Wealth

Оглавление

Yuval Elmelech. Wealth

CONTENTS

Guide

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Pages

Wealth

Dedication

Preface

1 Introduction: Why Wealth Matters

Why wealth? Why now?

An overview of the book

Notes

2 The Tenets of Wealth

What (exactly) is wealth?

What wealth is not

The three properties of wealth. Wealth as private property or assets

Wealth as portfolios

Wealth as net worth: A continuous and unbounded variable

Theorizing wealth

The social origin of private property: Exclusion, exchange, and transfers

Exclusion

Marketplace exchange and family transfers

Wealth stratification: Concentration and conversion

Conversion

Correlation and causation: Wealth and quality of life

Financial satisfaction and life satisfaction

Health and life expectancy

Marital status and family life

Why do we know so little about wealth? The twentieth-century lacuna and the “new” sociology of wealth

Conceptualizing wealth: A rudimentary model of wealth accumulation

Families: Intra- and intergenerational transactions

A “chain” of markets and domains

A revised two-stage model of wealth accumulation

The tortoise and the hare: A wealth tale

The Big Jump and the accumulation of advantage

Cumulative advantage/disadvantage processes

Illustrating the wealth CA/D effect: The compound interest analogy

Meso-level processes: Social group membership and interaction effects

Macro-level context: The “period” effect

Notes

3 The Evolution of Wealth. The scope of wealth inequality: Global patterns

Wealth = financial security: Work, welfare, wealth

A brief history of wealth

The golden age of security

The “modern” family and the rise of a property-owning middle class

Housing classes and the rise in homeownership

The end of the golden age

The second demographic transition and the changing family

The rise of wealth: Financialization

The financialization of household wealth

The changing composition of household wealth portfolios: Rising wealth and risks

The “chain of markets” in action: Consumption, credit, housing, and securitization

The financialization of home equity

When the macro meets the micro: Household–market interactions, CA/D processes, and the widening wealth gulf

Notes

4 Individuals, Families, and Generations. Social mobility among “the rest of us”: The prevalent narrative

Investigating the mechanisms of mobility. Intragenerational mobility: Does the “sociology 101” course make students more productive workers?

Intergenerational mobility: How do parents actually pass on advantage? Forms of capital and wealth transfers

Bringing wealth back in, Part I: Social mobility and intergenerational transfers of economic capital

Bringing wealth back in, Part II: A theoretical framework of micro-level wealth mobility

Intragenerational wealth mobility

Family life-course trajectories and intragenerational wealth attainment

The early years: Transitory (st)age and economic insecurity

Mate selection and wealth mobility

Union formation, childbearing, and homeownership

Peaking wealth, increasing inequality, and the sandwich generation

Aging and dissaving? The “two worlds of aging” and the retirement savings puzzle

Multigenerational families and intergenerational mobility. Families and wealth outlast the individual: Changing families and aging populations

Changing families, aging societies, and kin ties

Families and wealth outlast the individual

The changing landscapes of wealth transfers: Bequests and gifts

Dissecting the transfer mechanism: What motivates parents to pass on wealth?

Wealth transfers, mobility, and inequality

The 20/80 controversy

Intergenerational transfers and inequality

Notes

5 Wealth Polarization and the Demography of Wealth Inequality. Analysis of extremes: Why study the super-rich?

Rising to the top: Families and markets

Studying income to understand wealth: Superstars and the “double one percent”

Why is wealth inequality not greater? The limits of cumulative advantage

Falling from grace: Regression toward the mean

What has luck got to do with it? Being “in the right place at the right time”

The “negative” side of wealth: Asset poverty and cumulative disadvantage

Over-indebtedness and financial exclusion

“The rich are different from you and me”: The demography of wealth and inequality

Exploring the “explained” wealth gap

Explaining the “unexplained”: Exclusion and discrimination

Domains, markets, and cumulative discrimination

Institutional, historical, and cross-generational perspectives of CA/D processes

The ripple effects of intergenerational transfers

The intersection of race/ethnicity and immigration

A case study: Homeownership

Immigration and “assimilation”

Religion and wealth

Can inter-group union formation reduce wealth inequality?

Women, men, and families: The “gender problem” of wealth

Notes

6 Conclusions

From macro to micro: Work, welfare, and wealth

The changing family: Micro-level processes and life-course trajectories

From micro- and macro- to meso-level processes

Explaining the unexplained? Meso-level mechanisms of wealth attainment and inequality

Feedback effects and the micro–macro link

Looking ahead

Appendix Food for thought: Discussion questions. Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Bibliography

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

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Economy and Society

Patrik Aspers, Markets

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In addition to political influence, accumulated wealth has been linked to social and cultural capital. Acknowledging that “economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital,” Bourdieu (1986: 54) notes that the transformation of economic capital into social capital (e.g. in the form of beneficial social ties) and into cultural capital (e.g. through cultural signals, academic credentials, and educational attainment) requires great effort: “The different types of capital can be derived from economic capital, but only at the cost of a more or less great effort of transformation, which is needed to produce the type of power effective in the field in question.” Given its enduring nature, thanks to market transactions over the life course and family transfers that extend across generations, wealth attainment constitutes a particularly strong example of the transformative trait of tangible and non-pecuniary forms of capital. The intriguing relationship between such forms of capital will be further discussed in Chapter 4.

In addition to the conversion trait of wealth, both asset ownership and wealth function as important determinants of various measures of well-being. Despite never really making its way into mainstream sociology, quality of life (QOL) has long been a topic of sociological research (see Land 1975; Ferriss 2004; Nevarez 2011). The QOL literature studies subjective measures of well-being and their relationship with so-called objective conditions such as income and wealth. For example, Veenhoven’s (2000) model of QOL identifies two general categories of individual micro-level measures: the “life-ability of the individual” includes such attributes as health (physical and mental), life expectancy, and human capital (education), whereas “appreciation of life” includes such subjective measures of well-being as happiness, overall life satisfaction, and satisfaction with various domains of life (e.g. housing, neighborhood, and marriage). There is ample evidence to indicate that asset ownership and wealth are associated with both dimensions of QOL, but establishing the direction of the causal relationship between the two sets of measures (wealth and QOL) has long been a challenge for the research community. More recently, our understanding of this relationship has been furthered by the growing availability of longitudinal data on wealth and the concomitant development of more advanced econometric methods. By taking into consideration household asset ownership and net worth in addition to the “usual suspects” (level of education, marital status, income, and so on), the models generated through these econometric methods enable researchers to observe the “net effect” of each independent variable on QOL outcomes.

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