In a world that often celebrates wealth as the pinnacle of success, Prasenjit Bhattacharya offers a thought-provoking perspective on its true purpose. As Director of Great Place To Work® Institute in India and Sri Lanka, and Co-founder of the Great Manager Institute, Prasenjit has spent over 30 years fostering high-trust, inclusive workplace cultures. His deep expertise in human resources and change management reflects in his views on the intersection of wealth creation and societal responsibility.
In his article "The Case of Giving Back to Society," he argues that wealth is not just a personal achievement but a product of a broader social contract. Drawing on history and philosophy, he explains how modern constitutions have enabled wealth creation by ensuring rights like life, liberty, and property, and why the wealthy must give back to sustain this system. Beyond charity or morality, giving back is about maintaining the very structure that allows success, ensuring that even the most disadvantaged people have opportunities to thrive.
Through this insightful piece, Prasenjit invites us to rethink the role of wealth in society, urging a balance between personal success and the responsibility to uplift others.
To explore these thought-provoking insights, read the full article below.
Opinion Piece by Prasenjit Bhattacharya
Who is your role model for being successful? A self-made person.
Let’s take as illustration the richest people who created bulk of their wealth themselves. Bill Gates, Mukesh Ambani, Elon Musk….
Now look at their ancestors. Were they also the richest? Go back a few generations. How rich were they?
What do you think enabled Bill Gates and Mukesh Ambani become so rich?
Merit?
Assume they are hardworking, talented and have all the good qualities required to be successful. But all these noble and good qualities would not have helped them to build their riches if they did not have the following guarantees:
- Right to Life and Liberty
- Right to Property
- Right to enforce contracts
Who gave them these rights? If your answer is the constitution or the law of the land, you would have realised why the societal contract basis which the rich create wealth is of such recent origin. Most constitutions did not exist 200 years back. A constitution is nothing but a social contract, namely an agreement between people in a state about the rules that govern them. This agreement is often conceptualized as a trade-off between giving up some freedoms and receiving protection for the remaining ones.
Various philosophers have envisioned evolution of society in the following phases:
- Pre-moral and pre-political – survival of the fittest. In this scenario there are no rights. The richest person will only hold on to his property till someone else ousts him. At this stage it will be impossible for any one person to hold on to his wealth or power for a long time. This is what we call as the law of the jungle. Something you see in large parts of the animal kingdom.
- Post moral and pre-Constitution – right to life, liberty, and property are morally recognised, but there is no effective mechanism to enforce them. Rulers often invoked divine authority, but in practice they often got deposed.
- Post moral and post-constitution – this is when people came together to create enforcement structures through voluntary consent. It is only in this stage that the successful people we so admire got an opportunity to create wealth, and more importantly, hold on to their wealth.
The early ancestors of, say, Bill Gates or Mukesh Ambani were unlikely to have been the richest person during the above phases. They got the opportunity to accumulate their riches in recent times (post 18th century) thanks to three features that are at the core of most democratic nations and enshrined in their Constitution:
- Just laws and legal sanctity for contracts
- Fair judges
- Effective enforcement mechanisms
Right to property (which includes all wealth) and enforcement of contracts means that the wealthy have a much better chance at creating more wealth than the poor. Thus, economic inequality is a direct consequence of right to property.
To understand this better, let us compare Mukesh Ambani with a poor pavement dweller. In theory, the pavement dweller also has access to the same societal contract that allowed Mukesh Ambani to get rich. In practice he has the following difficulties:
- Any money the pavement dweller earns go in his subsistence, leaving him with no money to invest
- Mukesh Ambani uses most of his money to make more money, whether by investing in assets or by the simple power of compounding
- Mukesh Ambani has the option to convert his economic power to gain political, social, religious or intellectual advantage far more than the pavement dweller.
This advantage will get compounded over generations for the Ambani family, more so, since they and others who are rich will succeed in thwarting any inheritance tax for their successors.
But if the social contract enshrined in the Constitution leads to more and more pavement dwellers, would majority of people not decide to opt out of this kind of social contract? After all any social contract (and the Constitution is a social contract) requires the voluntary agreement of most people.
It is in the interest of the beneficiaries of the social contract to continue it. Therefore, there is an obligation on Bill Gates and Mukesh Ambani to see that the number of pavement dwellers come down. The social contract is sustainable only if the existing inequalities also work towards the benefit of the least well off or the most dis-advantaged, like the pavement dweller.
The purpose of wealth creation by individuals and corporations is not just making money, but also sustain the social contract that makes wealth creation possible. Giving back to society is a slight and partial redressal of the inequalities so that even the most disadvantaged person has a chance to benefit from the wealth that the social contract allows the wealthy to create.
It is not about charity or morality or religion, it is about sustaining the social contract that makes wealth creation possible. That is why giving back to society should have the enthusiastic support of the well off.
Note: Views published above are personal.
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