’s called Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home. And thanks for joining us. And come on in with your question, please.
Thank you. I wanna talk about Taylor Swift’s jets, her private jets. So many people look up to her and admire the generosity that she showers on all of her employees. But what do we do about the jets?
She has to use these private jets in order to keep up with her touring schedule, right, which is part of the way that she has become so incredibly wealthy, but also, those jets are contributing significantly to the climate crisis in a way that I think is substantively different than, say, asking individuals to stop flying entirely, right? So, I would just love to hear some thoughts on her private jet use.
So, I think that, in general, wh… especially when it comes to conversations about climate change, focusing on individual action in the face of these big systemic problems is often a distraction that is favorable towards the people who are the primary contributors to the problem, so the energy industry and public officials.
And so, we focus a lot on Taylor’s private jets, and we put a lot of blame on individual actors, but the most important thing to focus on for climate change is energy infrastructure reform. And energy infrastructure reform is the only way that we will, in any way, address the problems that we’re gonna face due to climate change.
And having effective energy infrastructure reform requires large-scale public and private changes, so public investment in energy infrastructure, or carbon taxes, or some kinds of political interventions that will require private actors to innovate, to have energy infrastructure reform. That is the most important thing. If we don’t have energy infrastructure reform, nothing any individual does, no matter how powerful they are, even pe… Taylor Swift, none of it will matter.
And if we do have energy infrastructure reform, again, none of it will matter, but that’s the conversation we should be having. And yet, people are very tempted because they feel hopeless in the face of the moral urgency of energy infrastructure reform to focus on individual actors that they think, like, display a lack of eco virtue or climate-oriented virtue.
When… Focusing on those individual actors is counterproductive, in my view, because it distracts us from the, the real eye on the prize, which is energy infrastructure reform, nuclear power or something.
No. I don’t… I think that if Taylor Swift stopped flying private jets tomorrow, it would be very destructive because a bunch of people worldwide would lack the opportunity to go to the Eras Tour, which is something that they really value.
And it would not make a meaningful difference in the long-term prospects for humanity averting the dangers of climate change. It would not matter. The most important thing is gonna… that matters is how we get energy, focusing on, like, nuclear and renewables. And so, why are we focusing on this for Taylor?
I fear I really disagree. I think it’s both the individual and the structures. Regarding the structures, I agree that energy infrastructure reform is crucial, but it’s not the only thing. Actually, we need energy infrastructure. We need, uh, the way we do, uh, the what we eat. But also, transport is also an important one. So, it’s just all of it that needs to change. And there, uh, you talked earlier about expressive value in the markets, uh, Jessica, but Taylor Swift is a role model.
I think if she were to start a debate with all the Swifties on what if anything we need to do to save the planet to make it, uh, habitable for the future, then she will get all those people along. So, I think, um, there is an… So, I think it’s hard for other people to ask, for example, shift your diet to plant-based, which is something we also need to do. Basically, she says, “It doesn’t matter what I do, because the only thing we need is energy infrastructure.”
If energy infrastructure reform happens, none of, none of this, all these individual things, will matter. But I think it’s just… it… the climate crisis and the bio- biodiversity crisis are so severe that I think we need individuals to lead because otherwise, they, uh, uh, they… it will be difficult for others to stay motivated. And at the same time, if we need collective action, which I agree, we also need a government.
Anne Helen Peterson, thank you very much for your question. We’re coming up to a break now. And when we come back, we’re gonna continue the conversation around our question, does Taylor Swift deserve her billion-dollar fortune? We’ll be right back after this. This is Open to Debate. Welcome back to Open to Debate, where we are taking on the question, does Taylor Swift deserve her billion-dollar fortune?
And to be clear, we’ve said this before, we’re not really zeroing completely in on Taylor Swift. We’re talking about billionaires. And even beyond billionaires, we’re talking about accumulation of great wealth. I’m John Donvan. And I’m joined by our debaters, political philosophers, Ingrid Robeyns Jessica Flanigan.
And we’re now continuing with questions from journalists and experts who are interested in and have been following this topic. And I wanna welc- welcome in now, Zack O’Malley Greenburg. Zack is a, a former editor at Forbes, and now has a substack called Zogblog that looks at music and media and money. He’s also the author of a biography of Jay Z, Empire State of Mind. Zack, thanks for joining us on the program. And, uh, what question do you have for our guests?
Oh, thanks for having me. And great conversation. Given our current economic system and the demand for Taylor’s work, do you think it’s even possible for her to not be a billionaire without making her give everything away?
Yeah. You said, is it, is it possible for her to not to be a billionaire without giving it all away?
But of course, she can give it all the way. So, that is the whole… MacKenzie Scott is the example. There’s no need to sit on your money if you’re a billionaire.
Well, I think that it’s misleading to say that a billionaire like Taylo Swift is just sitting on her income, like she’s one of those storybook dragons that’s just, like, nesting on a pile of gold or something like that. What she’s doing is a lot of it’s… I’m hoping. I mean, I hope that she doesn’t have, like, a Bank of America checking account like the rest of us, but I’m guessing that she’s investing a lot of it in the market.
And when she puts her money in the market in that way, what she’s really doing is she’s investing in other companies that might have a shot at providing goods and services that people want, and then, uh, contributing to the general, kind of, economic growth that I was talking about when I was talking about the moral value of those positive sum exchanges that we see in a market context. Now, of course, she could give it away. I’m an effective altruist.
I think we should focus on global poverty causes. But when you talk about governmental reform, that would actually, I think, in the context of Taylor Swift, who is an American, be counterproductive because the people who have the most morally urgent needs are not gonna be the people who the American government would redistribute those resources to the benefit of. And so, you know, should Taylor Swift give money to the Against Malaria Foundation?
Yeah, that would be a good thing for Taylor Swift to do. Would the people who benefit from the efforts of the Against Malaria Foundation benefit if the government confiscated her billion dollars? No, they would not. Even if anybody did benefit, I don’t think they would, but the people who would, you know, get some kind of gains from a redistributive tax system that tax billionaires like Taylor out of existence, would not be the people who need it the most.
Yeah. So, let’s just say we decided to make her give it away. If you go into the breakdown of her billion-dollar fortune, $400 million of that is the value of the work she recorded since 2019. That’s the Taylor’s Version, uh, albums, and some of them are newer, but the Taylor’s Version albums were re-recorded specifically to give her control over her art after she lost control, uh, of her art that was created previously. So, she would effectively have to sell her catalogue that she worked so hard to get back, right? Is that fair?
Yes. So, I don’t know about the details about, uh, Taylor Swift, uh, or her own enterprise, but what I can say is that, of course, we are looking at the situation where, I think, we should never have arrived at.
So, I think just the mar… the taxation on profit, taxation… the capital gains taxation just on income should be, in any case, really progressive, which, in the U.S., right now, it is not. Once upon a time, the highest marginal tax rates in the U.S. was over 90%. Can you imagine? So, this is just, if that were the case, she would probably not be a billionaire today.
Okay. Zack, thank you for your question. I now wanna begin, uh, bringing in Washington Post economics correspondent, Abha Bhattarai, who wrote a big story last fall about the Taylor Swift economy. Abha, thanks so much for joining us. And what’s your question for us?
Jumping off of the premise that Jessica had, that Taylor Swift… if anybody deserves to be a billionaire, it’s Taylor Swift. By that train of thought, is there somebody who doesn’t deserve to be a billionaire? And how do you determine that?
Oh, my gosh. So, there’s, of course, many ways that people become wealthy through unjust means, capture, like, public resources and extract them in a way that’s unjust. You know, they violate other people’s rights in ways that are committing injustice. Of course, like, I don’t think that those people should be billionaires.
Um, sometimes, people become billionaires in a way that’s, like, not really generative to economic growth. They actually will, um, intervene and inhibit growth and innovation so that they can capture more of the benefits of an industry for themselves, but then I think that the solution to that isn’t to address the fact that they’re billionaires but to address the injustices that led them to be billionaires.
What about Ingrid’s point that luck plays such a factor? Does… Is luck… Should luck be a disqualifier in any way since it’s, uh, unfairly handed out? Should that ever be a disqualifier?
… I think her point is, does anybo… should, should the allocation of resources play to talents or not since what… none of us have… are really-
And so, Taylor Swift doesn’t deserve the good luck that she was born in America, she doesn’t deserve that she’s so talented, but it’s also our good luck that she’s so talented. Like, we all are lucky that someone like Taylor, who’s so talented, is producing such incredible mu- music that we’re all able to hear and that we’re all able to appreciate.
And when we do think about the luck argument, I think that that actually is even more favorable to saying that someone like Taylor Swift should be a billionaire because the benefits that people can gain from Taylor Swift’s music, which is, as we’ve all talked about, very cheap to access, you can get on the radio, it’s online, uh, those are worldwide benefits that are fairly accessible, even to the worst-off all over the world.
I would think that if we were to really come to appreciate huge luck, that not just Taylor Swift, but I guess, Jessic, both you and me have in our lives of just being born here and being able not to live under patriarchy that we had 100 years ago and all that stuff.
Um, then I just feel that making that kind of mental shift in my mind of understanding that what I’ve achieved, and this holds for everybody who’s achieved anything, that there’s such a big portion of it that you, um, that you can, uh, trace back to luck. It makes you more willing to, to also just be generous, I think, because you don’t think, “Oh, it’s me who did all of this.” Those of us who were successful have just been incredibly lucky.
Okay. Abha, thank you very much for your question. It got u… It was very provocative. It got us to some interesting places. And really appreciate it. Uh, I now wanna welcome in, Allison Schrager, who is actually a former debater with us, as well as being a journalist and an economist, and is with the Manhattan Institute. Allison, it’s great to see you again.
So, my question is for Ingrid. You mentioned that billionaires create a lot of negative externalities, but are you concerned that they… that if you tax them out of existence, or at least tax them from continuing to work at the level they do, that you will also be giving up in some positive externalities?
Like, I believe it, it was the Washington Post story that pointed out that wherever Taylor does a tour, you see an increase in GDP. So, that is other people getting jobs, other people getting money, and her creating actually a whole, sort of, economy and infrastructure around her that are… benefits all sorts of people all skill and income levels.
Thanks. This is a great question. So, I think the problem is that you basically have to compare full worlds. So, what would happen with the tax level? And what would happen to, for example, other musicians who would have more of a place in the limelight, who are actually equally good or talented, but currently find it hard to get the foot through the door because it’s… this is a winner-takes-all market?
And then it becomes difficult to really say that, uh, if Taylor, uh, Swift were taxed, this would redu… uh, lead to a red… a reduction in material welfare, um, because you… we would have to work through all these effects. And I just think, and this is also just an, an element from… that’s widely shared among economists and philosophers, that the, the declining marginal utility of money, that the more money is dispersed, the higher, the higher overall welfare is.
I’m not an outcome in egalitarian, but I do think people can do more with small pockets of money. So, if, for example, you were to tax… uh, uh, uh, have, for example, a much higher inheritance tax and not give that money to the government, but return it as a basic income to young people, that would create really a lot of entrepreneurship, and, and so on, that I think would be much better for everybody.
I just wanted to, um, go back a little bit to the point of, you know, thinking about the positive externalities and Ingrid’s response that, well, maybe other people could get into the market if there were limits on Taylor, but Taylor’s billionaire status emerges because of what economists are gonna call superstar effects because everybody all over the world is able to access their first choice, Taylor Swift, instead of a lower quality option.
Jessica Flanigan
And then the bigger the market, the bigger the superstar effect, which means that because the market for Taylor Swift’s music is worldwide, that’s why it’s so lucrative for her to be the best songwriter of her generation.
And so, it’s not that everybody else is equally talented, like, the market dynamics we see right now is that she’s so well-compensated in terms of, you know, her global status because all of these millions and millions and hundreds of millions of consumers are saying that she’s their first choice. And so, that’s a signal that she really is gonna have a massive competitive advantage over the next best option.
Allison, thank you very much for your question. We have one more questioner and expert I’d like to bring in. And that’s Richard Wolff, who is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. And he runs the organization, Democracy at Work. Richard, thanks for joining us. And what question do you have today? Also, a former debater of ours. I wanna welcome you back.
Thank you very much. Here’s my question. Looking at Taylor Swift, I am offended that we question her about that rather than questioning Bill Gates, or Jeffrey Bezos, or Elon Musk because they earn much more. Jeffrey Bezos has announced that he has now over $200 billion of wealth.
If you put $200 billion, which Jeffrey Bezos has the right to do, in the safest investment that the stock market of the world offers, which is buying treasury obligations of the United States government, thereby earning $10 billion a year, that’s just shy of $1 billion per month being added to the wealth of a man who already has $200 billion, is it not a moral outrage that has taken over the economic system, and that the system should be as challenged as the morality that upholds such an outrage?
So, I think that what you find outrageous about it is that the, um, end state offends against your sensibilities. A lot of times, people will look at the distribution of resources in a society without knowing the history of, like, how those exchange has happened. And they’ll just say, like, “Oh, that must be unjust. Like, whatever the end state is, I don’t like that. That’s got to be the, the wrong way to go about it.”
And the argument that I’ve been making is that you just can’t know whether or not to be outraged ex-ante just by looking at the pattern. So, if you think that, like, Jeff Bezos violated people’s rights and entitlements along the way in acquiring the amount of wealth he has, I’m open to that possibility, but if you don’t think that he engaged in any kinds of rights violations in the history of how he acquired that wealth, I don’t think that is presumptively unjust just because it has a certain kind of distributive pattern that offends against our egalitarian sensibilities.
Yes. So, I am sympathetic to what… how I understand the question, which is we should keep our eyes on the ball. And for me, eyes on the ball is focused, first of all, on those that are so rich that actually, they can buy governments or even buy, uh, whatever. I mean, there’s also this book that I can recommend, which was written by the American patriotic millionaires, where they explain how the super-rich really layer after layer…
Yes, Tax the Rich. Uh, and basically, they explain how, layer after layer, the richest lobbied to, uh, increase the, the pie of the charity they have. So, I think we shouldn’t talk just about, uh, exchanges, but we should always keep the political economy in, which means we should also focus on firms, not just on individuals, but also on companies and corporations, and also on the, the economy. How have we organized the economy? That, I think, uh… These are, I think, are the real important questions.
Okay. Richard, thank you very much for your question. And now, we’re coming to, uh, to the homestretch. And that’s our closing round in which each of our debaters make brief closing remarks. Uh, Jessica, you are up first with your closing, one more time for you to tell us, in under two minutes, why you believe that Taylor Swift deserves her billion-dollar fortune.
Thanks so much so. So, um, so, we’ve talked a lot about how, like, so much great art Taylor’s work has just enriched the lives of millions and hundreds of millions of people. And so, I said I’ve been a Swiftie since debut. I’ve loved every single album. I love the re-records. She’s doing amazing. I can’t wait for the next album to come out.
My mom is a Swiftie. My kids are Swifties. We saw Eras Tour together in Kansas Night 2, Kansas City. Surprise songs were Last Kiss and Dorothea. Loved it. My best friend, Ryan, he’s on a group chat with other people in my family. And we all talk about mashups in the tour and our favorite lyrics. And we made the friendship bracelets.
And we, um, you know, we’ll hold on to these memories forever, as Taylor would say. And that is the best thing about Taylor’s work. Like sports and, like, other kinds of entertainment products that are producing billionaires today, her music and create a lot of common ground across generational and political and economic and cultural divides.
And in this way, her work is fostering what I would say is a very important form of egalitarianism, which is relational egalitarianism or this spirit of, like, mutual respect and solidarity, and the unconditional exchange of friendship bracelets, and overcoming our disagreements and differences.
And because her music is freely accessible to everybody on the radio and on the internet, she’s really materially benefited a bunch of people who couldn’t access even more expensive forms of leisure and entertainment. And so, all of this stuff that Taylor has done for the world is priceless.
It… You can’t put a price tag on how influential and important her work has been to so many people. And so, in light of all of those social and material benefits that Taylor has brought in to everybody worldwide, it’s surely worth at least a billion dollars. Thanks.
Thanks very much, Jessica. And, Ingrid, you get the last word here. Your closing statement, please, to tell us, uh, one more time, why no one deserves to be a billionaire, not even Taylor Swift?
Yes. First, I want to thank Jessica for the really great conversation and also for teaching me why or teaching me, explaining to me, why it’s so important, uh, that, uh, we should appreciate what Taylor Swift does. And I think I can probably… Although I am not in the Swift universe, I have other, uh, artists that where I’m willing to, uh, really put my money.
But I can… I still think I… I think that despite all the great accomplishments of Taylor Swift, and also the feminist ones, which I really appreciate, uh, she shouldn’t be a billionaire simply because nobody should be a billionaire because I think we should think about what kind of society we want.
Um, and we focus here in on an, on an individual, but really, the bigger question is, what kind of society do, do we want you, in the U.S., I, here in the Netherlands? And that also, uh, has the importance of question, what kind of economy do we want? And exchanges between two people are, of course, very important in the economy, but there is no such a thing as a, as a real free market.
Markets are always embedded in a structure of institutions, of expectations, um, of, um, legislation. And there, I would hope that we could move to a society, um, where we reduce inequalities from the top-down so that this would enable both, uh, fewer influence of the super-rich on the political system via lobbying and other mechanisms, but also that it would free up money that we could use to create real equal opportunities for those that are currently the worst-off, and/or a high-quality public health care, education, and so forth.
So, that’s the, uh, that’s the, kind of, society that I would like to argue for. And in that society, there’s no place for billionaires, unfortunately, also not for Taylor Swift as a billionaire, but she can keep on singing.
Okay. Thank you, Ingrid. And that is a wrap on this debate. And I wanna thank both of our debaters, Jessica Flanigan and Ingrid Robeyns. Uh, I just wanna say we so appreciate that you showed up for this, that you thought about it, that you agreed to have a good faith argument, but a good faith argument, we think, is a good argument. And you participated in that and, and showed to everybody how well it can be done, that it can be done, and how to do it well.
I also wanna thank my fellow journalists and our expert, uh, questioners for bringing some very interesting questions to the table. So, thank you, Anne, and Zack, and Abha, and Allison, and Richard. And finally, uh, a big thank you to all of you in our audience for taking part by listening in to this episode of Open to Debate.
I want you to know that, as a non-profit that is working to combat extreme polarization through civil debate, our work is made possible by listeners like you, also by the Rosenkranz Foundation, and by supporters of Open to Debate. Robert Rosenkranz is our chairman. Our CEO is Clea Conner. And Lia Matthow is our Chief Content Officer. This episode was produced by Alexis Pancrazi and Marlette Sandoval. Editorial and research by Gabriella Mayer and Andrew Foote.
Andrew Lipson and Max Fulton provided production support. Mili Shah is director of audience development. And the Open to Debate team also includes Gabrielle Iannucelli, Rachel Kemp, Linda Lee, and Devin Shermer. Damon Whittemore mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Alex Clement. And I’m your host, John Donvan. We’ll see you next time on Open to Debate.
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