NBR RICH LIST 2016: Prosperity’s moral basis
The point is that wealth creation is not a zero-sum game. With special feature audio.
The Higgins family of Manawatu entered the Rich List in 2006 with a value of $60 million. This year, Fletcher Building bought the family’s road construction and maintenance business for $315 million, still leaving the Higgins’ with their ready-made concrete and property interests plus a half-share of the aggregates operations.
Last year, the Rich List valued the Higgins’ wealth at $160 million and this year at $360 million.
This is common with Rich List valuations of privately owned businesses and is often a source of ill-judged contention. The point is that wealth creation is not a zero-sum game.
The Higgins business started from nothing in the 1950s and was built up by the only means – hard work by several generations.
This is the main theme of a book, Bourgeois Equality, by American economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. She outlines how wealth was democratised as recently as the 19th century through the Anglo-Dutch moral vision that “vaunted the value of work and innovation, earthly happiness and prosperity, and the liberty, dignity and equality of ordinary people.” It is the same moral vision that created the western world and one that underlies all the achievements recorded in these pages.
Read the profile here
For full Rich List 2016 coverage, visit the NBR Rich List 2016 home page here
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Nevil Gibson
Fri, 29 Jul 2016
Fri, 29 Jul 2016
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NBR RICH LIST 2016: Prosperity’s moral basis
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