Rich World's Folly

2021

As noted earlier, wealth is a way of measuring environmental impact, and this chapter expands on this by looking at the link between wealth and complexity. It investigates how wealth is expressed in the built environment and how this relates to developing inequalities in societies. It looks at how investment in buildings was involved in the 2008 global financial crisis and the changing relationship between house owners and landlords. Flipping is also discussed. The chapter continues by looking into personalisation of the dwelling and aspirations of wealth as a driver of this. This leads to a discussion of house size and the proliferation of large dwellings with few occupants in some societies. The next step is to look at the reading of wealth in commercial and manufacturing buildings, including the quest to own the tallest building. The chapter moves to a discussion of underused buildings, including second homes and ghost cities, as well as considering the cities of the dead. It end...

Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies, 2011

This pair of novels was first published in 1977 and 1980, respectively, but their penetration into the inside lives of investment bankers make them particularly relevant to current reflections on the purpose and value of banking. They might even be seen as prophetic, doubly so when the prophecy preceded the prophet, thus revealing the primacy of grace in both. When Howatch wrote these 1,230 pages, she was a divorced mother enjoying buying houses in different countries, fast cars, and 'facile, transient liaisons'. Afterwards she settled near Salisbury Cathedral, was drawn into the Anglican tradition, was converted, made a vow of celibacy, sold her luxury assets, and donated a million pounds to the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. So, these two books represent the last stages of her pre-conversion period and are based around her knowledge of New York. The reader might be forgiven that this daughter of a Surrey stockbroker had a jaundiced view of the 'Big Apple', but Howatch found a husband, daughter, career, success, and wealth, so she does not have the normal reasons for bitterness. The problem was that she came to be suspicious of wealth and success long before she had an owned Biblical perspective on them. There is very little that is ostensibly Christian in the books, apart from the nominal, almost external, allegiance of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the Eastern Seaboard of the USA to churches that are hardly visited except for funerals, and this only in contrast to the parallel Jewish pillar of investment banking. God and Christ occur most often as expletives, which we may note as a plague of Christian societies, not only in the West, that habitually break the third commandment. She presents these bankers as the apogee of New York society, richer than anyone else, and much of the time able to make political offices subject to their will. So how is Howatch prophetic? She pursues the motivation, methods, and outcomes of ambition for wealth and power. It is a dog-eat-dog, male world of playing deadly games to arrive as senior partner of a banking house. Although these patrician dynasts of the New World may use gangsters to ply them with the private intelligence to exalt or destroy firms and their executives, they see themselves as infinitely more sophisticated and superior. The mob is for Italians, but the bankers kill by ruthlessly trying to destroy each other's careers, and the blood flows just as much. Howatch does not present a mere episode, but another family history that is really rooted in the 19th century and ends in 1967. Moreover she makes her lot paradigmatic of the whole of New York's history. The central character of each book is a Cornelius Van Zale, one the nephew of the other, a nepotism of ambition, for the elder recognises the quality in the young boy. So he bequeaths to him (the nephew) his controlling interest in the Van Zale banking house and even his own name, which is an Americanised version of Cornelius van Zyl, whom she makes one of the Dutch founding fathers of the original colony of New Amsterdam. This dynasty of ambition is what makes the 'plastic' culture of New York tick. She follows its rising ascendancy over Europe, the Wall Street Crash, and the assassination of President Kennedy. It does give an unexpected insight into the elite world of banking, observing how easily Van Zale perambulated the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, in the wake of the collapse of 'pyramids' of paper, which separated retail banking from investment banking.

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The last 15 years have seen a growth of sociological studies of the lived experience of class – studies of suffering, low self-esteem, hopelessness, sense of inferiority, but also pride, sense of entitlement and self-congratulation, snobbery and contempt for others. Many of them have been inspired by Bourdieu's work on symbolic domination and capitals, and lifestyles and tastes. These have rescued class analysis from sterile classification exercises and explored how deeply class affects people and the quality of their lives. In addition, the concept of recognition-initially associated with non-class inequalities and differences, such as those of ethnicity and sexuality-was soon used to argue that class was not merely a matter of unequal distribution of economic resources but of unequal recognition. Far from being a minor consideration, recognition often matters to people more than their economic standing, as it affects their sense of self-worth and position in the eyes of others. Yet despite the importance of these aspects of how class is lived, they are more a response to class inequalities than their cause; if people of different classes treated one another with respect, instead of suspicion and contempt, class inequalities would remain. There would still be major differences in life chances, strongly though far from exclusively shaped by economic processes. The economic inequalities derive not only from minority ownership of assets (particularly land, means of production, money and other financial assets), or indeed unequal pay, but also from the unequal division of labour which consigns people to extraordinarily different qualities of work and the recognition that goes with it. Although research on class benefitted from the broader cultural turn through the awakening of interest in identity, symbolic domination and recognition, it was unfortunately accompanied by a neglect of the changing economic influences on class. In turning away from political economy, sociological research on class largely ignored the biggest change in class structure over the last 30-40 years: the return of the rich. One can only agree with Savage and Williams that it is strange that sociology has taken so little interest in this and the rise of neoliberal plutocracy. It was not merely that it simply wasn't noticed or considered interesting, or that class analysis had become uncritical – far from it – but that theoretical developments in the shape of the cultural turn, together with the post-structuralist emphasis on capillary power, also helped to draw attention away from the arterial economic power of the rich, so that 'elite studies' became 'deeply unfashionable'. Insofar as Bourdieu himself and followers studied elites, it was more in relation to their social capital than the sources of their economic capital.

, 1 relentlessly documents how characters confronting grinding poverty, failed upward mobility, and significant personal and familial sacrifices in India find no respite from squalor and blatant injustice as illegal immigrants in England. Damning in its portrayal of exploited informal labour gangs and the desperate competitive scrabble among illegals for limited work and living space in Britain today, Sahota brings together the developing and the developed worlds to illuminate the structures of immiseration that exist in both. In its portrayal of an almost textbook model of relative poverty, 2 the novel curtly dispels visions of the immigrant dream of a life of luxury in the developed West, and the common perception in rich nations that poverty only truly exists in undeveloped countries. In the novel's Epilogue, however, set ten years later, Sahota makes a surprising about-turn to depict the characters as having achieved extraordinary feats of upward mobility, to inexplicably become middle-class suburbanites. Randeep, whose attainment of comfort within the main storyline rose from living rough under a bridge to the mitigated security of a temporary squat, has now become a white-collar office manager, and has provided a house in a new suburb for his parents to come from India and a studio flat for himself. Avtar, who renounced tertiary education for hand-to-mouth itinerant work, in which cleaning nightclub toilets was a step up from being locked in a shed with an illegal crew cleaning the city sewers, now lives on a sickness benefit, has brought his parents and siblings to 1 Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways (London: Picador, 2015). 2 Relative poverty identifies a national poverty line calculated at 60% of the median income. It is based on Amartya Sen's maxim that "relative deprivation in the space of incomes can yield absolute deprivation in the space of capabilities." See Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992): 115 (italics in the original).

For almost all of history, people were extremely poor. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European countries (and their overseas extensions) began to grow extremely wealthy. Since World War II, enrichment has spread around the world with the " Asian Tigers " of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea becoming wealthy and with Chinese and Indian per capita income growing rapidly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Extensive research has emphasized the material and later the institutional underpinnings of economic growth, but McCloskey (2006, 2010, 2016) argues that changes in how we think, speak, and write about entrepreneurs and innovators explains what she calls the Great Enrichment. In this essay, we explore some of the " materialist " hypotheses for economic growth and explain how changing ideas about entrepreneurship led to modern prosperity. This essay is drawn from an ongoing collaborative project between Carden and McCloskey based on McCloskey's three volumes The Bourgeois Virtues (2006), Bourgeois Dignity (2010), and Bourgeois Equality (2016). In particular, the essay is drawn specifically from Carden's remarks to students and faculty members at

People, Place and Policy Online

It contains nine chapters in three sections, with each chapter written by one or two authors of the six involved. The first section of the book looks at wealth and its distribution. Early on in the introduction presented by John Hills, we learn that the ONS put a value on total UK wealth of some £5.5 trillion (before pension entitlements). Of this around £3.4 trillion is the value of houses and other property. Remember this figure because it turns out to be rather pertinent. Yet the almost abstract nature of the subject of wealth is reinforced when p. 153. Book Review-Wealth in the UK: Distribution, Accumulation and Policy

Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives, 2023

Is political equality viable when a capitalist economy unequally distributes private property? This book examines the nexus between wealth and politics and asks how institutions and citizens should respond to it. Theories of democracy and property have often ignored the ways in which the rich attempt to convert their wealth into political power, implicitly assuming that politics is isolated from economic forces. This book brings the moral and political links between wealth and power into clear focus. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. Part I analyses wealth and politics from the perspective of various political traditions, such as liberalism, republicanism, anarchism, and Marxism. Part II addresses the economic sphere, and looks at the political influence of corporations, philanthropists, and commons-based organisations. Finally, Part III turns to the political sphere and looks at the role of political parties and constitutions, and phenomena such as corruption and lobbying. Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in political philosophy, political science, economics, and law.