Читать книгу Wealth - Yuval Elmelech - Страница 23

On account of its accumulative nature, personal wealth can grow over time, and it can also be converted into economic and non-pecuniary resources. The Weberian theory of wealth stresses the possibility of wealth’s being transformed into capital, which provides property owners with significant economic advantages:

This mode of distribution gives to the propertied a monopoly on the possibility of transferring property from the sphere of use as a “fortune,” to the sphere of “capital goods,” that is, it gives them the entrepreneurial function and all chances to share directly or indirectly in returns on capital. (Weber 1958 182; see also Schweitzer 1980)

While income and wealth can be likened respectively to a stream and a pond, this analogy does not, as discussed earlier, capture the processes responsible for the conversion of existing wealth into greater wealth, namely property owners’ financial planning and decision-making regarding savings, consumption, and investment (Skopek et al. 2014). Building on the pond and stream analogy, the economist Hernando de Soto draws attention to the advanced market system of industrialized nations, which allows for the conversion of pond water (wealth) into energy (capital): “the additional value obtained from the lake is not a value of the lake itself … but rather a value of the man-made process extrinsic to the lake” (de Soto 2001: 45). Even during periods of unemployment, when no labor income is flowing into the family’s nest egg, wealth can be converted into capital and used for consumption, affording an adequate standard of living. These “capital-generating functions” of assets are unique to the property systems of highly developed industrialized economies, where private property is legally protected and transactions are documented and processed in a formal market (de Soto 2001).

Another type of conversion, noted by early and contemporary theorists alike, links property with non-pecuniary resources such as political power and social and cultural capital. The wealth–power nexus transcends economic and non-pecuniary processes, penetrating a number of other realms. Asset ownership increases political participation, since property owners generally have both stronger incentives and greater resources to participate in the political arena (Sherraden 1990; Manturuk et al. 2009; Zavisca and Gerber 2016). Among the economic elite, wealth and power are closely tied: wealth can be transformed into political power—both indirectly, as in the case of financial contributions to political campaigns, and directly, when candidates’ personal wealth is used to fund their own political campaigns—and political power can be used to protect the economic interests of the wealthy (Domhoff 2002; Stiglitz 2012). A key component of Domhoff’s (2002: 181–183) class-domination theory of power is the way in which economic resources are converted into social capital and political influence. The social networks that the American upper class establishes in private schools and social clubs and via assortative marriage patterns, for instance, create a form of social exclusion that enables the members of these networks to exert disproportionate influence on policy makers (Domhoff 2002).

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.