Prologue — The Oldest Question

The prologue of From Plunder to Plenty, reproduced in full.

One Sunday morning a few years ago, in Portland, Oregon, my wife and I walked through a street protest while looking for a local coffee shop. It was a bit breezy, and one of the chanters, a woman whose anger was not theater, dropped her sign. I picked it up to hand it back, and as I did I turned it over. It said: “Billionaires Should Not Exist!” I gave her what must have been a puzzled look. I looked at the sign again, then back at her face, which was demanding something of me, and I knew I wanted to say something but could not find the words. Every sentence that came to mind would only have started an argument, and not a useful one. I nodded, politely, and we went on looking for our coffee.

The right answer, as usual, arrived much too late to do any good. What stayed with me was one word on the sign. She had not written that billionaires should pay more, or that this one or that one was a crook. She had written that they should not exist, and no one says that about a fortune they believe was earned. This book is what I wish I had been able to say that morning: from where such a fortune comes, and why, if it was earned, society is better for it. The question that sorts the earned fortune from the other kind is smaller than it looks. Who could have said no? A fortune built on people who could walk away was made. A fortune built on people who had no other door was taken.

She has more company than you might think. Try a small experiment. Ask the next ten people you meet a single question: when the rich get richer, do the rest of us get poorer? If your ten are anything like the twenty thousand Americans economists have surveyed, roughly half of them will say yes—will express, in one form or another, the oldest instinct humans have about wealth: what he gained, someone else must have lost.

And the richer the world has grown, the louder that “yes” has become. It is a movement now. It says the game is rigged. It says the rich got that way by taking—that the billionaire’s yacht was paid for out of the worker’s wages, that behind every great fortune lies not a great service but a great theft. It says that if some have too much, it is because others were exploited and left with too little: that wealth is a fixed quantity, hoarded at the top, and the only decent thing to do is to claw it back and redistribute it. The movement is powerful because the feeling beneath it is powerful—the feeling that for someone else to win, I must lose. And it deserves to be taken seriously, because it is not a fringe opinion: asked plainly, about half of us hold it. The woman with the sign was acting on that instinct.

So, quite possibly, are you. Before you decide which half you belong to, answer one question, and settle on your answer before you read the line that follows it. Between 1979 and 2022, the richest Americans pulled away; everyone knows that part. Over those same four decades, what happened to the income of the poorest fifth of American households, counted the way the Congressional Budget Office counts it, after taxes and after every transfer payment has reached them? Did it fall by a third? Hold flat? Rise by a quarter?

It doubled.

Not the richest fifth. The poorest. And the three-fifths in the middle rose sixty-four percent over the same span.

If you guessed that it fell, or that it held flat, you are with the majority, and that majority contains a great many people who would be insulted to be told they think like the woman with the sign. The gap widened. The floor rose. Both are true. Only one of them made the news.

But is the instinct true?

That may sound like a small question, a matter for economists and their chalkboards. It is not. It is the oldest and most consequential question a society can ask, and almost everything else—our politics, our morality, our sense of what we owe one another and what we may take—hangs on the answer. The question is this: When one person grows richer, does another grow poorer? Is wealth a fixed pie that we can only divide, or the work of human hands, so that the pie itself can grow?

If wealth is a fixed pie, then every fortune really is stolen, envy really is a form of justice, and the highest work of government is to seize the pie and redistribute the slices. But if wealth can be created—if two people trading, or one mind inventing, can leave the world with more than before, then the fixed-pie crusade is not justice at all. It is the surest way to burn the pie in the name of sharing it.

I want to state my argument plainly at the outset, so you can watch me try to prove it: the fixed-pie instinct is wrong, and that is fantastic news, because it means nobody has to lose.

But I am not going to tell you the instinct was always wrong. That is the twist, and it is the key to everything that follows. For almost the entire span of human existence, three hundred thousand years of it, the fixed-pie feeling was right. Scarcity was the first law of the world, and everything about human life followed from it. Wealth really was a fixed hoard of land and grain and gold. Getting it really did mean taking it from someone weaker. Kings really did grow rich by beggaring their neighbors, and the ordinary man really did live and die at the raw edge of hunger, because that is what a world without economic growth condemns him to. Our ancestors were not fools to see the world as a fixed pot to be fought over. They were reporting the only world that had ever existed. No wonder the instinct runs so deep. For all but the last two centuries, it was not an instinct at all. It was simply true.

And then, around the year 1800, in a geological eyeblink, the truth changed. In one corner of the world a handful of ideas took hold, and a handful of societies dared to build their laws around them, and for the first time in history, the pie began to grow. Ordinary people, for the first time, could get richer without anyone else getting poorer, because they had found the one thing no conqueror had ever possessed: a way to create wealth instead of merely seizing it. The result is the world you are sitting in—a world so drenched in abundance that its central political worry is no longer how to survive the winter but how to divide the surplus. And the new wealth was never merely money. It was antibiotics and vaccines, refrigeration and pasteurized milk, the railroad, the airliner, the telephone, the library that now fits in a pocket, and almost none of it can be hoarded. The penicillin that saves a rich child is the same dose that saves a poor one. The teenager’s phone is the same model the billionaire carries. The first law of the world has been repealed, and what we still call scarce today will not stay scarce, so long as the repeal is left standing.

In the two centuries since 1820, the share of humanity living in crushing poverty fell from roughly three in four to one in ten. It is the greatest thing that has ever happened to human beings, and most of us have never been told it happened at all.

This is the journey the book will trace: how our species climbed out of a world of plunder and into a world of plenty, and what made the climb possible. The answer is not better tools or harder work or a bigger surplus; humanity had piled up all of those for ten thousand years without escaping. It was something stranger and more fragile: a new idea about the dignity and liberty of ordinary people, and the two plain institutions that idea made possible—property, so that a person could keep what he created, and prices, so that strangers could tell him what was worth creating. Those two are the thread of this book. Follow them and the whole story holds together; cut either one, as we shall watch men do again and again, and the plenty stops.

And because it was an idea, it can be forgotten. That is the warning folded inside the good news, and the source of whatever urgency you hear in these pages. The positive-sum world is not the natural state of things; it is a recent, hard-won, and historically bizarre exception to a rule that held for the whole of the human past. The fixed-pie feeling never died. It is wired too deep for that. And today, all around the wealthy world, it is stirring again—dressed in the language of fairness, armed with the machinery of the modern state, and certain, as it has always been certain, that the way to help the poor is to expropriate the rich.

The people who feel this are very often decent, and their anger at real suffering is very often justified. But if they win, they will not redistribute the plenty. They will end it, and hand our grandchildren back the world of scarcity and takings we spent so long escaping.

I mean to change how you see all of this—the paycheck, the price tag, the trade, the tax, the fortune, and the fury. By the last page, I want the fixed pie to look to you not like common sense but like the tidy, deadly illusion it is.

We begin where the illusion is easiest to see: with a game.

Chapter 1 begins with that game.