In early November, Tesla shareholders approved a $1 trillion compensation package for Elon Musk, contingent on meeting ambitious stock valuation thresholds, clearing the way for the world’s first trillion dollar man. The financial arrangement marks a new extreme in wealth concentration and evokes an image of unbridled capitalism where rewards overwhelmingly flow upward to executives and shareholders. A few days before the approval, Zohran Mamdani marched over the Brooklyn Bridge to the tune of a more egalitarian capitalism, flanked by supporters chanting ‘tax the rich’ and powered by a wave of popular discontent over New York City’s high cost of living. Over a million New Yorkers voted to elect Mamdani as mayor, giving him a mandate to pursue his campaign platform. His policies included raising taxes on wealthy households and corporations to fund an expansive social safety net and uplifting working-class city dwellers perceived to be left behind by the whims of financial and corporate prerogatives.
For those grappling with the tensions between such incongruous models of capitalism – from Tesla’s exorbitant compensation package to Mamdani’s tax-the-rich populism – tugging in opposite directions, Branko Milanovic’s The World Under Capitalism: Observations on Economics, Politics, History, and Culture (2025) offers a sweeping guide. Milanovic, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is one of the preeminent scholars of global inequality and his latest book brings together his wide-ranging commentary, blog posts, and essays under a single banner. The World Under Capitalism resembles a writer’s journal for the digital age containing musings that cover tremendous ground, ranging from taxonomies of billionaires to narratives of globalization to China’s miracle economic growth.
At their most interesting, Milanovic’s essays, with their accessible and sometimes acerbic prose, can resemble neatly wrapped candies that probe at the contradictions deeply embedded in the global capitalist system. In one of his sharpest pieces, he draws parallels between imperial England’s East India Company and the current Norwegian government. Just as the East Indian Company pried open China’s market in the nineteenth century to export opium not suitable for British consumption, Norway decreases its carbon footprint and preaches renewable energy at home while simultaneously remaining one of the world’s leading exporters of oil and gas. In another scathing essay, he indicts on grounds of hypocrisy the elite who meet to discuss inequality at the World Economic Forum at Davos where ‘never in world history will the amount of wealth per square foot [be] so high’ (p. 151). Writing of the elites in attendance, he argues that they have systematically weaponised the language of equality to pursue fundamentally inegalitarian policies, adding ‘they are loath to pay a living wage, but they will fund a philharmonic orchestra. They will ban unions, but they will organize a workshop on transparency in government’ (152). Milanovic’s critiques are not limited to the well-heeled attendees of Davos. He dedicates an early series of essays to criticising the ‘degrowth’ movement – broadly premised on the idea that limitless economic growth is incompatible with ecological sustainability – with a tone bordering on condescension. Fundamental to Milanovic’s disagreement is his tightly held belief that economic growth is one of the most effective engines for remedying global inequality.
Yet, The World Under Capitalism most resonates when it provides a deeper understanding of the underlying reasons why we should be concerned with high inequality and what can be done about it. Milanovic offers several rationales for closing the wealth and income gap between the rich and poor. On political grounds, Milanovic reasons, as others have, that highly concentrated economic power can erode political equality as the ultra-wealthy instrumentalise their immense fortunes to distort democratic processes and cement their interests. While Milanovic notes that a definitive scholarly consensus on whether high levels of inequality harms economic growth has yet to emerge, he argues that high inequality can be damaging to overall economic health to the extent that it becomes exclusionary and discriminatory. When people are unable to access education or health care, their ability to meaningfully contribute to the economy is diminished. Challenges to access bleed into philosophical concerns. As inequality continues to widen, wealthy families have opportunities to pass down considerable advantages to their children that poorer families do not possess, limiting intergenerational social mobility. This reality risks violating Rawlsian principles of equality of opportunity on the basis that in a ‘just’ society every individual is born equal and should have roughly an equal chance to reach their potential. If one accepts this premise, ‘because inequality of income almost directly translates into inequality of opportunities, it also directly negates that fundamental equality of all humans’ (p. 84).
Milanovic’s final rationale for concern over high inequality deserves particular attention. The author, drawing on Adam Smith’s Wealth on Nations, argues that humans are social beings, and our needs are inseparable ‘from the context where they are expressed’ (p. 94). What we deem as appropriate standards of living and ways of life depend on the relative wealth of society and our respective communities. As a consequence, high inequality can render our social relations unstable. This framing takes on greater urgency in our modern age when the needs and tastes of the ultra-wealthy have bourgeoned to levels of such extravagance as to appear almost unrecognizable to the average citizen, as intimately captured in journalist Evan Osnos’s recent book, The Have and the Have-Yachts (2025). In his title essay, Osnos chronicles the recent boom in the luxury yacht market, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and the wealthy’s desire for seclusion and secrecy. The steady growth in the size of yachts captures just how intensely the needs of the ultrarich have spun away from the median. Between 1990 and 2020, ‘the length of the average luxury yacht has grown by a third, to 160 feet’ and ‘the number of truly giant yachts – those longer than 250 feet – has climbed from less than ten to more than 170,’ Osnos writes. (pp. 5, 24). The rising demand for super yachts unsurprisingly mirrors the mounting supply of billionaires. In 2025, the number of billionaires increased by more than 10% with the billionaire class expanding to 3,508 members. There are now 1,135 billionaires in the United States, who have collectively amassed approximately 43% of the country’s total wealth.
In a later essay, Osnos reports on an undercurrent of concern over societal collapse due to high inequality taking root within the glass offices of California’s Silicon Valley and wood-panelled rooms of Connecticut’s Gold Coast. These fears have congealed into a community of wealthy survivalists with a proclivity for underground bunkers and air-filtration systems and airstrips and farms in New Zealand. As one managing director at a venture capitalist firm is quoted as saying:
There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens (35).
Milanovic’s concern for high inequality’s impact on society, texturised by Osnos’s reporting, illuminates that the contemporary way of life of the ultra-wealthy vastly extends the upper bounds of what society deems as possible, in turn placing social relations on a tenuous and unsustainable footing. Put slightly differently, one could not be faulted for questioning the health of a society where the social needs among its highly affluent members involve further insulating themselves on floating apartment complexes at sea or flirting with simply absconding from society all together.
One counter to such excessive consumption that Milanovic proposes is more aggressive taxation on ultra luxury items, such as super yachts and private jets. Retail taxes already differentiate among goods and services and the United States established specific tax rates for luxury items in the 1990s, although they were repealed after several years. The author writes, ‘Exorbitant taxes on luxury items will not bring much money to the Treasury. But their objective is not that they should – their objective is either to soak as much resources from the super wealthy as possible or to make them refrain from such consumption’ (p. 155). Milanovic believes a similar consumption-driven approach targeting the rich could also work towards curbing carbon emissions and addressing climate change. The economist’s logic is that the top decile in income of the global population accounts for just under a majority of the global income, studies have shown that levels of income and emissions are tightly intertwined, and, thus, a small slice of top income earners is responsible for just under half of carbon emissions (p. 139). By homing in on the goods and services that both carry a heavy carbon footprint and are principally consumed by the wealthy and curbing their usage through either taxation or intensive international pressure, addressing high inequality can have a strong second order effect of reducing carbon emissions.
Disappointingly, among the many essays, Milanovic does not discuss in detail the efficacy of a wealth tax, which has been a topic of great public interest. In a passing reference, Milanovic broadly calls for a wealth tax where the proceeds are redirected towards capital grants (p. 88). Yet, in another, he dismisses one specific type of confiscatory wealth tax, which would entail 100% on all wealth exceeding the one-billion-dollar threshold on the grounds of political infeasibility, a rationale that the economist particularly foregrounds throughout the book (p. 154). Momentum behind wealth taxes, which can come in many forms, has steadily grown in recent years around the world. Most notably, in France, a wealth tax known as the ‘Zucman’ tax after French economist Gabriel Zucman has been fiercely debated in the country and would impose a 2 percent tax on wealth exceeding 100 million euros. On October 31st 2025, after the National Assembly rejected the levy, Zucman told French television: ‘I am not disappointed, because it will eventually happen.’ Even in the United States, a wealth tax has crept into the mainstream, first proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren in her 2020 presidential campaign and later introduced as legislation by Senate Democrats under President Biden, though the bill eventually failed.
More broadly, at times, Milanovic’s engagement with wide swaths of issues in The World Under Capitalism through the prism of global inequality can feel like a double-edged sword. His lens produces much needed analytic rewards – for instance in reframing climate action and the distribution of carbon emissions along global income disparities – yet it can also obscure in other respects. Most notably, in a series of essays from the mid-to-late 2010s on migration, Milanovic stresses the worthiness of allowing the free flow of people across borders in reducing global poverty even at the expense of losing cultural tradition. He emphasizes, for those desiring a truly borderless cosmopolitan world, the need for significantly more migration and not simply growing international trade alone. While effective in drawing out the complex economic trade-offs of migration, one can feel a sense of disorientation when reading these pieces in their drawing of bold lines around economic migration and the financial motivations behind the movement across borders while paying limited attention to asylum seekers, refugees, or climate-displaced populations. As Mae Ngai, a historian at Columbia University, recently wrote in The New York Review of Books , ‘Distinguishing “political” from “economic” migration has long been arbitrary and nonsensical, but it is an even greater folly today, when so much migration is the result of civil violence and climate-related disasters – problems that cannot be defined simply as one of the other.’ Even for a forward-leaning economist in Milanovic who laudably foregrounds politics more so than his peers, his narrow focus on the issue of migration increasingly feels ill-equipped in a world where migration is ever more driven by war, civil strife, and climate disaster.
Nonetheless, at a moment when cities are grappling with affordability crises and the ultra-wealthy are building underground bunkers, when a democratic socialist (Mamdani) has ascended to the seat of power in the epicentre of global capital and the billionaire class continues to swell, Milanovic’s collection of essays serve as a valuable reference for understanding contemporary inequality’s multiple facets – from luxury consumption to carbon footprints to educational disparity. While readers seeking a more sober, comprehensive engagement with the Milanovic’s work on income distributions and inequality should turn to his earlier works The Haves and the Have-Nots (2011) and Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (2016), The World Under Capitalism provides important context for navigating the competing visions of capitalism. Perhaps with Mamdani in office, Milanovic’s arguments will increasingly move to the mainstream, and shareholders like Tesla’s will think twice about awarding trillion-dollar pay packages.