Is Wanting to Be Rich Wrong? Philosopher Jason Brennan's Counterintuitive Defense

Georgetown University McDonough School of Business philosophy professor Jason Brennan posed an unsettling question on the Vox podcast The Gray Area: Is wanting to be rich actually wrong? His book Why It's Okay to Want to Be Rich aims to persuade readers that wealth is not only harmless to individuals, but may be genuinely good for society as a whole. The conversation cuts to the heart of our deeply held — and deeply contradictory — attitudes toward money.

Our Split Personality About Money

Brennan opens with a core observation: modern people have a "schizophrenic" relationship with money. On one hand, getting rich is seen as vulgar, guilt-inducing, the "root of all evil"; on the other, open Instagram or TikTok and you're bombarded with "get rich quick" content.

He argues this contradiction doesn't just exist at the societal level — it lives inside each of us. "Very few people would turn down a raise, and very few people think their lives would be worse if they earned 50% more." Yet we feel ashamed of that very desire.

It's worth emphasizing that the "rich" Brennan discusses are not billionaires or tech moguls, but ordinary upper-middle-class Americans — people who are quite wealthy by both global and historical standards. "When I talk about rich people, I often mean people like me, like the typical listener of this show — people who are quite wealthy on a historical scale."

Why Money Is Good for Society

Brennan draws on an intriguing argument from Marxist philosopher Jerry Cohen. Cohen contends that money is essentially a "ticket": a $20 bill is meaningless in itself, but possessing money means having access to the world — a form of freedom.

"The more money you have, all else equal, the more freedom you have to live life truly on your own terms, to pursue the things that define who you are." The less money we have, the more our choices are made for us by the world and the people around us.

Brennan sums it up with a sharp analogy: money can't buy happiness, but it can protect you from the worst things that cause misery. "It's not the key to happiness, but it's insurance against suffering." Money's value lies not in itself, but in what it can be exchanged for — leisure, travel, education, and nearly everything else.

Do Markets Make People Kinder?

A counterintuitive finding challenges the conventional wisdom that "money makes people colder." Brennan recounts the story of economist Herbert Gintis: this former Marxist set out to prove that market-oriented societies made people worse, but instead — running real-money experiments worldwide using trust games, ultimatum games, and similar tools — he found that the single best predictor of generosity, cooperation, and trustworthiness was whether someone came from a market-oriented society.

Brennan explains money's duality: introducing money into intimate relationships (like paying your wife to make you a sandwich) signals distance and detachment, damaging the bond. But between strangers, money communicates "I want to cooperate with you on mutually beneficial terms" — it forces you to think from the other person's perspective: "What can I do for them?"

The "Ultimatum Game" used by Herbert Gintis is a classic tool in behavioral economics: one participant receives a sum of money and proposes a split; the other can accept or reject — and if they reject, both walk away with nothing. Under traditional economics' "rational actor" assumption, the responder should accept any positive offer, since something is better than nothing. In reality, people routinely reject offers below 20–30% of the total, preferring mutual loss to rewarding perceived greed. Gintis and colleagues ran cross-cultural comparisons across 15 small-scale societies and found that groups with greater exposure to market exchange actually made fairer offers and were more willing to reject unfair ones — the exact opposite of the intuitive prediction that "markets breed selfishness." The researchers concluded that sustained participation in anonymous market transactions trains people to treat strangers as worthy partners deserving fair treatment, rather than as targets to be exploited.

We're All "Rich" — Really

Brennan uses extensive historical data to reframe what "wealthy" actually means. A typical resident of England a thousand years ago lived on roughly $1,500 to $2,000 a year (adjusted for inflation and purchasing power); for most of human history, people lived in what we would today call "extreme poverty."

Global PPP-adjusted GDP per capita today sits at around $19,000 — an all-time high. This means that people in developed countries who consider themselves middle class are, in most cases, in the top 5% of global income. Even those considered "poor" in wealthy countries typically fall in the global top 20–30%.

He cites a vivid detail: while reading a biography of Cromwell, the book described him as "very wealthy" because he owned six shirts. "I have six shirts I've never worn." The goalposts of wealth keep moving, but measured against history and the world as it exists today, the ordinary middle class in developed nations is genuinely, remarkably rich.

Why We're Harder on Others Than on Ourselves

So why do we feel fine about wanting to be rich ourselves, while harboring hostility toward others' wealth? Brennan offers a moral-psychological diagnosis.

Humans have a persistent tendency to evaluate others more harshly than themselves. When we vote, we believe we're voting for justice; others vote for self-interest. At a party, we think we had three drinks; others had nine or ten. Research has even found that incarcerated felons rate themselves above average on honesty and nearly every other virtue compared to ordinary people.

Another cause is historical baggage: for most of human existence, humans lived under feudal and other exploitative economic systems, where "rich" meant knights and warriors who forced others to labor for them. Our intellectual framework for thinking about money is still stuck in the binary of "old aristocrat versus old serf" — unable to accommodate the genuinely new middle class that has only existed for the past few centuries.

A third cause is evolutionary: the human brain adapted to bands of roughly 100 people, not to trading with billions of strangers. Brennan notes that a complete supply chain for a single drinking glass might involve 50 million people. "Our moral intuitions were designed for small-scale cooperation, not the large-scale cooperation of today."

The Dilemma of Wealth, Charity, and Investment

On whether wealth can be "too much," Brennan argues that rather than a hard line where wealth becomes excessive, the obligation to do good simply grows as wealth increases — much like how a stronger swimmer bears more responsibility to save a drowning child.

But he highlights a widely overlooked fact: most wealthy people don't stuff money in a mattress or swim through a money bin. They deploy it as capital. Take Jeff Bezos: his wealth is primarily Amazon equity, and behind that equity are the warehouses capable of delivering goods to your door in three hours.

This raises a genuine moral dilemma: if your sole aim is to do the most good, should you donate to charity now to help people in urgent need, or invest the money to generate capital accumulation and long-term growth? $500 invested at 7% annually for 50 years grows to thousands of dollars — money that flows into business loans, education loans, and other growth-enabling uses. Brennan sees this not as a case where one option is obviously better, but as a difficult trade-off whose answer is probably some combination of both.

The Dangerous Border Between Wealth and Power

On figures like Elon Musk — people who are not only extraordinarily wealthy but have converted that wealth into political power — Brennan is clear: "You shouldn't get more political power just because you have money."

But his proposed solution is distinctive. The problem isn't money itself; it's money's invasion of other domains — buying political power with cash, buying elite college admissions with donations. These are cases where money has colonized spheres it shouldn't dominate. He draws an analogy: attractive people, charismatic people, funny people all gain undeserved advantages from those traits — but that doesn't make beauty or charm inherently bad.

The solution, therefore, is not to legislate against getting rich, but to reduce the power and privilege that money can purchase.

Brennan is implicitly invoking a core concept in political philosophy: sphere justice, systematically articulated by philosopher Michael Walzer in his 1983 work Spheres of Justice. Walzer argued that society consists of multiple relatively autonomous "spheres of distribution" — money, power, love, knowledge, honor — each with its own internal logic and criteria for fair distribution. The core of justice is not demanding absolute equality within each sphere, but preventing the advantages of one sphere from seeping into and dominating others — avoiding what Walzer called "dominance." Buying votes with money, trading donations for admissions offers — these are textbook cross-sphere invasions, where the logic of money colonizes domains that should be governed by political equality or academic merit. This framework explains why Brennan sees the problem as a failure of boundaries rather than a problem with wealth itself.

The Magic Wand Experiment: Growth Beats Equality

Brennan runs a thought experiment with a "magic wand." Suppose you wave it and distribute the entire global output of a given year equally among every person on Earth: each person receives $19,000 — a windfall for most of the world's population.

But he quickly punctures the illusion: roughly half of global output consists of capital expenditures — roads, buildings, bridges, healthcare, teachers' salaries — that cannot be converted into distributable income. Divide only by actual income, and each person gets around $6,000 to $7,000 a year — still a fairly impoverished existence.

His conclusion: "Growth matters more than equality." If forced to choose between "universal growth with inequality" and "universal equality without growth," he picks the former every time. What concerns him most is not the domestic gap between rich and poor, but international disparities — and genuine, absolute poverty: people who can't eat, who can't survive.

The position Brennan takes here implicitly draws on a long-running debate in development economics between "growth first" and "redistribution first." Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets proposed the "inverted-U curve" hypothesis, suggesting that inequality rises then falls as economies develop. Thomas Piketty and others have pushed back with long-run data showing that the rate of return on capital persistently exceeds the growth rate (r > g), meaning inequality tends to be self-reinforcing — growth does not automatically produce equitable distribution. Brennan's view aligns more closely with "absolute poverty primacy" — his priority is lifting the world's poorest out of extreme poverty (currently defined as $2.15/day) rather than compressing gaps between groups that are already relatively prosperous. This resonates with strands of the Effective Altruism movement: direct resources to where the marginal benefit is highest, rather than pursuing statistical equality.

Market Failures and Our Responsibilities

Brennan acknowledges that no market runs perfectly. The idealized market of Economics 101 — no information asymmetries, perfect competition, fully rational agents — does not exist in reality. But he asks: are market failures severe enough to justify "tearing the whole system down"?

He uses higher education — his own industry — as an example. He has written a book exposing the many corruptions within universities, but that doesn't mean all universities should be shut down; it means specific problems should be fixed. Markets, governments, and democratic institutions are the same: Denmark's democracy functions better than America's, America's better than Russia's — but no system should be discarded wholesale.

On predatory behavior, Brennan draws on Adam Smith's analysis in Book IV of The Wealth of Nations (1776) to counter the claim that imperial plunder made the West rich. Smith calculated that the value of raw materials extracted from colonies was far lower than the cost of maintaining the empire — the real beneficiaries were kings, arms merchants, and a handful of privileged companies, while the colonized peoples and ordinary taxpayers at home were both losers. "It was redistribution from the many to a small class of elites." More precise modern data confirms Smith's judgment: plunder was not the source of national wealth.

How Different Cultures See Money

One illuminating insight: Westerners actually hold a rather negative view of money, seeing it as "profane" and "dirty" — a view that is neither universal nor historically consistent even within the West.

Giving your wife $200 in cash as a birthday gift is considered cold and unfeeling in Western culture. But giving red envelopes at Chinese New Year is an honorific act — money there carries no connotation of dirtiness. Research by Brennan and co-authors Peter Jaworski and sociologist Viviana Zelizer shows that the intuition of "dirty money" is a specific contemporary Western cultural construct, not a timeless human truth.

How to Live Well as a Wealthy Person

Brennan's practical advice is grounded, not dogmatic. If you earn money honestly — meaning the world is better off because of how you earn it — you have no reason to feel shame or guilt, but you should give something back.

Giving back doesn't mean blindly donating to political causes or nonprofits (which vary enormously in quality), but being an effective altruist — maximizing the impact of every dollar — while also thinking carefully about how to invest and how to do good through valuable work. Charity, government, and markets are all necessary; there is no fixed optimal ratio, and the right balance depends on each person's specific circumstances.

As for auditing every brand's supply chain ethics before each purchase, Brennan thinks the information costs are simply too high for ordinary people to reasonably bear. "If you already know a particular company is deeply unethical, don't buy from them. But you can't spend your life researching every link in every supply chain." What truly matters is not the moral weight of any single transaction, but the systemic effect of all those small transactions accumulated — they create an environment in which most people, in terms of positive freedom, are far better off than at any point in history.