Tag Archives: wealth

Unearned wealth and unmerited suffering: Mini review of 2023

Homeowners are locked into dramatically escalating mortgage payments, and rented property is tipped into lucrative Airbnb short lets. There is real social pain behind macro-economic headlines, genuine suffering among those paying rent, struggling in work or in positions of disability. Yet such a troubling scene need not impinge on the expanded ranks of the super affluent. While the majority of people face challenges to their daily living, life for the wealthy may seem more like a kind of luxury advent calendar – each day bringing a new surprise whether it be the shower of unearned cash, the vehicle of offshore wealth innovations or the shiny baubles of the prospect of reducing inheritance tax (as well as the abandonment of a wealth tax by the political left).

The keyword in this toxic, hyper-divided social context is denial, the goal? To build a world that makes it easy to forget the desperation and chaos. This includes a new round of 5-star hotel openings in London, a record-breaking year for sales of homes worth more than £5m and a record year in prospect for super yacht builders. Yet who can morally lay claim to enough fuel to send a personal rocket to space, the use of a mega yacht to amble the Mediterranean, or possession of a string of residences that require unending private jet travel to access them? It may not be long before secretly sponsored piracy is used to challenge these excesses.

The toxicity of inequality today is now played-out in national politics as a series of diversions or refusals that persist until there is no way out from the truth. Something deeper and more destabilising appears to be at work as the parameters of political life, the fog of social media and the sharp work of legal teams fuels an industry of obfuscation working to deny the extent of tax evasion, to defend tax avoidance, to suggest that economic crime is somehow appalling but cannot be challenged. Grand lies, like the idea that the rich will go elsewhere if tax rates rise, are perpetuated most often by those working for them. Underlying this labour to defend inequality and corruption is a deep malaise in social life, while public fatalism has become widespread as a result of its endemic nature. As one elite after another tumbles in public esteem the idea of a common future and work to prepare for it by a more or less cohesive society is undermined at a time when it is most needed.

One of the best antidotes to denial is the dogged pursuit of tax justice – seeking fair contribution from across a, usually nationally defined, community. This may sound somewhat abstract but we must remember that tax receipts (or their absence) determine whether people are able to access core health, education and other public services. This year the Tax Justice Network wrote on this issue to King Charles asking that he set the tone for debates on fair taxation which would ultimately mean the difference between a well-staffed NHS or the parlous state it is currently in. Meanwhile it seems that the British government cares little about fairness or tax avoidance and finds only weasel words to avoid anything approaching action. The idea of the state itself has been so far denigrated by those who lead and manage it that it is no surprise that those with considerable money would prefer to put their money elsewhere. Why give money to a system that offers further tax breaks to the rich while presiding over the collapse of social conditions? But even here things are more complex, with ‘patriotic millionaires’ clamouring to step up and help out.

Naming the system and its functionaries for what they are is critical. But the political right are on to this, proclaiming communist plots for public wifi or social housing, or of a deep state run by leftist elites. It is hard to swallow this kind of provocative analysis at the best of times. But it is again a form of intentional fogging of the lenses we need to see with clarity the kind of country we have become – a country that sees the premature deaths of tenants, stress and anxiety locked into the housing pathways of millions, lack of action on affordable housing and the callous shadow play of immigration policy. A government formed of the rich and those connected to property interests continues to throw favours at those that don’t need them while those desperately trying to stay afloat are left to drown. We will see what 2024 brings, but it would seem naïve to think that things can only get better.

Thinking the pro-social

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Social researchers spend so much time considering problems of inequality, crime, poverty, ill-health and related questions that they rarely have time to pause and consider more utopian, counter-factual ideas, to step outside the ‘realities’ and constraints of needing to be policy relevant or palatable for other audiences. Many of us act in ways that are self-disciplining, if not self-defeating – we make careful pre-judgements about who will listen and this often prevents us from making proposals or running ideas that might make the world a, dare we say it, better place. This has long been the case but in the context of contemporary forms of unparalleled inequality, ecological crisis and economic instabilities the role and perhaps duty of social researchers is to draw on their evidence and intervene effectively in helping social conversations about these issues. It doesn’t strike me as a terribly partisan comment to suggest that the UK coalition government and its new round of proposed cuts is inherently anti-social (not least because the mainstream alternative/s offer much of the same). Indeed it has managed to triumph in promoting a worldview that suggests precisely any other argument around taxation, spending and investment is either loopy or some kind of powerful ultra-leftist viewpoint that would endanger civilization as we know it.

Today’s economic, political and social environment undermines everyday social life as notions of the shared, the public, the municipal and common space have been fundamentally challenged. The global financial crisis has ended-up granting energy and fresh confidence to narratives that legitimise cuts to the funding of public services, disinvestments in diversionary and creative programmes for vulnerable groups and fresh rounds of public asset stripping. The apparent logic of such attacks is that we cannot afford, do not need and should not pay for arrangements, institutions and provisions that are shared or collectively provided. Yet social investigation now tells us, through convincing and in-depth investigations (like that of Pickett, Wilkinson, Sassen, Piketty and Dorling) that gross inequalities, absences of social insurance and expulsions from citizenship and common provision generate expanding forms of hardship and social problems.

It appears increasingly evident that the kinds of social distress, climate change and other modern evils cannot be contained in convenient or cost-free ways to the wider population. We appear to be seeing the ‘escape’ of social problems from traditionally vulnerable spaces and populations to include those who have more often been able to avoid such problems has led to renewed efforts by the affluent to insulate themselves from these risks (I wrote about this sometime ago as a ‘cut’ in which the affluent are now able to insulate themselves from the costs of inequality that has diminished arguments for promoting greater equality or progressive taxation).

We now find that a number of problems (insecurity, fear, ill-health, violence, education and reducing social mobility) are being exacerbated by new rounds of value extraction from the public realm in the name of increasing efficiencies and economic growth. New forms of anxiety, hardship and concealed exclusion appear to mark this situation, with mounting concern about the long-term consequences of dismantling a variety of forms of common provision and mechanisms that might guard against extreme wealth and income inequalities (notably the NHS but also systems such as water). One critical basis for arguing against this ongoing disaster is to suggest that we are more capable and happy as private, free citizens when freed against the excesses and intrusion of such a dominant corporate-political sphere of influence. In other words, strong forms of municipal provision, affordable health, education, meaningful and financially rewarding work lead not only to some mad vision of a more equal society – they offer deeper and substantial rewards in the form of personal emancipation, freedom and self-realisation than in societies marked by declining public investments and provision. In such contexts what we find is not only troubling forms of social damage and loss (to say nothing of the revolting levels of excessive wealth and consumption by the affluent amidst poverty) but also diminished forms of self, community that ride alongside the vision of a minimal state and corporate capture of assets and profits.

With social and policy thinking often fixed on notions of the anti-social it appears timely to consider the value and limits of the social itself, of the kinds of mechanisms for community participation and self-realisation amidst these powerful social and economic forces. The position of the academy in relation to these debates and to questions of social resilience, emancipation, social justice, the nature of collectivity and forms of social sustenance and protection are also raised by this context. The real lie amidst all of this is that there are sides to choose from when the systemic logic of markets that pervades and dictates so many areas of social life is antagonistic to almost all visions of a sustainable, enjoyable, healthy life for all.

The poverty of urban research: London’s super-rich

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The Shard

The Shard

Space matters, as geographers often like to say to sociologists – it also matters to the very wealthy who are overwhelmingly concentrated around the social asset-rich spaces of London’s super-prime property markets. Unless you have been living in a cave for the last few years this is an issue that is exercising rather a lot of people. What kind of a city has London become and who is it for? The project that I am co-leading with Roger Burrows (Goldsmiths) is focused on trying to understand the changes that the city has experienced alongside the massive increases in wealth, both from international and ‘local’ sources. Instead of looking down, as has often been criticised in sociological research, we are trying to look-up and understand the property markets, neighbourhoods, social circuits and wider impacts of these groups on the city.

For the super-rich and the merely very wealthy London works – it has relatively low levels of property taxation, unrivalled cultural and leisure circuits, sits astride the time line and is a relatively safe city, both to live and do business. But there is a much broader series of political questions that lurks in the background here – austerity, welfare cuts, stagnating housing supply, gentrification, estate demolitions and the general sense that London works for capital rather than its citizens. If anything we feel that this makes studying the rich a more urgent problematic – the displacement of low-income households in the city is by no means disconnected from the rising fortunes and investments of off-shore investors and to the insulated political lives of those making the decision to cut welfare and housing programmes. As we move into the research we are learning much more about how and why the wealthy are choosing London, as a place to live or as a place to park money for a time. Much of London’s gain has been generated by the chaos of other regions globally, or the relative intrusiveness of the state in other countries.

The social splitting-off of super-affluence represents one of the foremost challenges for applied social science. Fundamentally this relates to the lag between models of society, power and civic life and the growth, dynamics and effects of super-affluence that have not tended to be captured through these lenses. In a city like London it is clear that there are those investing in, but rarely living in, the city, but there are also many very wealthy people who seek to be in the city. What do these types of engagement and non/elective belonging imply for politics and fiscal policies?

Gaining contact and learning more is fraught with difficulty, one of the reasons ‘studying-up’ , though laudable, is so difficult in the first place. The very rich present us with difficulties precisely because they tend to challenge the ability of a public sociology to locate, understand and report on them.  In many cases the very possibility of connection with such groups has evaporated, and the state already acknowledges this. In the past the traditional imperatives of research meant that work on elite was difficult – secretaries, various defensive and other power relationships kept social investigators at bay.  But, more recently, services like the Australian Bureau of Statistics and US statistical authorities have expressed concern at what is effectively the growing myopia of the state to super rich citizens whose residential arrangements, such as gated communities, prevent their basic profiling. Instead of concern with unemployed and young males, the perennial problem group for survey researchers, we need to acknowledge the increasing opacity of affluent life – from the state and from public understandings of the full range of social life. The state sees unevenly, and appears to be predisposed to support most those it sees least.

London’s burgeoning high rise landscape appears to be driven by underground pipelines of capital flowing into the city from across the globe. London’s luck brings more luck, the longest run of a nationally-sanctioned pyramiding scheme in the form of its property market. Perhaps worst of all the city of Lanchester’s Capital is a heartless space, money talks and politicians listen. Hostility to migrants but not migrating money, to new homes but not to empty homes speak of a callous money-logic that trumps attempts at stating the case for the city as a place for communities, social life and nurturing spaces. How very old-fashioned and cringe-worthy even to suggest such things.

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One Hyde Park, ultra prime market residences.

Any basic commitment to an equitable social and economic agenda should feel obliged to encompass these changes and move beyond speculation to learn more about the extent, lifestyles, attitudes and daily life of the very wealthy. Debates about taxation, house-building, civic engagement and urban politics cannot proceed without such insights. This is not to suggest that with knowledge might come political action or condemnation, but that we cannot achieve commitments to social equity and more just cities without it.