The Empirical Premises of Economic Limitarianism

Economic limitarianism is the view that no one should have more than a certain level of valuable resources, in particular wealth. While the literature on limitarianism is growing, there hasn’t been a solid analysis of its empirical premises. This chapter aims to rectify this lacuna. This project is particularly relevant because some critics have recently argued that economic limitarianism relies on unrealistic empirical premises. In this chapter, we identify the empirical premises to which it is actually committed and evaluate whether these premises are supported by evidence from the social sciences.