Moral and pragmatist sociology has studied capitalism as a set of institutions that require justification, which has historically been offered through forms of rewarding and meaningful work, anchoring the human life course in a narrative of individual and collective progress. However, emerging with neoliberalism, then becoming explicit after 2008, contemporary capitalism has become organised around the logic of assets and wealth as opposed to labour and production. This provokes a vacuum of justification. Once all actors are (as Minsky argued) balance sheet actors and profit becomes a function of sheer temporality, the economy ceases to function as a moral order and instead becomes imbued with existential concerns of temporality, durability, survival, and finitude. Possessed only of certain contingently acquired assets and liabilities, the self becomes wholly contingent in the sense described by Heidegger; that is, as ‘thrown’ into having had a past and into a relationship of ‘care’ towards the future. The article identifies symptoms of this existential condition in empirical studies of wealth elites, for whom (in the absence of conventional liberal and production-based measures of worth) problems of meaning, purpose, and finitude are endemic.

The role of housing in providing a welfare asset has been widely explored. With the growth in home ownership between 1979 and 2008 and erosion of the welfare state, housing wealth has become part of the welfare mix in the UK. Here, we present analysis of housing outcomes, as measured in the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in Great Britain. This shows that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people have poorer housing outcomes than heterosexual counterparts: they are less likely to be homeowners; more likely to be private renters; and more likely to be social renters. With growing intergenerational inequalities in access to home ownership, we argue that, as openly LGB (and broader trans and queer) people being on average younger than the rest of the population, this could lead to LGB people, as a group, being excluded from asset-based welfare in the future as they age.

Wealth provides self-insurance against financial risk, reducing risk aversion. We apply this insurance mechanism to electoral behaviour, arguing that a voter who desires a change to the status quo and who is wealthy is more likely to vote for change than a voter who lacks the same self-insurance. We apply this argument to the case of Brexit in the UK, which has been widely characterized as a vote by the ‘economically left-behind’. Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth. We corroborate our theory using two panel surveys, accounting for unobserved individual-level heterogeneity, and by using a survey experiment. The findings have implications for the potential broader role of wealth-as-insurance in electoral behaviour and for understanding the Brexit case.

Must we always pursue economic growth? Kogelmann answers yes. Not only should poor countries pursue growth, but rich countries should as well. Kogelmann aims to provide a wealth-insensitive argument – one demonstrating all countries should pursue growth regardless of their wealth. His central argument – the no halting growth (NHG) argument – says no country experiencing growth should stop it, because doing so requires undermining the conditions causing it and those conditions are independently morally desirable, so they should not be undermined. For countries not growing, he may argue that they have an obligation to implement the conditions that cause growth because they are independently morally desirable. Call this the implementation argument. I contend that neither argument is wealth-insensitive as each fails to establish an obligation to pursue growth. I attempt to diagnose how this could be and propose that it is a product of attempting to answer three questions about growth simultaneously.

The rapid widening of wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding whether and separately the rate at which individuals accumulate particular types of wealth by family background is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show offspring wealth inequality is driven by housing wealth, and holding such wealth is becoming increasingly associated with early life circumstances relating to parental housing tenure and education, even after controlling for adult offspring’s own characteristics. Importantly, we find adult offspring whose parents hold a degree and are homeowners are no less likely to report homeownership and housing wealth compared to older cohorts from the same background. Our findings infer the intergenerational rank correlation in housing wealth is set to double in approximately three decades.

This article analyzes the second-century Acts of John 56–57, in which Antipatros seeks healing for his twin sons whom he claims he cannot support as he ages. I argue that this passage turns on a layered critique of Antipatros. First, the text censures medical commerce. Second, it uses his threat of murder, economic circumstances, and name to undermine Antipatros as both father and inquiring disciple. The episode thus leverages criticism of a character whose negative attitudes lead him to contemplate destruction of those with infirmities. However, it retains a mixed message: while the character of the apostle John comes to focus on the sons, the narrative silences them. Ultimately, the text emphasizes what the critique means for the flawed male, elite father, rather than the experience of the impaired sons. Such dynamics warrant close attention as we continue to expand our understanding of attitudes to disability in sources from antiquity.

Studies of health care expenditure often exclude explanatory variables measuring wealth, despite the intuitive importance and policy relevance. We use the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to assess impacts of income and wealth on health expenditure. We investigate four different dependent variables related to health expenditure and use three main methodological approaches. These approaches include a first difference model and introduction of a lagged dependent variable into a cross-sectional context. The key findings include that wealth tends to be more important than income in identifying variation in health expenditure. This applies for health variables which are not directly linked to means testing, such as spending on health practitioners and for being unable to afford required medical treatment. In contrast, the paper includes no evidence of different impacts of income and wealth on spending on medicines, prescriptions or pharmaceuticals. The results motivate two novel policy innovations. One is the introduction of an asset test for determining rebate eligibility for private health insurance. The second is greater focus on asset testing, rather than income tests, for a wide range of general welfare payments that can be used for health expenditure. Australia's world-leading use of means testing can provide a test case for many countries.

The author makes the case that wealth inequality ramifies in the communicative practices of policymaking in ways which produce specific forms of epistemic injustice. Relative epistemic authority between richer and poorer knowers is established by limiting some speakers to being sources of information, and elevating others to the epistemically more sophisticated role of inquirer. In its systemic form, this differentiation has the effect of re-producing and maintaining ‘tracker prejudices’ (Fricker, 2007) and ‘tracker privileges’ (Medina, 2011) which then ramify in relational and distributive inequality (Fricker, 2016). The article suggests that in a context in which the inclusion of ‘lived experience’ has come to be seen as an intrinsic good in policy discourse (Smith-Merry, 2020), the lived experience we need to amplify isn’t that of the poor, it is that of the rich. Only in centring rich voices in social policymaking can we reveal and challenge the operation of wealth privilege and advance reparatory forms of epistemic practice.1

This article, originally presented as the Presidential Address at the 2022 SNTS Meeting in Leuven, explores the ways in which Paul configures giving and ‘wealth’, both in relation to the Macedonians and Corinthians (as contributors to the Jerusalem collection) and in relation to Christ. Drawing on the dream-interpretations of Artemidorus, it illustrates how ‘wealth’ could be understood in antiquity as performance rather than possession: one is wealthy in giving and not (or not only) in having. In this light, Paul offers a striking image of the Macedonians who in their poverty were ‘rich’ in their unreserved commitment to the collection, fulfilling the dream of the poor by acquiring the dignity of giving. The Christological statement of 2 Cor 8.9 can also be understood (and integrated) in a new way: it was in his wealth (of self-sharing) that Christ became poor (in the weakness of the cross), so that the Corinthians, participating in this momentum, might become ‘rich’ in the same self-giving of Christ. Although grace and money are not identical, neither are they unrelated ‘economies’: the grace of the Christ-event transforms its beneficiaries into givers, rich in multiple forms of generosity, including material gift. The text thus evidences principles of a non-competitive mode of social relations operative in the material sphere, with the capacity to stimulate a theological challenge to dehumanising forms of capitalism.