Envy, Greed, and Billionaires (Neon Liberalism #66, with David Lay Williams)

Samantha Hancox-Li and guest David Lay Williams, author of The Greatest of All Plagues, discuss the nature of extreme wealth inequality in America and across history, from Plato to Occupy Wall Street. Williams argues that extreme wealth warps the soul, leading to "pleonexia"—a restless desire for more and more that will never be fulfilled. Reducing wealth inequality is therefore not about redistribution or envy, but rather self-protection against overweening power.

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Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:00]**
Welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I am Samantha Hancox-Li. Since Occupy Wall Street burst onto the scene, politics in America has become increasingly concerned with inequality -- with the inequality of wealth, with the increasing share of American wealth that is held by the 1%, by the 0.1%. The presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America as a political force, an enduring political force that continues to win elected offices here and there -- all seem centrally concerned with this question of inequality, economic inequality.

And so I think, to try and talk about that, to talk about how it's been received in history, how it's understood in the academy and in intellectual life, I thought I would have on David Lay Williams. David Lay Williams is a professor of political science at DePaul University and the author of *The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought*, and also the author of an essay at Liberal Currents about some of these issues. So yeah, David, welcome to the podcast.

So I guess my first question is, what's your read on the state of inequality in America -- inequality, discourse about inequality, however you want to take it.

**David Lay Williams [00:01:30]**
Thank you so much, Samantha. It's a pleasure to be here.

**David Lay Williams [00:01:46]**
Yeah, well, maybe I'll frame it this way. I originally signed my contract to deliver this book to Princeton University Press in 2015. My initial promise was to get it to them in two years. The book was not published until 2024. But every time I reached out to my editor to say there's been another delay in finishing this book, I said, "But I don't think we have to worry. People are still aware of inequality and the issues that it generates for our politics."

So yeah, certainly it continues to grow. I went back and looked at the introduction to my book the other day, which was published again in 2024, just 18 months ago. And I cited the fact that it was kind of crazy that someone like Elon Musk, for example, had more than $200 billion, and the last time I checked, Elon Musk now has much closer to a trillion dollars, somewhere in the $800 billion range. And it's certainly on our minds. I don't know if you happen to notice, there was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday saying, yeah, maybe we should be doing something about this, which was pretty stunning to me.

So it certainly hasn't gone away. The gap between the rich and the poor has continued to grow. People are increasingly aware of it, and I think we live with the effects of that almost every day, it seems.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:03:22]**
So what do you consider to be the effects of wealth inequality on America?

**David Lay Williams [00:03:55]**
Sure. Well, I'm going to anchor most of my comments in what the great philosophers said that I talk about in my book, because I'm more an expert on that than contemporary issues, but I think they give us a good framework for thinking about this.

And the first person I talk about in my book is the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato. A lot of people might be familiar with Plato's treatment of tyranny in Book Eight of the *Republic*. But in case it's been a while since people have read it, which is fine, or if you haven't read it, I can give a short synopsis.

So Plato says that tyranny comes from democracy, which itself evolved from oligarchy. And he says, in the late stage of democracy, we still have the lingering effects of oligarchy. We have a great difference between the very rich and the very poor. And there's a certain amount of chaos that comes with this, as he understands it, and as he experienced in the ancient Athenian democracy. And he says that democracy ends up, along with this chaos, furnishing both aspiring tyrants and the abettors of tyranny. Namely, you will have a lot of poor and desperate people who sense chaos and trouble and problems, and you will have the aspiring tyrants, which will include very rich people who are more than happy to promise the poor masses anything they want, so long as they cede all power to the tyrant.

And so I think this is as good a place as any to start contemplating some of what we're dealing with right now, as indeed there are some real concerns about the nature of the current regime that's been empowered, the sources of its political power in this MAGA base, and certainly its cozying up with oligarchic powers at the same time.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:06:32]**
Okay, so here's maybe a slightly pointed question. Why do you think that Plato is relevant today? Right? Because that theory of his -- democracy is contrasted with the ideal system of government, which is ruled by the philosopher kings. You take these children from birth, you teach them about geometry, you teach them about mathematics, you teach them about the forms. Naturally, they come to understand virtue and reason. And the decline into democracy isn't so much a change in institutional structures for Plato as it is a change in the structure of the soul, right? The democratic man is the one ruled by appetite rather than reason.

And so his vision of what democracy is might seem to be a little distant from what we understand democracy today is. He, in social and historical context, is quite distant from us. So I guess, why do you see these philosophers as relevant to the world we live in?

**David Lay Williams [00:07:38]**
Yeah, thanks. That's a great question. And I totally understand your point here about Plato. We don't normally think of Plato as a champion of democracy, because he's not, right, at least in the most forthright way. Arguments have been made that he's much more democratic than he appears on the surface, which I agree with. But certainly, if we limit ourselves to looking at Plato's *Republic*, which is certainly his most famous and widely read dialogue, we get a very serious critique of democracy, which doesn't make him seem too relevant or much like a resource for us in trying to salvage, much less maintain, a democratic republic.

But here's why I find Plato so interesting, especially in combination with some of the other folks I discuss in the book. Plato, not being a democrat in the classical sense, lowercase "d," still finds that economic inequality is a serious problem for any kind of thriving regime. And Plato knew this because he grew up in Athens, and Athens had a history -- indeed, in the first twenty years of Plato's life, they had three class-based revolutions. They had an oligarchic revolution of the rich against the poor, followed by a democratic revolution of the poor against the rich, followed by one more oligarchic revolution of the rich against the poor, all while they were trying to fight Sparta at the same time, externally.

And you certainly get how this is a problem. Plato, even in the *Republic*, says that when you have this kind of distance between rich and poor, you don't even have one city or one polis. What you have are two cities -- one city of the rich, one city of the poor. They can't meet in the middle. They have no commonalities that can help them bond together as a single city. And he says such a city could not possibly win a war. They could have never beaten Sparta with this going on internally.

So it failed in a democracy, it failed in an oligarchy, it would fail certainly in trying to maintain something like a republic. And Plato's classic *Republic* expressly emphasizes: you have to rein in the inequality to make this work. Why? Because the greater the gap between the poor and the rich, the harder it is for them to find any kind of common ground.

And with this question of how is he relevant -- I think we could use someone like Elon Musk again, right? Elon Musk has said, in podcasts -- not this one, but in other podcasts -- that one of the great failures of Western civilization was to suggest that empathy is a virtue. And not only does that run counter to what Adam Smith says in *Moral Sentiments* -- maybe we can talk about that a little bit later -- but it very much runs counter to what Plato wants to cultivate.

And it very much symbolizes the problems Plato said we would get if we allow that gap to grow. Somebody with $800 billion couldn't possibly empathize with hungry people, with diseased populations in Africa. It doesn't make any sense to him that he should feel any kind of empathy or have any moral consideration of those people, and that is, for Plato, a direct effect of his extreme wealth.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:12:02]**
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And for me personally, one of the things that I really take from Plato is the metaphor of city and soul, this idea that political structures are mirrored in psychological structures. And I haven't read your book, but I think you talk a lot about pleonexia in it, which is this concept in Plato of unsatisfiable desire, desire that always craves more and more.

There's another one that I'm very fond of: megalothymia, which is the overweening sense -- not just of the appetites, not just the desire for more food and more drink and more luxuries or whatever, but the desire to be better than others, an uncontrolled desire to always be outdoing other people. And for Plato, it's these kinds of overweening motivations that drive inequality in social structures.

Is that something that you pick up in your book at all, or in your analysis of where we are? Megalothymia, pleonexia -- take your pick.

**David Lay Williams [00:13:09]**
Specifically megalothymia -- yeah, okay. So sure, let me say briefly about megalothymia. This is basically the French notion of amour-propre, which is central to Rousseau's philosophy and his theory of inequality. So this certainly factors into my book, and all my books, in fact, because I've written two books on Rousseau.

But let me go back to pleonexia, because that is what you initially asked about, and it is one of the common threads that works its way through most of the book. So I think you defined it pretty well. It's an insatiable greed. And this concept emerges in ancient Greece, but it's not unique to ancient Greece. We find it certainly in the Bible, for example, although much of that is written in Greek.

But Plato gives a wonderful illustration of what pleonexia is in his dialogue the *Gorgias*, where he likens it to a leaky jug. He says you can sit there and pour more water into the leaky jug all day long, and you will never satisfy it. No matter how much you pour in there, it will continue to take more and more.

And for the ancient Greeks, and particularly Plato, there are three things in life that really are susceptible to that kind of greed. And those things are wealth, which is obviously essential to my book, but also importantly, power. And finally, what you might call status or public applause, which gets, I think, maybe a little closer to the megalothymia that you mentioned -- this desire to be better than others, to be recognized as superior to others. And that, again, gets pretty close to the French concept of amour-propre.

So yeah, Plato -- in fact, to get back to your initial question, your framing of this about questions of the soul -- pleonexia is a problem of the soul, for Plato. It was, in fact, a disease of the soul, as he characterizes it. Someone who has pleonexia has a fundamentally disabled, malfunctioning soul. Not only would it be impossible for them to be a good ruler, it'd be impossible for them to be a good citizen. Because, among other things, it inclines people to committing all kinds of terrible acts against their neighbors and fellow citizens to satisfy their desire for more money or power or status. People who are truly pleonectic will do anything, as Plato says in Book One of the *Republic* -- they'll do anything to satisfy that desire.

And the interesting thing is, Plato introduces this in his dialogues, but it comes up again and again, often even with the very Greek word -- not just the concept, but the very word pleonexia comes up in surprising places. It comes up in Thomas Hobbes in *Leviathan*, in his discussion of the laws of nature. It comes up in John Stuart Mill's *On Liberty*, interestingly, where he talks about this as one of the deep character flaws, the kind of people that we should distance ourselves from, the kind of people we don't want to have any part of. And then, of course, it plays a major role in Karl Marx, for whom pleonexia is substantially enabled by capitalism. It's encouraged by capitalism because of the possibility of infinite accumulation of capital. It kind of stimulates the growth of pleonexia as a kind of tumor on the economy, for him.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:17:39]**
So I mean, I guess that's kind of what I want to ask you about here. You've talked -- we've talked a little bit about the ancient Greeks, but you mentioned also that you see this concept in the Bible, you see it in Mill, you see it in Marx, you see it in Rousseau. We could talk about the German philosophers -- Hegel, the struggle for recognition, seems to be touching on some of the same subject. In economics, they would call it positional goods, right? This is Veblen's theory of the leisure class. So it seems like a recurring concern in history, or at least in philosophical history.

What's your favorite treatment of it? What do you think is the best place to really understand this kind of drive?

**David Lay Williams [00:18:34]**
So at the risk of taking us back to Plato once more, he's the first there, and I think he offers kind of the most extended discussion of it. And I think his willingness to talk about the soul as a fundamental element of his analysis, in a way that happens less with more modern philosophers -- they'll talk about characters and personality and these kinds of things -- but I think honestly, Plato's characterization of pleonexia as a disease, I think actually works pretty well for us.

We can think of it, in more contemporary terms, as a kind of mental illness. And we certainly do talk about mental illnesses these days. We don't talk about pleonexia specifically as a mental illness. But maybe if we took Plato just a little more seriously, we could benefit from that. We could look at people who exhibit the kind of behaviors that concern Plato in a more diagnostic and helpful way, rather than simply, as we do in society, just ending up praising these people as the winners of society, which is what we do more than anything else.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:20:12]**
Yeah, so I am going to be the first to recommend Plato to anybody. The *Republic* is a great book. So I agree with you, basically. I think it is a tremendously valuable text for understanding these questions. But before we fall too deep into the Plato hole, I guess I thought I would ask: we've been talking about these important philosophical concepts, there are books written about them over thousands of years -- how do you see them as applying to society today?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:20:47]**
However you want to take it.

**David Lay Williams [00:20:44]**
From Plato, or just generally? Yeah, okay, sure. It's not hard at all to see how they apply today. Let's move on from Plato for the moment. We can certainly talk about John Stuart Mill, someone a favorite among many liberals. John Stuart Mill is often understood as an advocate of a free market economy, and he is in many respects. He's also a very complex thinker and somebody who had very serious reservations and concerns about inequality.

So one of his major concerns -- something that Plato doesn't really bring up so directly in this way -- is what he calls class legislation. This is in the *Considerations on Representative Government*, where he addresses this most directly, and it also comes up in his *Autobiography* some. And this is Mill's concern about the fact that when you have a handful of very rich people, they cannot help themselves but to commandeer public policy and to bend it to their will. And in contemporary terms, Bernie Sanders, or AOC, or some other contemporary left Democrats -- they call this oligarchy.

So Mill writes a lot about this. He talks about why this is a danger, that when you empower a very small number of people, they're not going to exercise this power to help the poor. They will tell you they will do this. Mill says that they consider themselves to be stewards of the public trust in the same way the feudal masters were posed as stewards of the serfs. The industrial aristocrats in his time, in Victorian England, pretended to do the same thing. "Oh, we're very rich, but that's given us time and leisure to think about what's truly right for England, and we'll guide policy in a way that will make sure that the poor are taken care of properly. And we really don't need the poor people even to vote -- in fact, that could muddy things up."

And Mill pushed back against that, as did many people in England. There was the Chartist movement, and they did expand the franchise eventually through a long and slow and painful process.

But what did Mill say? What can Mill teach us? Well, among other things, Mill said we need to expand the franchise. Mill was a moderate on this. Mill generally preferred slow, progressive change, steady change, but not everything all at once either.

I think Mill, more than someone like Marx -- and they're both writing in London at the same time, and they kind of give us two very different takes on inequality in important respects -- Marx is kind of the more scary person for some people. "We just have to tear down the whole system." Mill says, "Look, we can start these changes within the context of capitalism. We don't have to leave capitalism right away." Although he's interested in all kinds of experiments -- in *On Liberty* he calls them experiments in living. He's interested in socialist communes and the like.

But he says even outside that, within the capitalist system, why don't we have more worker cooperatives? Where the workers own and manage the corporations, rather than a small number of very rich people. And he says if we do this, we're going to certainly equalize wages, because no company owned by all of its workers is going to say, "Oh, well, why don't we give most of the money to this one person because we like him?" No, they're going to naturally incline to more equality.

And Mill is actually optimistic that in a fair and free economy, this would actually end up being a better business. He says that workers would take more pride in their work if they owned their businesses, they would produce better products, and this would have greater appeal to consumers. And he thought, in a free and fair economy where you didn't have a handful of oligarchs stacking the deck, that consumers would gravitate to the products made by worker cooperatives as superior.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:26:00]**
Yeah, okay. Personally, I'm always pretty dubious about worker cooperatives, because if they're not illegal, right, you can have a worker cooperative if you want to, but these predictions -- that the product will be better, that everybody will flock there, that they'll be more efficient -- don't really seem to be borne out. They haven't outcompeted all the capitalist firms. You can get into whatever -- I don't even actually want to get into the theoretical arguments, because that's a whole tedious sidetrack about structures of corporate governance.

What I want to ask you about is a different thing. What I want to ask you about is something you started with: Mill says, okay, we're going to have these rich oligarchs, they're going to say that they're just helping you out, they're just trying to help the poor, but actually they're just going to grab government policy, they're going to engage in what we would call regulatory capture, and use that to enrich themselves.

And certainly it seems like we've seen a lot of this in the Trump administration, especially the second Trump administration -- just this flock of grifters in the Trump court who are there to shill cryptocurrencies or enrich themselves on the government dime or buy a pardon, or all this stuff.

But I also think it's interesting to talk about -- and we keep coming back to Elon Musk -- and we see, on the one hand, it looks like Elon Musk effectively buys himself some time in the big chair, right? He gives Trump $300 million, $250 million, of just cash on the barrelhead, basically, in the final stretch of the campaign. Comes out of nowhere to do it, and as a result, suddenly Trump is like, "Oh yeah, that guy, we're going to bring him into government, we're going to create this Department of Government Efficiency that he believes in. DOGE is going to make the government more efficient," blah blah blah.

And Musk really is running a lot of policy in the early days of the Trump administration. We see huge firings, a lot of chaos. There was a lot of fear that they were going to seize control of this or that Treasury payment system, which they did in some ways.

Probably the thing that is most notable about him, the most durable impact of his tenure at DOGE, is the gutting of USAID, which is -- in the scale of the federal budget -- a little raindrop in a storm, but it turns out to be a very important raindrop if you are in Africa and suffering from AIDS or various other forms of disease. Probably this is going to kill a few million people over the next decade. An enormously destructive, impactful result of Musk basically buying himself political influence.

I don't think Musk is getting rich off of gutting USAID. I don't think DOGE was principally about funneling money to Elon Musk. Rather, it seems to me very much like he was pursuing an ideological agenda, one that is a little bit strange and hard to understand. We've talked a little bit about it in previous podcasts, so you can go listen to those if you want to. But it doesn't seem to me that this is driven by this accumulative drive that we've been talking about.

So I'm curious what your analysis of these events is.

**David Lay Williams [00:29:33]**
Yeah, right. I mean, I think it's at least a couple of things. One is something we talked about a little bit, which is the disabling of any kind of capacity for human empathy, as most people would understand it. So there's that, on the one hand.

And then, on the other hand, is something that we certainly find in the tradition as well. Maybe Hobbes is a good example here. I can talk a little bit about him. Hobbes says that one thing you find with very rich people is that they think they know better than others. It's the way they've lived their lives, the kind of feedback they've gotten from everybody all their lives, which is a lot of sycophancy, flattering. They begin to think that if they say it, it has to be true. If they think it, if they feel it, it has to be true.

And even Plato talks about this. Plato talks about the princes Cambyses and Darius and Xerxes in ancient Persia -- princes who were flattered by the staff that raised them, told how great they were. And then Plato says, when they eventually rose to power, they were complete disasters, because they had no sense of limits -- not just in terms of what they could acquire, but they had no capacity to understand the nature of the problems. They have no wisdom, in his sense -- not just in the philosophical sense of knowing the Forms, which they also don't have, but they don't even know what's going on in their own countries. All they know, all they ever hear from people their whole lives, pretty much, is how great they are.

And of course, these are the kind of people that Socrates made a sport of picking on in the Agora. He would find these successful business people in the Agora and say, "Oh, you're a very rich, successful person, you must know what the definition of friendship is," right? And they always fell for it. "Oh, of course, I know, I'm such a great person." And then the fun of the dialogues is seeing how Socrates deconstructs them so easily and with great humor, with his students standing aside -- including Plato -- just lapping this up as hilarious, exposing these buffoons.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:32:22]**
Basically the Isaac Chotiner of his age.

**David Lay Williams [00:32:27]**
So yeah, right. And maybe I'll bring Adam Smith in here as well. Now, Adam Smith has this passage in the *Lectures on Jurisprudence* where he says that the very rich don't even understand themselves to be accountable to the same moral code as anybody else. They're kind of superhuman. So they don't even think of themselves as being morally accountable in the same way that everybody else does.

And look at the way that Elon Musk reasons about this kind of stuff. It often comes in this kind of futurist sense: "Oh, well, maybe people will die now, but I'm building this rocket ship, we're going to establish colonies on Mars, and I'm saving the whole human race." We've got this kind of perverse utilitarian calculus going on here that he's able to justify. But it takes a certain kind of detachment from ordinary moral norms to get himself there, which is, I think, greatly facilitated by his enormous wealth.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:33:45]**
Yeah, okay. So I guess I kind of want to ask you a little bit about some of the criticisms you've received. And again, this essay that you recently wrote for us talks about this: some people have looked at this concern for inequality, they've looked at the increasing salience of "we are the 99%" kind of rhetoric, and they say, "Well, actually, that's a disease of the soul. That's the disease of envy. You're just jealous. You just think that the ultra-rich have a lot of stuff, and if you take some of it, you'll have more stuff." There's the envy line you can take.

And in some ways, I think that, to be fair to your critics, there is a real line in American political culture that they're picking up on, when people say, "Oh, why can't we have nice things? Why don't we have universal health care? We should just tax billionaires, and if we tax billionaires, we could easily have universal health care." And to me, the math doesn't really work on that. Billionaires are very wealthy, let's be real, but there are also a lot of Americans, and healthcare is expensive. You could not pay for Medicare for All just by taxing billionaires, to take the big example here.

And so I tend to be a little bit skeptical of these kind of redistributionist lines, or at least some versions of it. I guess I'm curious: what's your read of the discourse here? Your critics -- what are they responding to? What do you think of them?

**David Lay Williams [00:35:07]**
Sure. Yeah, so it's a very common critique of egalitarians that their primary motive in arguing for a more equal distribution is that they're driven by envy. Envy is a sin, and therefore the whole notion of being egalitarian is inherently suspect or invalid.

So indeed, this exchange that culminated in this Liberal Currents piece that I wrote for you guys was just responding to one of these critics, right? She says, "Look, much of what the Bernie Sanderses of the world -- what's motivating them is envy. And we don't tolerate that with children. Why should we tolerate that in public policy?"

So yeah, and I confess I do not take that criticism very seriously, because there are a lot of very rational arguments against extreme inequality. And it's interesting: one of the critics of the egalitarians that I cite in one of my pieces in this exchange actually cited John Stuart Mill and his critique of envy in *On Liberty*. And it's actually in that same passage I cited earlier about pleonexia. I think it's in Chapter Four of *On Liberty*. And I found that very interesting. So Mill does criticize envy as an unfortunate disposition of the soul, but then he has all kinds of things to say about how bad inequality is.

So either we can accuse Mill of contradicting himself -- that would be one strategy -- but I take Mill seriously enough as a philosopher that I don't think he simply contradicts himself in ways like this. I think Mill thinks that envy is a bad thing and also thinks that inequality causes all kinds of problems. And you can be concerned about oligarchy, you can be concerned about the effects of inequality on people's character, you can be concerned about the way it introduces social tensions and these other things that Mill and others argue, without having to address envy at all.

But I might even push a step further -- and I don't really do this in the article -- but there's an argument to be made that maybe, if people are that envious, maybe it says something. Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong, too. Michelle Schwarze at University of Wisconsin-Madison has a book called *Recognizing Resentment*, and she doesn't address inequality so much in that book, but she's just becoming more interested in it now. I know she's been teaching a class on inequality.

And oftentimes people have emotions for real reasons. If someone steals my wallet and I get mad -- I mean, Seneca tells me it's bad to be mad, right? He's a smart philosopher. So is it my problem that I'm mad? Or is it the problem that somebody stole my wallet? And we could look at envy that way too. And as I said, I didn't argue that in my article, but I think that would certainly be an argument that we probably should have if we want to flesh this all out with people who are very dismissive of inequality as simply the manifestation of people's insecurities and flaws.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:39:48]**
So I think that's interesting, that you frame it as, yeah, maybe these emotions are a reaction to a real circumstance or a real problem. And to kind of put a sharper point on some of these questions: there's a recent book that people have talked about called *Abundance* by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. And give them this, they're really clear about what they mean by abundance. They say, well, there is a kind of redistributionist frame of politics which says we're going to give you more stuff by taking stuff away from those other people. And they see this on the left and the right. The left says we're going to give you more stuff by taking stuff away from billionaires. But they see it on the right too: we're going to give you more stuff by taking it away from immigrants. This came up in the campaign -- what's your solution to the housing crisis, Mr. Trump? It's mass deportations.

And Klein and Thompson say, well, we want to propose a different model. Their view is we don't have enough stuff to start with along a variety of axes, whether it's housing or energy or et cetera, and what we need to do is make more stuff, and that'll be how we solve the real problems in America today. What do you make of that picture?

**David Lay Williams [00:40:48]**
"Or we're going to take CBS away from the liberals and give it to the conservatives." Yeah.

**David Lay Williams [00:41:21]**
Yeah, so I confess I've not read the book yet, so I don't want to get too into the weeds on this before I start saying things that I can't possibly defend. I would say, in general, I can see some appeal in some of that. I mean, maybe -- I don't know if they address housing as an example -- but yeah, housing seems like an area where it's extremely expensive right now. And a tremendous number of young people trying to start their lives simply cannot afford to buy a home. And a lot of this is artificially suppressed by the lack of housing in this country. And we're not making this any better by deporting all the immigrant labor in this country either. These people are largely building new housing for us. Getting rid of them seems to work against a solution here.

So yeah, I mean, I can certainly imagine cases like that, but I don't want to get too deep into talking about a book -- I know there are controversies about that book too, and I don't know it well enough to engage that too deeply.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:41:44]**
Oh, housing is central to the book. Yeah.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:42:38]**
Okay, so maybe I'll try to bring it back to some of what your critics have accused you of, I suppose, where they say, "Well, look, many of these authors that you're talking about, they lived in zero-sum societies, right? Societies where stuff was extremely scarce. Plato lives in conditions that we would recognize as extreme scarcity, and his luxurious philosophical life is built on, quite literally, slave labor, as are the lives of all the ancient Greek philosophers. And so what prompts megalothymia -- you talked about these revolts in ancient Athens, the oligarchic revolt versus the democratic revolt -- but that's all revolts among the citizens of Athens. These aren't slave revolts. These are one group of slave owners trying to get a better deal over a different group of slave owners."

And so authors like Deirdre McCloskey would say, well, the whole point of the modern world is that we should escape that situation where, in order for me to have more, someone else has to have less. We should just forget about all that zero-sum thinking. And I guess, what's your response to that criticism?

**David Lay Williams [00:43:56]**
Yeah, well, certainly. I don't know if you're familiar with Darren McMahon's book, *Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea*. Great book, really terrific. Came out about a year before my book. And this is actually one of the central themes of his also longue duree history of equality and inequality. He talks about how, as the West has had debates about equality over the centuries, a lot of the arguments for equality have been built on a foundation of inequality.

And the ancient Greeks are a good example of that. You have this culture that's going to have equality within it, but it stands on a foundation of, "But these people are not going to be considered at all." And that happened with slaves, of course, with women. It's happened, of course, with different racial and ethnic groups. McMahon does a good job even talking about fascist notions of equality: "We're going to have Aryan equality, but these other people -- well, they're not part of the calculus."

So that's very real, and I acknowledge this in my book, certainly when it's particularly relevant to authors like Plato. I think when we read them, we have to be aware of this. I don't think that means, however, that their concerns are irrelevant, and that the concerns about inequality are irrelevant.

And bring it back to the zero-sum issue that's raised by McCloskey, but others -- certainly Tyler Cowen, Steven Pinker -- they all talk about this. Donald Boudreaux, with whom I had this exchange. So they argue, well, before Adam Smith, it was a zero-sum economy, and somebody making money -- you could plausibly argue -- was taking money out of the hands of somebody else. And in that kind of context, you could make a better case that extreme inequality is problematic. But in a non-zero-sum economy, kind of post-Adam Smith, in a market economy built on the exchange of goods and the accumulation of capital and growth -- specifically the thing that comes out of Adam Smith is a growing economy -- the argument is that everyone is made better off.

And there are good Smithian arguments for this. Smith -- if you go back and read the first couple of pages even of *Wealth of Nations* -- provides the moral justification for the whole rest of the book. He talks about the fact that there was great equality in hunter-gatherer societies, but also everybody was kind of on the verge of starvation all the time. And we don't want that for people moving forward. So if we grow the economy, we will produce this kind of -- to bring us back to the word -- abundance. We'll create more goods that will benefit everyone.

And Smith even makes the further argument: as you continue to grow the economy, you will increase the demand for labor. And increased demand for labor will raise wages. Smith is optimistic here that there'll be upward pressure on wages over time. That's not the only force controlling wages, and Smith is at the same time concerned about collusion against workers. He's concerned about an imbalance of wealth -- that employers can hold out much longer than workers can in a strike, for example, and therefore can push those wages back down. But overall, he's optimistic that a growing economy will produce these benevolent effects for everyone in the economy.

So all that being stated -- and we can, I think we have to, grant a certain amount of that. I don't think that's all wrong. I think there's a lot that's right in there. And I don't regret the fact that refrigerators exist now and other things that have been brought about by a market economy.

But that doesn't mean that oligarchy isn't a problem anymore. And it doesn't mean that we're still not dealing with these problems of a lack of empathy on the part of the extreme oligarchs. It doesn't mean that we're not dealing with problems of social tensions.

And I guess what my frustration is in arguing with the likes of McCloskey and Boudreaux and the like is a real failure, I think, to acknowledge the complexity of these issues. You can make an argument that inequality introduces problems, but because of the overall abundance it generates, maybe on balance it's a little bit better than what we had before. But that's not the argument that they're making. The argument is that inequality isn't a problem at all. And this is where I think they're bad students of Adam Smith. They like the part from Adam Smith about growing the economy, but they don't acknowledge the way Adam Smith did that yeah, when you do that, you do create these other problems. The problems of whole different systems of morality applied to the rich versus the poor, the lack of empathy, the danger of oligarchic takeover of public policy -- all these things that certainly concerned Adam Smith and should rightfully concern all of us.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:50:38]**
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. To be honest, to put my own cards on the table here a little bit -- one of the reasons that I like Plato, that I like the stuff that I see in your work, is this concern with character, with the internal motivations. Because some of these arguments seem to assume, "Oh, such-and-such businessman got rich under capitalism, under this growing economy, therefore surely what he supports is a growing economy." But that's not really what we see.

When we talk about crony capitalism, we don't see mega-billionaires out there lobbying for stuff that's going to increase economic growth. We see people who are consumed, I think, with megalothymia -- with this obsession with having the most, or not even in this purely self-directed way, but specifically having more than other people. They see competition fundamentally as a threat, and they don't like it, even though competition is what created them and enabled them in certain ways. What do they do with power? They try to crush competition. They try to recreate a zero-sum world, because that's how they think, because that is how their character has been shaped.

And so to me, the fundamental problem with inequality -- it's not that I envy the rich, it's that I think they're dangerous. Power is power. Economic power can buy political power -- not always, it's complicated, blah blah blah -- but we just saw it happen. We all just saw it happen with Elon Musk buying himself a government position and using it quite aggressively, maybe not to enrich himself, but to pursue a kind of, frankly, demented policy agenda, to put it mildly. One where there's a rationale there, but it's not really a sane rationale. It's not a rationale that has been tested by debate among peers, but that just brews in the head of one guy who nobody can say no to. So he's just kind of high on his own supply in that way.

So to me, that seems like the core of the problem here -- that all this stuff about "oh, it's envy" -- yeah, that's really missing the point. Who is most afflicted with envy? It's the rich. They are the ones who are consumed by these kinds of comparative desires.

**David Lay Williams [00:53:07]**
Yeah. And in fact, that kind of brings us back to pleonexia, right? Because you want to say to these people -- if you ever got close enough to them to say it -- "Shouldn't you be happy now? You have everything. You have more money than anyone in the history of the world. Take a victory lap, pat yourself on the back. But why do you feel this impulse to be a menace to others?"

And part of it is this insatiable drive: "I've got to prove that I'm still better than everybody else." And look at somebody like Donald Trump. If we can -- you mentioned that they try to make it a zero-sum game when maybe it wasn't a zero-sum game anymore. Donald Trump won the presidency. Okay, good for you. But it wasn't enough for him to win. He has to imprison his opponents, because that's the equation for him. "I win, I must imprison my opponents now. That's justice, that's the fair world, and I can only be happy if these people are made to suffer."

And yeah, it's a deeply unhealthy disposition for people to have. But a lot of it comes from these kinds of psychological problems that we can trace back to the ancients.

To borrow from Adam Smith one more time -- but via Adam Smith we'll ultimately go back to St. Augustine -- Adam Smith talks about an element of human nature that he's not fond of but says is real. He says that there is this impulse among many people not just to win, but to dominate. And it's deeply concerning to him. And for a lot of people, they can only feel happy if they exercise complete domination and power over others. And that is what St. Augustine called the *libido dominandi* -- the lust to dominate.

Which is -- I teach St. Augustine in one of my classes at DePaul, and students find the *libido dominandi* to be completely fascinating. They're all very skeptical -- "We're going to read a medieval Catholic theologian?" -- like, hang in there with me, this guy is pretty great.

And you can see it in the way that some of these oligarchs exercise power. Even Musk again here is the prime example. What's the most perfect way to demonstrate your power to dominate others? The capacity to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people with a snap of a finger. So that's not even about earning more money, as you said. It's about demonstrating power, which is certainly connected -- money facilitates getting there, having that power. It's maybe not the only route there. Stephen Miller, I don't think, is rich, but would love to exercise the same kind of power. But money certainly facilitates, for some people, the ability to get there and do these kinds of frankly horrific things.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:56:36]**
No, I think that's right. I mean, you talked earlier about amour-propre, this notion in Rousseau that we live, to some extent, in the eyes of others. We want to be recognized. And sometimes we want to be recognized as better, we want to be recognized as winners and not losers. And in some ways, I do think that that is a pretty fundamental human drive. We like recognition. We like winning. That part's true.

But what I think -- I actually kind of hate Rousseau, but I think he's good about this, just on a personal level. He seems like a really repugnant individual. But this concept that he has of inflamed amour-propre -- whether you call it inflamed amour-propre, or you call it megalothymia, or whatever it is -- that this can devour you. That this desire -- it's not just that you want to win when you're playing Settlers of Catan tomorrow night, but this overwhelming drive for domination in all things. "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women." And when that consumes you, you get some real, real evil stuff out at the other end.

**David Lay Williams [00:57:55]**
Yeah. I mean, yes, it's the answer to that. And we're seeing it recently. And again, for Rousseau, it's a fairly normal thing to happen to people in society. But there are better and worse forms of this. Rousseau encourages us, in republics, to try to honor the good things -- to honor sacrifices to the republic, service, love of neighbor, these kinds of things. As much as we can honor those things and make that the source of status -- as far as we can do that, we can try to make our amour-propre work for us.

But the vast bulk of what he says about amour-propre is basically what you said -- that the way it manifests is in these powerfully negative ways, through domination, through utter defeat of competition. And Marx says, of course, this is ultimately what capitalism is. Capitalism is, for him, this competition, and it's a competition to win. You win by putting your competitors out of business. And he says you get status, you get money out of that, and so it goes as capitalism utilizes this very effectively.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:59:35]**
So we could probably do a whole episode, or a whole series, or a whole podcast -- a whole life, really -- about Marx. But I do kind of want to close with just a little bit more about him, and to bring it back, actually, to McCloskey, to Deirdre McCloskey.

In her book *Bourgeois Dignity*, I think she takes a very different tack than a lot of other economic historians. She's trained as an economic historian, but she says: what is capitalism? It is a transformation of the human soul in important ways. It is about the rise of new values of hard work and commerce and thrift, rather than violence and domination and the old aristocratic values. And I think there's something to that.

I think it's not actually a bad thing to want to live a better life, to want to have access to better medical care, or live in a nicer house, or have nicer things by working hard and producing a good product that other people want and are willing to pay you for. I think there is something to that.

And I guess: how do you see this? Do you see this as some fundamental tension where, yeah, you want to do better, you want to have a nicer life, and that's always going to lead you in this pleonectic direction? Or is there a way to try and find a balance here?

**David Lay Williams [01:01:15]**
Look, I want these things too. And if my dean -- heaven help us -- were to offer me a raise, I would say yes. I wouldn't say no. So I think it's a very natural thing for people to want some degree of comfort and security, among other things.

And look, in my book, I'm not generally making my own arguments. I'm not saying what I want in the world. The thrust of the book is why all these philosophers from the past had concerns about inequality, which I do share, I confess.

So the question of whether capitalism can produce the good stuff without the bad -- I think that needs to be a real, live debate. And look, I think a lot of Marx's criticisms of capitalism are right. I think a lot of what Smith said is right. So I'm not a hardcore ideologue on either of these ends of the spectrum.

Maybe I'll bring it back to Mill once more. What does Mill encourage us to do? Well, Mill says, "Look, I don't have all the answers here." What he does know is we have lots of problems right now. He believed in progress. He believed with freedom we could actually have the ability to experiment with a lot of different things, including, as I mentioned, socialist communes. He thought that was important to track. And later in life, he said, "You know what? I probably am a socialist. I think if we could make this work, this would be best." At the same time, though, he was encouraging us to tinker with capitalism, to see if there weren't ways that we could make it more humane.

Now, Marx actually totally resists that. Marx is like, you can't tame this beast. It's like taming the devil. You can't do it. It's the very nature of the thing that's going to produce all these malevolent consequences.

And look, I mean, I know there are people who fundamentally think Marx is right about that, and I enjoy talking with them, because the sincerity of their views about this is appealing to me. And again, I think Marx did get a lot of stuff right. It's not like he's wrong with a lot of his critiques of capitalism. A lot of them are spot on.

So where am I gonna end up? I'm gonna end up less in a policy place than in an intellectual space. And I think the intellectual space also kind of takes me back to this debate that sparked this invitation to this conversation. I think we need to have more conversations, more honest conversations, about what inequality does to society, what's the role of capitalism in this, how scary is socialism. And not just say, because someone -- I don't know -- people are accused of being a socialist for all kinds of reasons, like because they believe in public schools, for example. They're accused of being a socialist.

I think we need to have more rational conversations, free intellectual debate. I certainly don't think we're going to improve things, as they're trying to do in Texas, by telling people they can't read Plato. I don't think that's going to help us make real progress on this. And I think Mill is very helpful for us here: we need to have a free and open discussion, and acknowledge when the other side has the better part of an argument, and see where that gets us.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:04:25]**
Words to live by. David Lay Williams, thank you for coming on the podcast.

**David Lay Williams [01:06:18]**
Thank you so much, Samantha.