Attacks against Bernard Arnault: “How many jobs did François Ruffin create?”

Trained historian, journalist at Die Welt then a successful entrepreneur, the German Rainer Zitelmann decided, in his fifties, to return to university life. In 2016, he defended a second thesis at the University of Potsdam, devoted to the psychology of the super-rich. Since then, this former Marxist who has become a liberal has published essays evoking prejudices about the rich or about capitalism. For L’Express, he reacts to attacks from the left against Bernard Arnault and explains how France stands out, even among European countries, for a high level of social jealousy.

L’Express: Bernard Arnault, the new richest man in the world according to the Forbes ranking, has become the favorite target of the left, which opposes the pension reform wanted by Emmanuel Macron. “We have in our country the worst offense: the first billionaire in the world is French”, declared Jean-Luc Mélenchon, while Marine Tondelier dreams of “a France without billionaires”…

Rainer Zitelmann: If we look at the list of the richest people in the world, we see that most of them became rich as entrepreneurs. Jeff Bezos with Amazon, Bill Gates with Microsoft, Sergei Brin and Larry Page with Google… For a long time, Sam Walton was one of the richest men in America, just like the Albrecht brothers in Germany. Gold Walton and the Albrechts made their fortune because they made it possible for many consumers to buy products at a lower cost, through their Walmart and Aldi discount stores. Brian Acton and Jan Koum invented WhatsApp and sold it to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014. Two billion people around the world today use this application not only to send messages and files, but also to make free phone calls. Thanks to their innovative idea, the two founders of WhatsApp have amassed a combined fortune of $16 billion.

For an entrepreneur, the fact of becoming rich and the level of this wealth thus depend only on the consumers who buy his product. This is why capitalism is the most democratic system. The French should be proud that a French entrepreneur has been so successful that he now finds himself at the top of this ranking.

According to you, France is the country with the highest coefficient of social jealousy. How do you explain it?

With Ipsos Mori, I conducted a study in thirteen countries on the image of the rich and the level of social jealousy. In no other state are people so envious of the rich as in France. The principle of this coefficient is that each number higher than 1 shows that in a given country, there are more people envious of the rich than non-envious people. France thus obtains a coefficient of social jealousy of 1.26. Second, Germany is at 0.97, against 0.62 in Italy, 0.42 in the United States, 0.37 in the United Kingdom, 0.25 in Japan or 0.21 in Poland. What is the reason ? I think the French, like the Germans, have a very intense love affair with the state.

In your opinion, prejudices and stereotypes based on social class are more important than those based on ethnic differences or gender. Really ?

Yes, that’s what scientific research on prejudice shows. Here are the prejudices against the rich: they are greedy, they make money at the expense of others, they are mostly tax evaders and, above all, they are dishonest. We presented respondents with a list of seven positive and seven negative character traits, asking which ones applied to wealthy people. Of these 14 traits, “honesty” was the least cited in most of the countries tested. This ranged from 1% in Italy and Spain to 8% in the United States. On the other hand, as soon as respondents personally knew at least one wealthy individual, they were much more likely to describe them as honest.

But does anyone really believe that only moral and honorable people live in the suburbs, while the wealthy neighborhoods of Paris are exclusively populated by crooks? The rich are not morally better or worse than the poor.

One of the key factors in this social jealousy is the belief that life is a zero-sum game. The gain of one would necessarily mean a loss for another…

This belief is at the heart of socialist views. Zero-sum thinkers believe that the rich are rich because they took from the poor. But it’s wrong. If that were the case, how can we explain, for example, the fact that in China, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 88% in 1981 to less than 1% today, whereas in the same period, the number of billionaires has increased from zero to more than 500 today?

The same is true on a global scale: before the rise of capitalism, most people lived in extreme poverty. In 1820, approximately 90% of the world’s population was in absolute poverty. Today, that figure is less than 10%. And the most remarkable thing is that over the past few decades, the decline in poverty has accelerated at a rate unequaled in the history of humanity. In 1981, the absolute poverty rate was 42.7%. By 2000, it had fallen to 27.8%. And in 2021, it was less than 10%. Even though the number of poor people has fallen sharply since 2000, the number of billionaires has multiplied by five over this period. The decline in poverty and the increase in the number of billionaires in the world have the same cause: economic growth. This proves that this belief in a zero-sum game does not make sense.

But isn’t it outrageous that some people have such disproportionate incomes compared to the vast majority of the population? According to François Ruffin, “Bernard Arnault does not have 400,000 more merit than a worker”…

It is absurd to think that someone would only have the right to become rich if they worked 400,000 times longer or harder than an unskilled worker. Do Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi train 400,000 times longer than a footballer playing in a regional division club? Certainly not. And please remember that Louis Vuitton alone employs 150,000 people. How many jobs has François Ruffin created?

People generally have a much more positive opinion of the fortunes of top athletes or artists. Isn’t this proof that when wealth is directly linked to merit or work, it is less contested?

In the case of a top athlete, everyone can see what he is doing on television. But the performance of the rich cannot be observed in the same way. Most people don’t understand how an entrepreneur works and how he gets rich. Entrepreneurs do not work longer or harder than others, but above all they have great ideas that benefit many people. Successful entrepreneurs are like great detectives who uncover special opportunities that others don’t see. At the end of the day, it’s always about satisfying the needs of a large number of consumers.

In The Wealth Elite, you have studied the psychology of the super-rich. Isn’t inheritance or social connections the main factors that explain why some people become rich?

We often hear it said today that we could only become rich through inheritance, but this is false. The results of a magazine study Forbes for the United States prove it: in 1984, less than half of the people belonging to the list of the 400 richest Americans had succeeded on their own. On the other hand, in 2018, they were 67% in this case. Each person on this Forbes 400 list is assigned a score on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 means the person has inherited everything and does nothing to increase their wealth, 10 on the contrary shows that they have very strong backgrounds. modest and that she built her wealth on her own, against all odds. People whose score is between 6 and 10 are considered “self-made” rich.

As for social connections, yes, they are important. Billionaires who come from wealthy backgrounds, like Bernard Arnault, have certainly benefited from good connections through their parents. But, above all, these super-rich have become masters in the art of creating new networks of relationships. Oprah Winfrey, for example, who came from a poor background and became the first self-made black billionaire, is very brilliant in the area of ​​relationships.

I devoted my second doctoral thesis to the psychology of the super-rich, which as you say, was published in English under the title The Wealth Elite and has been translated into many languages ​​(unfortunately not into French). My conclusions are that the super-rich have certain specific personality traits. They are often mavericks who like to swim against the tide. They do not seek to assign responsibility for failures or setbacks to anyone other than themselves, or to external circumstances. A psychological test also showed that these people are less neurotic than others, and that they are generally optimistic.

The super-rich are today increasingly criticized not only on the issue of social inequalities, but also in relation to their ecological footprint. In France, private jets were the subject of collective indignation last year. And according to the World Inequality Lab, the richest 1% generate more carbon emissions than the poorest half of the world’s population…

People who don’t like the rich are constantly looking for new “arguments” to accuse them and make them look like bad people. Yes, the rich use the plane more than the inhabitants of poor countries who cannot afford such a means of transport. It’s part of their job.

Today, rich states like France, the United States or Germany are accused of emitting more CO2 than poor countries. But it is simply because these countries are justly poor. If you look at environmental standards, like Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI), you find that rich countries have better standards. Twelfth, France is not in such a bad position. 70% of your electricity comes from nuclear, a carbon-free energy. In this respect, you French are more intelligent than we Germans.

Even when billionaires donate a lot to charitable causes, they seem to be criticized. Bill Gates, whose foundation is the largest charity in the world, has thus become the main target of anti-vax conspiracy theories…

Whatever the rich do, their detractors hate them for it. Even when they do great philanthropic projects like Bill Gates, they are not praised for their actions, but criticized. People who hate the rich think that money should be taken from the rich through extremely high taxes, because the state could better judge what to do with that money.

As part of my investigation for the book In Defense of capitalism (unfortunately not translated into French either…), we tried to find out if the pro- or anti-capitalists were more inclined to conspiratorial thinking. In 33 of the 34 countries surveyed, anti-capitalists were more likely to embrace conspiracy theories than pro-capitalists. Finally, I think anti-capitalism is a form of conspiracy thinking.