Читать книгу Wealth - Yuval Elmelech - Страница 21

While exclusion delineates social boundaries by enacting the methods and patterns that restrict access to assets, the exchange and transfer of material possessions are based on enhancing social interactions within and across social groups. Durkheim (1992) rejected the notion that asset ownership is solely acquired through labor and suggested instead that it emerges from two sources: exchange in the marketplace and intergenerational transfers in the form of inheritance and gifts inter vivos (between living persons) (Durkheim 1992: 123). The value of assets exchanged in the marketplace has a social component, since it reflects people’s changing perceptions and tastes. Thus the price of a new house built by its owner can increase if the property “suddenly becomes sought after for its qualities of charm or some other reason.” Durkheim (1992: 126) explains: “my property, or what I own, might double its market value, without my lifting a finger.” Weber emphasized the importance of exchange to the formation of social class, stating that class position is determined by the returns people receive on their tangible and non-tangible (i.e. educational and skills-based) assets, which makes these resources valuable to the owner only in the context of exchange and competition in the market (Breen 2005).

While economic exchanges based on competition and on the calculated assessment of costs and benefits take place in the market, intergenerational transfers of wealth in the form of inter vivos gifts and bequests occur within the realm of the family. According to Durkheim (1992), both exchanges and transfers involve social interactions. But, while exchange creates “new objects of ownership,” inheritance entails the acquisition of existing material property, which is unrelated to effort and therefore immoral, as it produces inequalities that undermine the principle of meritocracy:

The inheritor is endowed with goods and chattels of which he is not the originator and which he does not even owe to any act of the one who did create them. In certain circumstances, it is kinship alone that confers the right to property. (Durkheim 1992: 123)

Marx viewed intergenerational transfers of wealth as an extension of private property. Inheritance enhances the concentration of productive property in the hands of the few, promotes the exploitation of the propertyless workers, and serves as a fundamental instrument of the reproduction of inequality. Consequently, abolishing the rights of inheritance was viewed as an inevitable step toward a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx and Engels [1948] 2017: 84).

More than a century after the publication of these classical theories, studies on increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth in OECD countries identified two prime culprits: one is the changing price of assets—specifically, the rise in stock and housing prices—and the accessibility of credit; the other consists of family intergenerational transfers of wealth, predominantly from older to younger generations (see Chapters 3 and 4 here).

In addition to their ongoing use in contemporary commentary, the social processes of exchange, transfer, and exclusion remain fundamental components in more recent definitions of private property. Echoing Durkheim’s assertion that property both defines the boundary between individuals and groups (for which see also Beckert 2002: 110) and establishes the basis for social interactions, Davis (1949: 452) emphasized the dual nature of property:

[Property] consists of the rights and duties of one person or group (the owner) as against all other persons and groups with respect to some scarce good. It is thus exclusive, for it sets off what is mine from what is thine; but it is also social, being rooted in custom and protected by law.

Addressing the general neglect of private property as a topic of sociological research, Carruthers and Ariovich (2004: 24) provide a definition of private property that maintains a similar foundation: “Owner (A) owns property (P) if and only if (1) A has the right to use P; (2) A may exclude others from using P; and (3) A may transfer rights defined by rules 1 and 2 to others by consent.” Earle (2000: 40) notes that cultural anthropologists view the right to exclude as the primary function and the only pancultural attribute of property. Economist Yoram Barzel’s work underscores the link between legal rights and economic rights; this link centers on the owner’s control over the use of an asset, as manifested in the rights to “consume, obtain income from, and alienate these assets.” “Legal rights, as a rule,” he writes, “enhance economic rights, but the former are neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of the latter” (Barzel 1997: 2).

Both early and more contemporary perspectives demonstrate the social function of private property. If, at the outset, property ownership appears to involve relations between a person and an asset, the view presented here suggests that it always involves triadic relations among owner, property, and non-owners (Carruthers and Ariovich 2004).

Moreover, as a scarce economic resource that is manufactured through the social processes of exclusion, exchange, and transfer, property ownership inevitably produces two outcomes. One is the extreme concentration of wealth at the top; the other is the attribute of convertibility, which allows wealth-related disparities to permeate other economic and non-pecuniary forms of capital through social and economic exchanges. Drawing mainly on the classical theorists, the next section addresses these two hallmarks of wealth.