The Asset Economy. Lisa Adkins

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СКАЧАТЬ the latter stagnate, the role of speculative asset gains becomes more and more important (both to the quality of individual and household balance sheets and to overall macroeconomic performance and policy).

The chapter then turns to Piketty’s observation that the growth of asset values has outstripped returns on labour over the past four decades. This is a key point of reference for our book, but Piketty’s account has two key weaknesses. First, he understands the tendency for capital income to exceed labour income as the reassertion of a basic law of capital rather than as an outcome of a series of transformations in fiscal and monetary policy that have shifted inflationary pressures from consumer prices and wages to asset prices. The chapter indicates some of the key aspects of this policy configuration, which are examined in more detail in the following chapter, ‘The Making of the Asset Economy’. Second, Piketty’s focus and that of others following his analysis has been skewed towards the very top layers of the population (the 1%), and they have generally not pursued the implications for a more general understanding of class and stratification. This is where some distance is needed from the idea that the current era represents a return to classic liberalism or a ‘new gilded age’. Contemporary inequality in Western countries is built on a base of middle-class asset ownership that evolved during the post-New Deal and post-war era. This is especially evident in the area of housing: the sustained inflation of property values over several decades has fundamentally shifted the social class structure, from a logic that was structured around employment towards one that is organized around participation in asset ownership and appreciation.

The next chapter, ‘The Making of the Asset Economy’, discusses the origins and development of asset inflation in more detail, aiming to understand how we arrived in a situation where continuous asset price inflation has replaced wage inflation as a key economic driver. To this end, it returns to the 1970s, a decade that saw historic declines in asset prices as consumer price inflation cut into the returns on assets, combined with the growth of wages and welfare state expenditure as trade unions sought to keep up with or even outpace the rise in consumer prices. Over the next decades, this combination of high wage inflation and asset price depreciation was reversed. The chapter examines the role of monetary policy, taxation policy (notably capital gains taxation) and public spending constraints as the primary levers by which this reversal was effected and the asset inflation/wage stagnation norm was forged.

      This chapter also elucidates the role of Third Way neoliberals such as Bill Clinton in the US, Tony Blair in the UK and Paul Keating in Australia in softening, but also consolidating, this new policy regime by offering consumer credit as a pathway towards democratized capital gains – a kind of asset-owning democracy. Anticipated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Third Way neoliberals offered up the hope that we could all participate in asset price appreciation, via a democratization of stock ownership, home ownership, or simply ownership of our own skills (our ‘human capital’). The Third Way take on human capital theory imagined that, by adopting an entrepreneurial investor stance towards life, people could compensate for stagnant income from labour through income from their human capital on a permanent basis and that this could altogether neutralize the antagonism between employees and employers. Fiscal and monetary policy became heavily driven by the notion that life course events such as education, housing and employment are above all to be seen as investment opportunities.

The final chapter in this book, ‘New Class Realities’, shows how forty years of asset inflation and wage stagnation have exposed the limits of this Third Way vision. It is in housing, already widely distributed across the population (at least in Anglo-American countries) at the start of the neoliberal era, where the promise of inclusion in capital gains has mostly played out. The combination of rising house prices, low interest rates and the democratization of mortgage credit has meant that substantial parts of populations in Anglo-capitalist countries have been able to participate in asset-based capital gains. But the reality of this has been both less utopian and less universal than that projected by the architects of the democratized asset ownership project. Home ownership has just as often entailed greater reliance on stagnant wages as it has meant economic independence. Only the top layer of the population, holding diversified asset portfolios that benefit from various forms of preferential tax treatment, may be said to approximate an ideal of asset ownership. Moreover, the very logic of asset appreciation means that growing segments are unable to buy into it.

Increasingly, the only way to buy property in major Western cities is with parental assistance. The division between people who do and do not have access to parental wealth is becoming particularly evident as a fault-line in the ‘millennial’ generation, who are the first since the post-war boom to really experience the impossibility of building up wealth and securing access to a middle-class lifestyle on the basis of wage-labour alone. The chapter pushes back against the trend to couch this in purely generational terms. After all, a millennial who is likely to inherit real estate or to receive a cash transfer from parents for a deposit on a property is far more advantaged than either a renting boomer or a millennial without access to parental wealth. In other words, intergenerational transfers have become a key mechanism in the new logic of class. The chapter develops an analysis of the patterns of stratification and exclusion generated by the asset economy, including their cultural and affective impacts. It conceptualizes class not (as it has been traditionally) in terms of people’s relationship to work and education, but rather in terms of their relationship to assets. Contemporary life is increasingly ordered by the speculative dynamics of the asset economy and in particular by the double dynamic of appreciation and depreciation.

      In the Conclusion, we reflect on the wider implications of the rise of the asset economy. Key here is the way in which economic policies are interacting with imperatives of political legitimation. Policies (capital gains tax discounts, low interest rates) that cater to a core constituency of asset-owning citizens increasingly have the effect of preventing new entry to this constituency. However, policies that aim to make property more affordable not only tend to be electorally troublesome, but also result in lower rates of economic growth in general and jeopardize the growth of employment. Consequently, few governments can resist policies that reflate the housing market, thereby fuelling the growth of asset-led inequality even as it appears these instruments are losing some of their effectiveness and require more firepower with each round. It is against this economic background that key aspects of the political shifts and turmoil of the past decade need to be seen, and we conclude by asking what it may mean for Anglo-capitalist societies and their citizens if the same logic remains operative.

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