Lisa Adkins - The Asset Economy

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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