Читать книгу Wealth - Yuval Elmelech - Страница 29

One of the key questions in the scholarship on wealth centers on the extent to which members of society are able to move up the economic ladder and improve their relative and absolute socioeconomic standings. In contrast to the prevailing emphasis on individual mobility in the labor market, wealth attainment is best understood in the context of the changing relationships between labor income, consumption, and savings over the life course.

Modigliani and Brumberg’s (1954) influential life-cycle hypothesis (LCH) is based on the premise that people tend to save out of their income during their working lives and employ dissaving after retirement. According to this theory, the life-cycle process of wealth accumulation starts with low levels of wealth, which are attributed to volatile income and low savings among young adults. These levels usually increase during the years of participation in the labor force and reach a peak in the pre-retirement years, before stabilizing and then falling in the post-retirement years. Empirical research has generally supported this curvilinear, hump-shaped pattern of savings by age profile, although some scholars have questioned the timing and magnitude of deaccumulation by arguing that older adults continue to maintain a standard of living that is comparable to that of their pre-retirement years (Kotlikoff and Summers 1989; De Nardi et al. 2016; Angelini et al. 2013).

While the LCH is useful as a model of wealth attainment, the social, economic, and demographic trends observed in many countries since the mid-twentieth century (e.g. increasing life expectancy, declining fertility, and shifting family structures and marriage patterns), along with structural changes in the labor and financial markets, present several challenges to the theory. Two critiques in particular merit attention. They center on financial transactions that take place in the two main social institutions that support wealth accumulation—the family and the market. The first focuses on the changing nature of intra- and intergenerational family transfers, while the second focuses on new forms of economic transactions in multiple markets.