What’s a million dollars worth? Are people allowed to have a million dollars? This website’s editorial position on billions of dollars, and on billionaires, is already established. But what about millionaires?
James Surowiecki, whose job is to write about money, took the news that Bernie Sanders has a net worth of more than a million dollars to argue that—well, something something, hypocrisy, if you think people shouldn’t be poor, then you should be against anyone, especially yourself, having more money than anyone else:
Bernie’s “It’s totally fine that I’m a millionaire” underscores the problem with the whole “it’s wrong for billionaires to exist” position. Because if it’s wrong for billionaires to exist, why isn’t it wrong for millionaires to exist? No one needs a million dollars to live well.
The reason billionaires are seen as intolerable, while millionaires are OK, isn’t because there’s some conceptual difference between them. The difference is that it’s easy for someone like Bernie – or AOC – to imagine making a million dollars, while a billion is unimaginable.
It was remarkable to see a financial journalist express the belief that there’s no meaningful difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars—even as he described the latter sum as “unimaginable” to people. A billion dollars is, of course, one thousand million dollars. If we represent a million dollars with a dollar sign, like so:
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Then a billion dollars looks like this:
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I have no particular stake in whether Bernie Sanders has a good or bad news cycle, and I don’t have anything like a million dollars myself, or any clear imaginary path to getting it. Rich people overall should be less rich, and their excess money should be taken away and used to fund the economic security of the general population, but the idea that no one can criticize inequality without embracing personal austerity is snide and dumb and comes down to complacency posing as critique.
Still, I can be persuaded that Bernie Sanders doesn’t really need to have a million dollars, either. Bernie Sanders owns multiple houses and has a nice government job with good retirement benefits, and that ought to keep him financially secure for the rest of his life. He does not appear to require a million dollars, on top of that, to live well.
But it’s absurd—and for a writer who covers financial matters, disqualifying—to say “No one needs a million dollars to live well.” It would be nice if that were true. In a more just and equitable society, it would be true. In a country where hundreds of thousands of people declare personal bankruptcy, though, it’s false.
A million dollars is more money than most people have, or ever will possess at any one time. But it is not more money than anyone could ever need—not if their source of household cash stops flowing in, and money starts flowing out in earnest. It is less than 20 years of income at the national median. It’s a sum of money that could easily be used up by losing and not recovering a job, or by having chronic or emergency medical expenses, or by simply surviving deep into old age.
(It’s also the price of an extremely ordinary apartment in New York City, if one wants to start digging into the question of whether owning a home is a “need,” or whether being able to live in a particular city is a “need”—or whether, coming at it from the other side, making major population centers unaffordable for large numbers of people infringes on those people’s own needs.)
This, besides the comma and three zeroes, is the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire. A millionaire—even a millionaire!—is not safe. The defining political fact is not that an ordinary person can imagine somehow making a million dollars. It’s that they can imagine losing it.
