Читать книгу We Have Never Been Middle Class - Hadas Weiss - Страница 8

What do we talk about when we talk about the middle class? The critical half of the term is not “class” but “middle.” It evokes a spectrum of gradated positions with people moving to and fro between lower and upper reaches. The middleness of middle class suggests space: we move socially and economically relative to people occupying higher or lower positions, inching closer to some and then to others. It also suggests movement in time: awareness that within the span of our own lifetimes we can ascend or descend. Consecutive generations of our families may do the same, impelling, continuing or altering our greater upward or downward trajectories. Our perpetual movement bespeaks restlessness. The middle class is sometimes spoken about as an aspirational group, drawn by prosperity within reach, and sometimes as an insecure one, haunted by a fear of falling. It is, as social critic Barbara Ehrenreich¹ put it, evanescent: requiring ever-renewed effort to assert and maintain one’s social position.

In contrast to “middle,” which is amplified in the way we talk about the middle class, “class” is toned down. In fact, class is muted to such an extent that, as some theorists have noted, saying “middle class” is almost like saying “no class at all.”² They point out how middle classness summons neither a deeply held sense of identity (just compare it to things like race, religion, nationality, gender or sexual orientation), nor empathic allegiance to members of the same group, if a group is even acknowledged. One reason is that, unlike with slaves and masters, serfs and lords, or even, tellingly, workers and capitalists, there is no class to which the middle class stands in clear opposition. Instead, it replaces cohesive and demarcated groups with an image of multitudes of disconnected individuals. Each comes fully equipped with a personal history, drive and destiny, as if no fixed definition could possibly capture who they are, what they do and how they are likely to fare.

What is more, in recent decades we have come to perceive society as being comprised, quite simply, of middle classes and others. In this perception, “middle class” stands for normality: individuals who stand on their own two feet and progress or decline in a conventional way, which is to say systematically, independently and (barring exceptional occurrences) incrementally, without significant upheaval. This is seen as reflecting the standard nature of their investment and its rewards, or of their inertia and its penalties. Directly above the middle class, per public imagination, lounge elites who are spared the effort of ascension and the danger of decline; while immediately below idle about the welfare-dependent underclasses and other marginal populations if our frame of reference is advanced economies, or destitute masses if we are looking further afield, all of whom appear, in contrast, to be shackled to their misery.

The idea of middle class as a class-neutral norm of individual self-determination is a denial of what “class” stands for. It negates the notion that indirect and impersonal forces might delimit our position in society or preordain the opportunities we will have and the quality of life we will enjoy. Class is stronger in indicating an external determination of our lives than categories like race, gender and religion. This is because social and economic opportunities are inherent in the concept of class (as opposed to, say, a member of a race or gender group being assigned a certain fate through the recognizable influence of place- and time-specific racism or sexism). To reject class or (what amounts to the same thing) to assert middle classness is to spurn the notion that our chances of success in life might be shaped by anything other than our own desires, capacities and, above all, efforts. And the middle class does this in a big way.

The potential to become middle class suggests that social mobility—both rising and falling—is our own doing. Finding the referent for “middle class” is tricky precisely because its boundaries are so fluid. Indeed, they have to be fluid for mobility to work. “Middle class” stands for open-ended meritocracy, holding forth a promise of entry to anyone who invests and the threat of decline over anyone who doesn’t. Delaying gratification, sacrificing some consumption in order to put something aside, taking on the risk and commitment of indebted ownership and investing in education and training, in a home, in a savings plan, in a pension, are all middle-class strategies of rising and of taking precautions against falling. Middle classness implies that anyone can potentially ascend through effort, initiative and sacrifice, just as anyone can descend if they are fickle, lazy or wanting in aspiration. It pronounces us the masters of our destinies and kings of our fortunes. This applies just as forcibly to our image in the eyes of our peers: if we made it, we must have applied ourselves, and if we failed, we probably haven’t and have no one to blame but ourselves.³

If this is what “middle class” means, what purpose does it serve? We might begin to answer this question by looking at its biggest fans, be they politicians or policy experts, corporations or marketing firms, development agencies or financial institutions: all those who intone moralizing proclamations about the middle class being harbingers of democracy, progress and consumption-fueled economic growth. They have markedly different and sometimes conflicting sensibilities and agendas when they seek the expansion of the middle class or speak up for middle-class interests and vulnerabilities. Common to all of them, however, is a de facto if rarely acknowledged attachment to capitalism, if only because they depend on its workings for the accomplishment of their respective goals.

The most erudite apologia for so-called bourgeois virtues has been penned, tome after wordy tome, by economist Deirdre McCloskey, who finds in the middle class everything from honesty, through richer social, emotional and even spiritual lives, to motley identity choices.⁴ Anyone who has ever visited an affluent community whose residents boast that they never lock their doors knows how annoying it is to have privilege name itself morality. But when someone as smart as McCloskey deems a manifold of virtues inextricable from the enormous privilege that is required to exercise them, she speaks in good capitalist faith. These gifts and sensibilities, she believes, are available to all of us as the spoils of economic growth: the more people out there who possess bourgeois virtues, the more whose lives will similarly be enriched as presumed billions already have been.

Literary critic Franco Moretti⁵ reassigns as “middle class” what McCloskey calls “bourgeoisie,” reminding us that by the nineteenth century it has come to replace the earlier, more rigid category because of its greater capacity to connote social mobility. With this in mind, we understand McCloskey to be saying that middle classes are capitalism’s protagonists, actors whose virtues reflect those of capitalism itself, and whose proliferation marks the spread of its riches. Moretti goes on to observe how well the honesty that McCloskey attributes to members of the middle class aligns with the machinations of the capitalist market. An economic system’s ideal typical actors need only play by the rules in order to enjoy its rewards: nothing is gained by trying to game so beneficent a system.

Proceeding from this insight, an obvious entry point to deciphering the category “middle class” lies in examining how capitalism works and the outcomes it promotes. Let me, then, briefly outline some aspects of capitalism that prefigure the purpose of the middle class within it.⁶ McCloskey refuses to commit to a definition of capitalism beyond the trite notion of self-interested action that, let loose in healthy competition, encourages the gumption and enterprise that makes markets grow, with bountiful spillover effects—the famous rising tide lifting all boats. A more instructive starting point is one of capitalism’s hallmarks: its foundation on a production process that, save few exceptions, is not centrally planned or coordinated. Unlike production in alternative or earlier social and economic systems, production in capitalism is not typically designed to generate the goods and services that would satisfy what people determine through democratic procedure or despotic decree to be needed by some or all of them. Instead, everyone is supposed to be free to produce what they will, and competition between producers decides the success or failure of each enterprise.

Proponents of capitalism like to say that this success or failure is ultimately a reflection of how well producers satisfy demand: no goods or services would ever be produced if people didn’t want them enough to buy them. If they were, their producers would go out of business. Desire for goods and services signals to entrepreneurs that they could profit from their production, and these goods are consequently produced according to demand. Despite not being coordinated, then, popular needs and desires are ostensibly met through the free play of market mechanisms. What this line of reasoning elides is that even if popular demand, crucially backed by sufficient buying power, inscribes the ultimate boundaries for what any single enterprise can or cannot sell, it does so only after the fact of production. That is to say, after driving numerous entrepreneurs out of business, after permitting an overabundance of products to go to waste, and after leaving multiple needs unmet.

The crucial point is that these outcomes do not stem from producers’ failure to accurately predict demand. Rather, they manifest the very logic of the capitalist system, which generates chronic overproduction. Producers, to avoid being priced out of business, need to outproduce and undersell their competitors. This competitive pressure is the motor that drives enterprise. Because of it, the things that end up being produced are not meant to satisfy needs or desires. Rather, they are designed to capture slices of the market through their amenability to cost cutting, their conduciveness to price raising, replacing and updating, and their capacity to induce demand for them through minute distinctions rendered personally meaningful. An ensuing excess of commodities—from groceries and entertainment through brands and fashions to a variety of professional services—competes for our wallets. Often, we either have no use for them or, far more commonly, we cannot afford to buy too many of them no matter how aggressively their manufacturers and retailers try to shove them down our throats.

As producers strive to attain a level of productivity that would give them a competitive edge over other producers, the entire production process changes. It incorporates innovative technology that speeds up and diversifies the provision of products, at the same time as it renders a lot of jobs redundant and squeezes as much work as possible out of every remaining employee. This accounts for capitalism’s dynamism, thanks to which less and less overall work time is required to generate the economy’s glut of commodities. It also accounts for the fact that, even as some people work so hard that they barely have time to see their loved ones, there are more people out there with the same skills who are suffering the effects of unemployment, underemployment and poverty. A hallmark of capitalism, when you consider it in its global totality, is the gross disparity between the mind-boggling amount of stuff that is produced and then left to waste, and at the same time the desperate deprivation and widespread struggle to earn basic necessities, or the backbreaking overwork by some alongside the demoralizing unemployment of others.

For the wheels of production to keep turning (and continue employing workers as well as financiers and auxiliary providers of machinery and services who would facilitate the production, circulation and sale of commodities), those who set these wheels in motion have to reinvest in their business to avoid losing it. But they also have to potentially profit from it to encourage the efforts and risks of multiple business endeavors. The economy must therefore have enough readily available and useable physical, material and financial resources to fuel enterprise and to incentivize the competition among various lines of business and industry. To guarantee this availability, there has to be incessant accumulation of a global surplus.

While an inanimate system cannot have a deliberate purpose, it can have a sort of inner dynamic that makes sense in terms of a goal it appears to be advancing. In capitalism, accumulation is this goal. Capitalism’s cumulative excess is called surplus, because the capital that is accumulated globally cannot be invested profitably in the activities from which it stems, or be absorbed back into society in the form of anything the population could use or enjoy. A surplus is nevertheless always generated by overproduction, and the prospects of pocketing some of it as profit incentivizes entrepreneurial risk-taking. The goods and services that people can access and hold onto, in turn, must be limited in order to stimulate surplus-inducing competition among them for these things. Surplus’s embodiment in profit or revenue, or in the expectation of profit or revenue sometime in the future, must likewise be high enough to urge reinvestment in ever more production of ever more commodities.

In a capitalist market, the general rule is for things to be exchanged freely for different things of equal value without force or theft. Under conditions of free and equivalent exchange, surplus can only be generated in one way: by workers producing more value in the form of the products and services to which their work contributes, than the value represented in the pay they receive for it. Karl Marx called this exploitation, because even when no one deliberately sets out to do anyone any harm and even when employers are just as happy or unhappy as their employees, work is not fully remunerated. The contribution in value that workers make to the commodities they help produce is larger than the value of the stuff they can purchase with their paychecks, however lowly or prestigious their jobs. And whatever they earn, even if they are earning good money, they are contributing to the production of more; otherwise no one would employ them and pay them for their work.

Additionally, earnings from work are generally (but with notorious exceptions) not enough to allow workers to ultimately stop working: otherwise there would not be enough workers to produce the economy’s surplus. Finally, earnings from work should (again with exceptions) nevertheless suffice to finance workers’ and their families’ food and shelter, health, education and training at a level that is accepted in their society; otherwise the economy’s workforce would not be up to the task of working and generating a surplus. Capitalism’s accumulation through the extraction of unremunerated value from work and its embodiment as profit and revenue is made invisible when it is euphemized as growth. This gives surplus a positive aura of progress, deflecting attention from its human costs.

Competition between independent producers transforms the entire production process in a way that reduces barriers that might hamper or slow down the profitable production and circulation of goods and services. Small industry either grows to become large industry or disappears. Enterprise is economized through technological sophistication or else the entrepreneur is priced out of business. National economies are (unevenly) integrated into a world market in order to survive and—in the case of more powerful economies—to profit from business with less powerful ones. The subsequent increase in productivity makes it cheaper to produce all of the food, clothing, housing, transportation and other goods and services on which workers spend their paychecks. If they can buy the stuff they want for less money, employers and clients can pay workers less in aggregate and relative value. This, while their work and their services contribute more to the economy’s surplus because they yield greater value than they cost. Capitalism thereby generates extraordinary wealth that is reinvested or concentrated at the top, however slowly or fitfully. It is a jagged trajectory whereby, despite advances and respites that workers in some regions or industries can win through political or personal victories, work loses value and employment conditions become more strenuous and precarious.

If surplus-extracting work was all that capitalism had to offer the people subject to it, however, it is hard to imagine how it could have remained intact for all this time, let alone gathered steam. Work could not always be hard and underpaid, with significant portions of the wealth that workers create escaping their reach, without these workers growing so disgruntled as to struggle constantly to break away or replace capitalism with a more just system of production and distribution. Historically, of course, workers have often tried to do just that. But others eschewed collective struggle, not only for threat of backlash but because they felt they had something to lose by revolting. A major factor entered the considerations of workers when they could finally, in large numbers, accrue a portion of the social surplus that they had themselves created.

It is hard to figure out anyone’s precise contribution to goods and services whose composites are manufactured, combined and circulated by numerous people and machines, in multiple stages, separated from each other in time and space, and then to compare the value of these goods to the buying power represented in each worker’s paycheck. Typically, we just assume that we’re paid the competitive value of our work. We are certainly free—in theory at least, if seldom in practice—to charge a higher price for our services or seek employment elsewhere if we’re unsatisfied. Sure, we might nevertheless recognize our collective disadvantage and organize to resist the system that disadvantages us. But when we are given something extra if we play by the rules—something whose existence and value are independent of our work, something the possession of which might give us leg up on those who do not possess it, and something the loss of which would be a calamity—we have good enough reason to turn a blind eye to our predicament.

When Marx wrote about class in his magnum opus Capital, he wrote about it in the structural sense, as the outcome of the production process being divided between ownership and non-ownership of the material resources it feeds on. He saw this division as generating antagonism between capital and labor: the less that labor is paid, the more resources can be accumulated in the form of a surplus that capital can pocket. And conversely, the greater the power of labor, the more of this surplus it can take back for itself. What Marx did not do in this study was to equate labor and capital with actual working classes and capitalist classes. Important reflections on the living conditions of workers and on aspects of class politics notwithstanding, his approach was more structural than historical, concerned with exposing the opaque logic of the capitalist system. But if we were to take a more historical approach, we would see that workers have indeed been enlisted into agendas associated with capitalists, in a way that has obscured the antagonism between labor and capital that Marx described. This, if you will, is the true purpose of the middle class.

We can have some of the surplus we create and enjoy it, too, despite our vulnerability as people who have to work for a living and despite the exploitation of our work in the creation of surplus. The institution that affords us this benefit is the very institution that has deprived us of the means to secure our livelihoods independently: private property. If we live in a capitalist society, we have no choice but to work under the conditions we are offered. These conditions are exploitative in the sense that our work generates a surplus we do not enjoy. We no longer live off of communal lands or obtain our basic necessities from other common resources. Working for less than the value of our work is therefore the only way for us to earn the money with which we can buy the things we need and want.

From around the seventeenth century onward, shared and common resources have been expropriated and parceled out, most often by force and against immense resistance, in the form of private property, that is, land and other resources that only some people got to own and control. The process was gradual in Europe and then more abrupt in colonial takeovers of other parts of the world. The beginnings of capitalism and its global spread came hand in hand with the violent introduction of private property where it had previously been absent or marginal to the ways in which populations managed their resources. As resources worldwide came to be parceled out in this way, people were left with no choice but to work for a living in whatever conditions the new owners of land, raw material, work instruments and other resources offered them.

There is another way of looking at property, however, which is promulgated by the agents and agencies of capitalism. This approach builds on the legal apparatus that designates and protects everyone’s right to private ownership. The domain of ownership expands to encompass all manner of things that workers and their families covet: material things like a home or a car, immaterial assets like a savings account, an insurance policy, a pension contract, or a range of stock, bonds and securities—and to broaden the scope even further, other things like a university degree, a specialized skill, a professional credential or a social network, which usually fall under the heading of human capital.

We have a pretty good intuitive sense of what the possession of such things can do for us. The value that private property represents is independent of the value we earn by working. In the case of human capital, it could help us attain a better job. Our fortunes as workers can be counterbalanced by our fortunes as property owners. This matters whenever they diverge significantly. We might lose our earnings following employment cutbacks, falling demand for our services, health or family issues, or simply old age. Faced with such difficulties, owning a home, a savings account, an insurance policy or a university degree can mitigate the loss by securing new income. Alternatively, we might have purchased real estate, stock, or professional credentials, which market developments could make more valuable than when we procured them. This property can then help us cash in on a sum greater than what our work earnings alone would have brought in.

As workers who are at the same time existing or aspiring property owners, we do not assess our place in society (or the society that so places us) solely by the nature of our work and its pay. Nor do we see our collective predicament, as workers, as the be-all and end-all of our highly differentiated fortunes. Instead, all of the things we privately own or have the prospect of someday owning tug at our attention. As workers, we may be fully aware that the lower our paychecks in aggregate, the more the agents and agencies representing capital gain at our expense. But as property owners we stand in a more complicated relation to capitalist institutions. Often, we sense that to be able to leverage our possessions in order to secure our future or to improve our prospects by acquiring new property, we have to root for the stability and growth of our national economy. This holds particularly true when this growth is connected to the increase in the value of the property and assets we own, even if this growth is ultimately based on surplus accumulated at the expense of our wages. With the internalization of this sensibility, accumulation has us on board.

There is more to this shift in perspective than just learning to love capitalism. As people who have to work for a living, we crave property more the less reliable and rewarding our earnings from work and our other protections might be. But getting our hands on property, unless we are lucky enough to have inherited it, takes effort and sacrifice. We have to work harder and better than we otherwise would—perhaps harder and better than others do—if we want to earn enough to put something aside. Earmarking some of our earnings for a savings account, a university degree, a house or a pension, means that we cannot spend all of our earnings on the stuff we want right now. Even if we do attain some property immediately on credit or through installment plans, those debts have to be paid off sometime. Ultimately, then, we still have to work harder and save more. We have a word for our pursuit of property: investment. We invest more time, effort and resources than we absolutely must, in order to later have a potential income that does not rely on our work. We perceive this as a means by which to protect ourselves against a possible shortfall in our earnings and by which to spare ourselves or our children the need to work as hard in the future.

The growing popularity of the category “middle class” over the late nineteenth century in Europe’s most advanced economies had everything to do with the proliferation of diverse forms of household property and of the means of obtaining it. This was also a time of social and political upheaval, which endangered the mounting force and dominance of capitalism. Operating to smooth the course of accumulation by appeasing disgruntled workforces, some of the surplus generated by the increased volume of industry became accessible to the populace. It was condensed into resources that allowed significant numbers of workers to become socially mobile and materially protected in ways they hadn’t before. This mobility and protection, or the promise thereof, redirected their energies from protest to investment. Discontented workers could accrue savings, homes or credentials they would be terrified to lose. They could also acquire a broad array of material and cultural accoutrements through which to assert their advantages and showcase their accomplishments.

The benefit for accumulation lay in the creation of a docile and motivated workforce whose members are too busy trying to keep up in the scramble for property and property-dependent income to recognize and resist their common exploitation. Observing this trend, some theorists have written about the middle class as occupying a contradictory position between work and capital.⁷ Contradictory, in the sense of pitting us against ourselves: as workers, we are exploited for the creation of surplus no matter how prestigious our jobs or how high our earnings. Yet, insofar as we own or have the hopes of procuring some savings, a home, a car, an insurance policy or a credential, we have something to gain by siding with the cumulative dynamic of capital, which might protect or increase the value of what we own, no matter how humble our jobs or how modest our earnings. We also have something to lose by resisting it insofar as our well-being hinges on the continued possession and preserved value of what resources we have managed to acquire.

We are classified in a way that applauds our propensity to look beyond the tight limitations on our work toward a future in which our households will soar or tumble as a result of our investments today, and to disregard the institutional constraints that, to sustain profitability, determine the value of our possessions, work and earnings, and by extension our own fates. We are named middle class. This designation opens its arms to all of us, from the highest-earning professionals and managers, through successful or struggling business owners and self-employed service providers, to the lowliest personnel and precariously employed interns. This is the case insofar as we make most of our living off work yet possess, or have the prospect of someday possessing, material and human resources whose value can be maintained or enhanced through investment. The designation “middle class” represents our consideration of what we own and how we fare as if they were the outcomes of our personal choices and efforts. It further represents our commitment to sacrificing for our future as if this future relied on our choices and efforts alone.

What makes this idea so compelling is that, to the extent that the value of our possessions does not change too radically while also making us better off than people who own less, or better protected against misfortune than we would have been without them, our best efforts often do pay off. We can therefore plausibly consider our pains to acquire property as prudent investments rather than compulsory forfeitures or reckless gambles. The more strenuously we work and study, plot careers and save for a home, for old age or for our children’s education, the more engrossed we become in these endeavors and the greater our inclination to trace our fortunes back to them, above all else. Moreover, the more we delay gratification in anticipation of something better, the more reluctant we become to discredit our renunciations as externally imposed and therefore personally meaningless. We not only invest but also take pride in our investments and in ourselves for having made them.

But wait. What if we find we have had quite enough of struggling, competing and investing? What if, at some point, we decide that whatever assets we have already managed to ferret away give us a fair shot at living the kind of life we want to live, and that it is high time to sit back and reap what we have sown? Economists call the incomes generated by property “rents” and those who live off them “rentiers.” They distinguish rents from the earnings that come from work and from the profits that come from enterprise. The fantasy of rentier leisure is one in which we can afford to work less, selectively or not at all, by living off our property. This sounds great for us but not so much for capitalism’s imperative of accumulation. The institution of private property can very well boomerang for capitalism in the sense of providing not a common incentive but a common disincentive to work and invest.

And there’s more. With only so much surplus generated through each cycle of production, how thinly—from the standpoint of potential profitability—can it be spread in globally available household property on top of other hoards of cash or assets that working households can simply hold on to for a rainy day? Recall that the promise of profit appropriated from the economy’s surplus has the potential to encourage production’s independent organizers, facilitators and financiers to forge ahead, risks and all. When a broad spectrum of the population has the political power to reclaim a portion of the surplus in the form of privately stored savings, cars, homes, social protections, academic degrees and the like, this could prove too heavy a drag on profitability and growth, even if most of them still work for a living. Economists have been discussing such dangers since household property has become pervasive, and tinkering with solutions that chip away at it, such as inflation and taxation. But the most insidious solution has been taking shape in recent decades, following an era of unprecedented growth in the rates of property ownership and the proliferation of household assets and savings.

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, national and regional markets have been deregulated and integrated into a global financial market, easing the flow of capital and the provisioning of credit to governments and firms everywhere in the world. It has helped stimulate competition and make accumulation smoother and more flexible. Capital is fed to profitable enterprises while overcoming social and geographic barriers between them. It is also withheld from enterprises that do not perform as well, regardless of their significance for national economies and regional populations. Novel financial instruments allow the risks attached to different kinds of investment (like changes in currency values or interest rates) to be pooled, subdivided, priced and sold off as further investment products. As a result, the volume of trade and enterprise as well as the bulk of global investment capital has grown exponentially, all the while creating new risks and opportunities for profit. Economic actors facing intensified competition as well as pressures by shareholders to increase the value of their holdings have come to rely on financing to survive and prosper. The reliance cuts both ways, as the intensification of economic activity and competition has amplified pressure on the global financial market to provide credit, bonds and shares, channel investment and manage risk.

The profit-hungry agencies of global finance are ever on the prowl for new investment opportunities, including in goods and services that had previously been financed publicly through taxes and social insurance arrangements, or privately through work earnings and bank-deposited savings. Industrial capitalism has given way to finance capitalism, flagging the dominance of global finance in public and private funding arrangements and in setting the terms for economic growth. Risk estimates and pricing signal, to investors, avenues of potential profit or loss. Through this pricing, finance comes to regulate all aspects of economic, political and social life. It insinuates itself into the way in which institutions operate, the infrastructure through which services are provided, and the choices that national economies as well as firms and enterprises must weigh in order to remain viable.

The scholarly term for finance’s dominance in the economy and society is “financialization.” In advanced economies, financialization has dovetailed with other economic trends grouped under the heading of neoliberalism, mainly the decreased readiness of states to pool risks, stabilize incomes and provide goods and services through taxation and social insurance arrangements. The public safety nets that had spread piecemeal after the Second World War in advanced economies have been rolled back to varying degrees in each of them. Salaries have not grown apace with rising prices, while employment has become more precarious with the removal of work protections and the weakening of organized labor. The convergence of stagnant and unreliable work incomes with diminishing public goods and services has created urgent need among workers and citizens to counter mounting insecurity with whatever resources they manage to get their hands on.

Enter global finance. Through credit cards, installment plans, mortgages, student loans and other long-term lending, along with the financial management of savings, insurances and pensions, financial institutions rush in to cater to cultivated mass demand; hence the growing significance of financial services and instruments in household economics. This is accompanied by an imperative that requires anyone ensnared in the web of finance to become financially literate, able to recognize investment opportunities and use financial instruments with discernment while shouldering risks and taking responsibility for the outcomes of their investments or lack thereof. This responsibility often includes a self-imposed reduction in spending to balance family budgets and make sure that one’s capital inflows and outflows are sustainable over time.

To ease the ongoing circulation of capital, institutional investors such as banks, insurance companies and pension funds intermediate between households and global finance. They do so through the provisioning and management of mortgages, pensions and other long-term savings products, insurance policies and consumer credit. They bundle the payments and repayments organized by these products, and they price them in bulk before selling them on to other market players. The value that household property represents flows back into the market to become credit for more investment. Because the value of this property is implicated in the ebb and flow of financial markets, it is itself in flux. Consider all those homes whose value is finally determined only after thirty years of mortgage repayments whose size changes, in turn, according to interest rates and currency values. Consider also retirement annuities determined by savings invested over decades in potentially volatile stocks and bonds. Then consider academic degrees whose price is calculated over many years of student-loan repayments while relying for validation on a mercurial job market. The danger of property providing too much security, or of its taking too much away from the economy’s surplus, is lifted by the proliferation, among high and low earners alike, of property of unstable value. This kind of property requires invigorated investment while delivering erratic returns. All but the wealthiest owners cannot dream of finally settling for what assets they’ve succeeded in piecing together. Instead, many more are lured in by the promise of ownership, only to discover that in order to enjoy its benefits they must continue to relentlessly invest.