The Asset Economy by Lisa Adkins & Melinda Cooper & Martijn Konings

Author:Lisa Adkins & Melinda Cooper & Martijn Konings [Adkins, Lisa & Cooper, Melinda & Konings, Martijn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Economic Policy, Business & Economics, Economics, General
ISBN: 9781509544226
Google: otcBEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2020-10-07T05:00:00+00:00

Class and generation

To capture this reshaping, we might propose a class scheme that is analogous to Marxist and Weberian schemes but that identifies asset ownership as the key distributor and driver of life chances. In figure 1 we offer such a scheme. It has been developed with specific reference to the Australian context and it reflects some of the institutional specificities of that context (which are elaborated in detail in Adkins et al. 2019). But given the shared pathways across Anglo-capitalist societies, it has relevance well beyond the specifics of the Australian case and hence can also be considered an ideal type. It differentiates five classes defined by their relationships to asset ownership, and especially to property ownership: from investors who live off the income generated from diversified portfolios of assets through to non-asset owning classes (renters and the homeless). The scheme therefore captures the stratifying effects of asset ownership and property inflation. While the scheme is classificatory (outlining how different relationships to asset ownership define class positions), it also recognizes that these classes exist in relation to one another: positions in the asset-based class scheme concern the abilities of classes relative to each other to own assets and to benefit from asset holdings. Renters who are dependent on income from labour, for example, are likely to be servicing the mortgages of landlord investors and hence providing the conditions of possibility for investors to enhance their asset holdings and asset-based capital gains. But this is not a zero-sum game where benefits for some rest on losses for others: asset-based class positions have been constituted and distributed institutionally via the macro-level twin processes of asset price inflation and wage moderation.

Figure 1. Asset-based class scheme ¶ Source: Adkins et al. 2019: 18. In foregrounding different relationships to asset ownership, our scheme makes explicit the full implications of the asset economy for reshaping the social structure. The scheme therefore moves away from simplistic models of a bifurcated class structure (e.g. of rentiers and renters or of creditors and debtors) and articulates a top, bottom, and a middle range of classes defined by complex relationships to asset ownership (including mortgaged home ownership and ownership of investment properties). It captures how the population as a whole (outright asset owners, indebted asset owners and non-asset owners alike) is incorporated into the economy of assets and demonstrates how positions within the hierarchy of asset ownership overdetermine the wage relationship.

It is important here to reiterate that we are not claiming that income from wages has become unimportant – it manifestly has not, and indeed for those without assets it may well be an increasingly precarious lifeline. The point is rather that income from employment is less and less itself a gateway to a middle-class lifestyle and increasingly important primarily as a determinant of one’s ability to participate in the logic of the asset economy. In other words, our asset-based class scheme depicts a logic within which other sources of inequality are increasingly playing out. That also means that it is not a matter of simply tracing the ‘interaction’ between different forms of inequality.

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