Foundations for a harm-based extreme wealth line

Ingrid Robeyns, Michael Vaughan and Tania Burchardt

Published 24 June 2026

In this paper, we lay out the foundations for an extreme wealth line, in both conceptual as well as motivational terms. An extreme wealth line is a social indicator that tries to capture the intuition that a person can have too much wealth, and is thus the opposite of a poverty line. An extreme wealth line is a novel proposal, that could play a crucial role in debates on high and rising levels of wealth inequality, in academia, policy-making and civil society. To conceptually develop the extreme wealth line, we first lay out the reasons to hold that one can have too much wealth. We argue that the most fruitful way to answer this question is to focus on the harms that excessive wealth causes to people, societies, economies, democracies and the planet. In this paper, we start by reviewing existing academic research on related but distinct efforts to identify 'the rich' and 'riches lines'. Next, we develop a notion of harm that is suitable for this purpose, and provide a brief survey of the different domains of harms. This allows us to develop a definition of the extreme wealth line, and also clarify what functions we believe an extreme wealth line can play and how it should be distinguished from related yet different claims. We conclude the paper by laying out an agenda for further research, that is needed to develop the extreme wealth line empirically.