Trager, et al. reported in mid-2025 via survey on whether excessive wealth is immoral? Most people do not think so, but members of societies that are more equal and wealthy than average are more likely to believe it is wrong to have too much money.
The relationship between the A) Gini coefficient and B) log GDP (PPP)
per capita with the immorality of excessive wealth.
Currently, the world's eight richest individuals have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of people worldwide. There are two distinct moral objections to such extreme wealth. One is that economic inequality is wrong, an opinion shared by a majority of people worldwide. The other is that extreme wealth itself is wrong. Published in PNAS Nexus, Jackson Trager and Mohammad Atari recruited survey samples mirroring demographics in terms of gender, education, and age for 20 nations, totaling 4,351 participants overall.
Participants were asked "Is it morally wrong to have too much money?" "Too rich" was left unquantified, given broad individual and cultural variations in how much money is considered excessive. People in Russia, Switzerland, and Ireland had the strongest moral objections to excessive wealth, and people in Peru, Argentina, and Mexico had the least objections to excessive wealth.
Globally, the average response was somewhere between "not wrong at all" and "moderately wrong." Nations with high GDP were more morally opposed to excessive wealth than nations with low GDP, possibly reflecting the greater visibility of harms caused by excessive wealth in wealthier nations. Nations characterized by equality were also more morally opposed to excessive wealth than nations with high levels of inequality.
The perceived immorality of too much wealth in 20 nations. Scores are
standardized and whiskers represent the 95% confidence interval.
Credit: Jackson Trager and Mohammad Atari
Individual respondents who valued authority and people being rewarded for their work and skill were less likely to condemn excessive wealth, as were those on the political right. Survey results also revealed an association between moral condemnation of excessive wealth and values related to equality and purity, as well as younger age. According to the authors, the link between purity and condemnation of riches may be related to concerns that large amounts of money and the endless avenues for self-indulgence that money affords are apt to corrupt individuals, reducing their spiritual cleanliness. Extreme wealth, to some, is disgusting.
Here is the paper's abstract:
In some societies, people find excessive wealth immoral, while others are structured so that having too much money is morally neutral or even praised. Here, we show that moral judgments of excessive wealth are distinguishable from moral judgments of economic inequality and examine how people’s moral concerns and national inequality predict the immorality of excessive wealth around the globe. Using demographically stratified samples from 20 nations (N = 4,351), we find that across all countries, people do not find excessive wealth very immoral, with notable variability such that more equal and wealthy societies (e.g. Belgium, Switzerland) consider having too much money more wrong.
People’s equality and purity concerns reliably predicted their condemnation of excessive wealth, whereas loyalty, authority, and proportionality concerns were negatively associated with condemnation of excessive wealth across societies after controlling for the moralization of inequality, religiosity, political ideology, and demographic variables. We conducted a followup study in the United States (N = 315), showing that moral purity is more broadly linked to the moralization of excess beyond wealth, even after controlling for different ways of wealth acquisition and spending. Collectively, these cross-cultural results demonstrate that some moral intuitions shape our moral judgment of excessive wealth above and beyond economic inequality.
More information: Jackson Trager et al, The immorality of too much money, PNAS Nexus (2025). DOI:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf158. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/art … 93/pnasnexus/pgaf158
Journal information: PNAS Nexus
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