176,000,000,000,000 yen. ($1.089 trillion).<\/p>\n
Even when written out in full, the figure defeats comprehension.<\/p>\n
That is the net worth American entrepreneur Elon Musk reached when SpaceX\u2014his rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence infrastructure company\u2014completed its record-shattering initial public offering this month.<\/p>\n
This stock market debut for the ages made him the first trillionaire in human history.<\/p>\n
A fortune of 176 trillion yen does not invite understanding so much as surrender. As one Indian media outlet observed, even if you spent $1 million (roughly 160 million yen) every single day, it would still take more than 3,000 years to run through such a sum.<\/p>\n
To finish the task on schedule, you would have had to begin your spending spree in the Jomon Pottery Culture Period (c. 14500 B.C.-1000 B.C.), a prehistoric age where communities in the Japanese archipelago lived by gathering, fishing and hunting.<\/p>\n
According to Forbes, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now command more than 30 percent of the nation\u2019s total wealth. On the global rich list, the top seven individuals are each worth more than 30 trillion yen; most of them are founders of the most powerful technology companies in the United States.<\/p>\n
Exceptional talent, vision and effort deserve exceptional rewards. Yet, when wealth is concentrated on this scale, it becomes difficult to dispel the suspicion that something more than individual brilliance is at work\u2014that the economic game board itself may be tilted.<\/p>\n
It was while turning over such thoughts that I encountered the term \u201climitarianism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coined by the Dutch-Belgian philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns, it is a provocative idea in political philosophy. Its claim is disarmingly simple: there should be an upper limit on how much wealth or income any one person may possess.<\/p>\n
No economic activity, the argument runs, is possible without a vast foundation of shared resources\u2014public goods, scientific knowledge, infrastructure and social institutions.<\/p>\n
Individual success is never purely individual. Scoring a goal in soccer, after all, is never the achievement of a single player alone.<\/p>\n
Wealth beyond what is required for a life of sufficient quality, Robeyns contends, should be redirected toward public purposes such as health care and poverty alleviation. She proposes a ceiling of roughly 1.6 billion yen.<\/p>\n
Whatever one thinks of the proposal itself, the intellectual move behind it is arresting.<\/p>\n
A tiny cohort now commands colossal fortunes, while the great majority share in little of the bounty produced by the economic order they help sustain.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the moment has come to ask whether a world arranged in this way is truly the one we wish to inhabit.<\/p>\n
\u2014The Asahi Shimbun, June 22<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"176,000,000,000,000 yen. ($1.089 trillion). Even when written out in full, the figure defeats comprehension. That is the net…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[172,191,189,8,188,190,173,170,171],"class_list":["post-45035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-asahi-shimbun","tag-economy","tag-economy-of-japan","tag-japan","tag-japans-economy","tag-japanese-economy","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-vox-populi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}