Wealth, Welfare and the Asset Economy. Part I

The rise of finance capital and wealth inequalities potentially challenge models of social welfare, class and social policy focused on income distribution and employment. Within the global north, especially the Anglophone north, the rise of house prices, private health insurance and pension funds has linked fundamental social rights – shelter, health care and adequate post-work incomes – to increasingly unstable and unequal global markets. At the frontiers of social policy ‘innovative’ social financing models, such as Social Benefits Bonds, link policy interventions in vulnerable communities to financial derivatives. And in the Global South, the expansion of cash transfer programs is linked to the expansion of finance and debt relations. These structural economic changes parallel a substantial increase in wealth inequality and patterns of asset ownership that clearly impact social stratification, but are not straight forwardly connected to variations in national policies of social welfare.

This session asks how we connect the emerging patterns of an ‘asset economy’ premised on rising asset values and increasingly global and liquid financial markets to our understanding of inequality and social policy? How do wealth inequalities intersect with forms of economic precarity, such as contract and migrant labour markets, and residualised social programs? How does the logic of finance transform our understanding of social policy, from Social Benefit Bonds to Social Investment? And what, if any, opportunities are created by the rise of finance, and particularly the reliance of financial markets upon household spending on care, housing and education?