Hi ,

What could $497 billion (or £373.5 billion) buy you? One estimate in 2022 said the entire Covid pandemic cost the UK £370bn, so you could fund that and use the remaining £3.5 billion to buy some biscuits or something. You could give everyone in the world $60. If you had that much money in pound coins stacked on top of each other, it would reach around one third of the way to the moon and present a significant hazard to aviation. What I'm saying is that much wealth is very hard to wrap your head around. It's also the amount of money Elon Musk added to his fortune in just one year according to the new Forbes billionaire list.

This is the most anyone's ever increased their wealth in a single year. His total worth is the 22nd largest economy in the world, beating Belgium. He's wealthy enough to buy a presidential campaign (should he chose to) or gain access to power that might reward him with further billions in government contracts. He's certainly wealthy enough that he can brazenly break any number of laws. He's far from alone in this, too – while US billionaires Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ellison or Murdoch using the Trump administration to their own ends is the example we're most familiar with, this is a worldwide problem from Brazil and France to South Africa and India. 

However, this isn't just a warning sign about the way wealth and power have intertwined to reshape democracy, it's a warning sign about the growing structural irrationality of the economic system that underpins everything. Although Musk has made billions through the corruption his wealth affords him, the numbers reported by Forbes are effectively made up. The actual material output of the companies he owns stakes in are a shrinking number of cars sold by Tesla, rockets that keep exploding on launch from SpaceX, and a social network that everyone hates. Elon Musk has become so wealthy on paper that it's warping the entire world economy around him like a black hole warps space time. This valuation of him is utterly irrational. 

After a certain point, an economic system that grows this deranged ceases to function altogether. We've seen this happen in living memory in the way the Soviet economy unravelled during Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. This form of deranged capitalism isn't inevitable or immortal. 

The good news is that more and more people are thinking about what comes next, including ideas like doughnut economics and degrowth that many of you mentioned in last week's poll. We know from extensive studies that people increasingly regard the economy as a human-made system that we can change ourselves. Our job now is to turn that belief into empowerment!

What's Britain's fundamental problem – wealth, power, income, or something else? 

Should we try to move beyond growth, and if so, what could come next? You said:

• "I think a better question to ask is - growth in what? Growth in social services, in education, training and care are all great, needed and worthwhile growth areas. For that reason I've always thought that 'degrowth' can be confusing and unhelpful. Growth in socially useful things is fine and even growth in economies as long as it really is socially useful and environmentally responsible, I wish someone could come up with terminology that helps us understand growth better but I haven't come across better terminology yet!"
  
  
• "Yes. Equity. Sharing paid work and having more leisure. Guaranteed basic income."
  
  
• "Indiscriminate growth is undesirable. Some sectors and activities need to grow. The profits from growth need to be shared more equally."
  
  
• "Growth is impossible. The resources of this planet are finite, and shrinking every day. What should come next is sustainability."
  
  
• "The pursuit of growth comes with significant costs to the environment and to many people’s physical and mental health. It also appears to exacerbate inequalities. Instead of competing for control of scarce resources, an alternative might be to encourage cooperation to provide decent standards of living for everyone, which in turn would lessen the demand for health and social care interventions, reduce crime, and the degradation of the environment."