One needs to be wary of ‘Rich Lists’, whether from the Sunday Times or from Forbes. The reason? As Piketty has shown, they seriously under-estimate the possession of wealth by individuals. It is not for nothing that greed is so well hidden.
But this is not to say that the Sunday Times Rich List is without interest. It is of special relevance to me given my long-term interest in the class structures that the wealthy ‘surf’ to their advantage, condemning ‘the many’ to attenuated lifetimes of disadvantage and, too often, impoverishment. The ‘capital rich’, for my purposes a more telling term that the popular ‘wealth elite’, reside in what I call the capital executive (comprising monopolists, auxiliaries and sleepers in a class classification I discuss in my book Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society).
In this blog I offer the briefest of summaries of the ‘data’, then pick out a theme or two to develop. Robert Watts, fronting the Sunday Times ‘analysis’, commends the new ‘British Dream’ by noting the coming of the ‘self-made man’. No longer, he writes, is the top 1000 simply reflective of inherited wealth: in fact 94% are ‘self-made entrepreneurs’, and the very top performer, Jim Ratcliffe (worth £21.05bn), once lived in a council house. The top performers over the years have been: the Queen (1989-1993), Gad and Hans Rausing (1994, 1995); Hans Rousing (1996, 1999, 2000), Joe Lewis (1997), Lord David Sainsbury (1998), The Sixth Duke of Westminster (2001-2003), Roman Abromovich (2004), Lakshmi Mittal (2005-2012), Alisher Usmanov (2013), Gopi and Sri Hinduja (2014, 2017), Sir Len Blavatnik (2015), David and Simon Reuben (2016), and, finally, Jim Ratcliffe (2018).
The bare bones are as follows. The overall wealth of the top 1000 amounts to £724bn. Included are 145 billionaires, up 11 from the previous record. The number of sterling billionaires by country has the UK in third place (145), behind the USA (442) and China (309). London, revealingly, has the most sterling billionaires (93) of any city, with New York in second place (66).
Watts reports that the list is no longer dominated by elderly white men. 141 women make the top 1000 in 2018, compared to 9 in 1989. Moreover, while in 1989 only 5 ‘Rich Listers’ were from ethnic minorities, the number is now 86 (‘83 from the Asian community’).
But it is the self-made’ label that Watts stresses. Whereas in 1989 only 15% had made their own fortunes, now this applies to 94%. New money is overtaking old money. In 1989, 28.5% were landowners (the largest single category of wealth), whereas the current figure is 2.9%. Buildings on land are now a more significant source of wealth, with 16.4% owing their wealth to property.
The influence of the City is ‘hard to overstate’. The first Rich List contained 5 bankers and a total of 19 entries who had ‘struck it big’ from financial deals and trading; in 2018 there are 169 entries from the financial sector (46 from hedge funds alone.
Just 5.7% in 2018 represent wealth passed from one generation to the next. The ‘cosy club’ is being displaced by the ‘revolving door’.
The new Rich List is also more international (not least because London is a magnet for the super-rich).
So much for a skeletal precis of the results. Now for a comment or two, if off the top of my head. First, it seems apparent that there is further confirmation here for Aeron Davis’ finding that present-day elites are more heterogeneous than has been the case in the past (see my blog on his latest book). This of course leaves open the possibility that inherited capital and wealth remain disproportionately salient for the super-rich (and as Piketty shows, inherited capital is of growing relevence for inter-generational affluence in general).
Second, it is a proportion – though doubtless a large one – of the super-rich, Bauman’s ‘nomads’, who, as capital ‘monopolists’, and in combination with capital ‘auxiliaries’ and ‘sleepers’, and together with their cross-class allies and co-optees, who exert telling influence on the power elite of the state to shape policy to their advantage (check out previous blogs on my classification of class if you’re not already losing the will to live).
Third, to reiterate a point I cannot make too often, it remains the case in my view that members of the capital executive, in which the super-rich are dominant, are the principal agents of the rapidly growing inequity and inequality to be found in the UK (treading deliberately in the footsteps of the USA). Paraphrasing, the disadvantage, suffering and hopelessness that now characterise the lot of so many are the unintended consequence of the strategic investment and boardroom decisions of the hard core of the capital executive. As I have tried to show in a series of publications as well as blogs, the very ‘few’ are donating to the very ‘many’ a ‘disconnected fatalism’ that terminates in despair. And if the term ‘unintended consequence’ allows for a plea of manslaughter rather than homicide, the grounds for such a plea are rapidly diminishing. Revealingly, again, more than a third of Rich Listers are Conservative Party donors.
Fourth, it is not only the case that the putative British Dream (talent plus hard work can lift one into the super-rich) is (statistically) illusory, but also: (a) that it represents a symbolically, and frequently physically, ‘violent’ pro-capitalist aspiration and propensity to exploit/oppress others, and (b) that, again referring back to a previous blog, the ‘jobs’ occupied by the super-rich generally detract rather than add value to society. It really is carers, waste collectors, nurses, social workers, teachers and so on who add real value to society and ‘our belonging and togetherness’.
Fifth, as Attlee eloquently put it, charity is ‘cold’. Philanthropy on the part of the super-rich is neither substitute nor compensation for the welfare and kindred rights of citizenship ‘won’ after the 2ndWW.
Sixth, and once again to re-rehearse a past refrain, beware the ideology of a globalised neoliberalism that seeks cover for rip-off merchants falsely presented as role models. They are performers, celebrities, surfers of enduring capitalist social structures; parasites that feed off the blood of the rest (dispensable ‘little people’). Maybe, as Streeck has argued, (financial) capitalism is imploding even as – because – it senses it is unstoppable.
Finally, it is not the more varied assemblage of rich individuals that matters, but rather the obdurate capitalist social structures that they represent.