The problem of the rich

In 1969, Martin Nicolaus delivered a rousing speech to the annual conference of the American Sociological Association, in which he lambasted his colleagues for taking government money to conduct research into the lives of the poor (resulting in further measures to discipline and control people in poverty), when virtually no one was researching the other end of the social spectrum:

What if that machinery were reversed? What if the habits, problems, actions and decisions of the wealthy and powerful were daily scrutinized by a thousand systematic researchers, were hourly pried into, analysed, and cross referenced, tabulated and published in a hundred inexpensive mass-circulation journals and written so that even the 15-year-old high school drop-outs could understand it and predict the actions of their parents' landlord, manipulate and control him?.¹

This clarion call largely fell on deaf ears, which is a great shame given that it was made shortly before the ideology of neoliberalism began to shift away from its marginal, perhaps even crackpot, status, to become lodged at the centre of mainstream political-economic thought, where it served to harden even further the institutional arrangements that make the acquisition of enormous personal wealth (and enormous inequality) possible.

But it is precisely in this spirit of scholarly subversion, clarity and resistance as set out by Nicolaus that I think Andrew Sayer's remarkable contribution should be read.

At once a book of analytic fortitude and political commitment, Why We Can't Afford The Rich is an important dissection and critique of the massive damage currently being inflicted upon societies and the environment by the wealthy and powerful. Anyone with a sense of social justice will have two conflicting emotions reading this book: on the one hand, massive anger as the author articulates the roots of the grotesquely unequal world in which we find ourselves, and all the ways in which the rich and their supporters justify that inequality to themselves and to others; on the other hand, massive admiration for the delightful eloquence of the author, who guides readers carefully and enlighteningly through political-economic terms, concepts and theories that can often be, in the hands of other writers, opaque and/or dangerously misleading. Having read and admired Sayer's works for years, I was impressed by the straightforward, cutting tone he demonstrates in this book, which is something new for him; this broadens the appeal of the book, and makes it highly accessible and useful for scholar and non-scholar alike, and is especially informative for social science students taking courses anchored around any aspect of inequality.

The introduction to the book lays out the horrifying extent to which a tiny few have effectively robbed the world and continue to do so ('because they can', as one subheading states), and convincingly explains why the author's 'moral economy' approach is a necessary act of intellectual resistance. Following this, the book is organised into sections that explain precisely how the rich acquire their wealth and the damage it does, before a soaring concluding cadenza that captures the urgency of addressing the 'rich problem' with a clear agenda for what needs to be done (and before it is too late). I found the first part, 'A guide to wealth extraction', enormously instructive, and have already drawn upon it several times for my research and teaching on the UK housing crisis. In particular, Sayer's exposé of the serious problem of extracted unearned income by those who own and control assets such as land is absolutely crucial for any critical analysis of the crisis, as well as a much-needed response to the vacuous (yet hegemonic) bleating about 'supply and demand' that is the favoured 'explanation' for the housing crisis by neoclassical economists informing politicians. Sayer devotes a short chapter to the problem of rent as unearned income and, crucially, resuscitates the lost vocabulary of the rentier to describe precisely those who derive unearned income from ownership of the assets or resources that all of us need. He demonstrates with conviction just how damaging it...