I present the first of three possibilities for the future of economic development and inequality. In this scenario, the rich continue to get richer, leaving the rest of us behind. I describe four implications of this continued concentration of wealth. First, the super-rich will continue to disproportionately influence politics, furthering fragmentation and polarization in society and deepening civic discontent. Second, economic inequality will amplify ill-health. Third, poverty will persist despite increased aggregate prosperity. Fourth, the climate will continue to deteriorate to our collective detriment. This dystopian possibility underscores the urgency of imagining and pursuing alternative futures.

This chapter outlines the historical evolution of the “Production Paradigm” in economic thought. It begins by exploring production as a defining characteristic of modern societies, shaped by the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, and contrasts natural resources with produced wealth. The chapter then highlights 18th-century Physiocracy, focusing on François Quesnay’s Tableau Économique as a groundbreaking framework. It transitions to Classical Political Economy, examining the contributions of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and reflecting on the intellectual decline that followed. Marx’s theories, particularly his approach to the transformation problem, are analyzed in relation to Ricardo’s work. The chapter concludes with a critique of the marginalist counter-revolution of the late 19th century, emphasizing its departure from production-centric models and missed opportunities in classical analysis.

Social network ties represent an important and complex confluence of sundry social processes and their consequences. It is an enduring fact of life that the more socially connected a person is, the better off they are. This goes for well-being, for health, for social stature, for popularity and prestige, for social mobility, and for access to material resources. Social connections give people power. They plug people into a switchboard of opportunities and resources, making them part of a resource-rich social system. Social connections liberate people from the stringencies of what might otherwise be stultifying conditions of everyday life. They create trust and produce the capacity for collective action to deal with local and regional social problems. They help people live longer lives. And social connections generally make life more fun, and richer, in every sense of those terms. It is a bundle of benefits that cannot be unwound. This introductory chapter lays out the primary motivation behind this book, which is an attempt to understand whether everyone has equal access to these valuable social resources, and whether they are so potent as to substitute for other valuable resources, such as wealth and prestige, in shaping people’s life chances.

The overarching question that guides this chapter is: Are social ties, and the resources they represent, equally distributed throughout society? That is, are these connections so free and abundant that they transcend the relentless constraints that people face in obtaining other forms of capital? In particular, do people from disadvantaged backgrounds enjoy the same level of access to such ties as wealthy people? This requires close examination of factors such as people’s connectedness to friends and family; the number of such ties they have and how often they engage them; how much turnover and instability there is in people’s networks; the internal wiring of the networks in which they are embedded, and how that relates to dense connections and brokerage potential; the status and wealth of their contacts; involvement in exchange processes; and connections to community organizations. This chapter navigates the thicket of findings regarding the distribution of these various forms of social capital by first walking through analyses of personal, micro-level connections, and then proceeding upward to more macro-level, organization-oriented indicators. This set of analyses reveals some latent, surprising, and fateful truths about how universally bountiful and reachable these valuable social resources really are.

One of the most spirited debates about social capital raises the promising and reassuring prospect that the social connections and networks in which it resides are so omnipotent as to serve as an optional equal substitute for other valuable resources such as wealth. Some scholars are optimistic in this regard, seeing social ties as potential social levelers. Others, in recognizing the extraordinary value of these ties, are less certain, feeling that anything that is so incredibly valuable as social capital appears to be will inevitably be closely intertwined with other forms of capital: that is, that social capital and more material resources – such as money – tend to move together. This chapter undertakes an analysis of all of the varieties of social capital that were examined, theorized, and documented earlier chapters, with an eye toward assessing the extent to which they are associated with income in particular. These analyses tell us a lot about how universally “free” these ties really are, and provide a provisional answer to the question about whether social capital is a potentially viable substitute for material resources, or whether the two forms of capital are inseparably tied together.

It is tempting and heartening to think of social relationships as readily available substitutes for access to other, harder-to-reach resources such as money. Imagine the social problems that could be solved if they were: the promise that as long as one is sociable, all of the resources one needs to maximize one’s life chances are there for the taking. As one steps back and takes in the body of evidence we present, though, it does not take long for doubts concerning the more optimistic scenario to settle in – suggesting that impoverished people will continue to toil in poverty in spite of their theoretical access to social relationships, and elites will continue to enjoy power, prestige, and prosperity because of these connections. This is not to say that social relationships do not confer their own rewards and help ease the pressures of everyday life. That is part of their enduring power. But for a variety of reasons, discussed in this chapter, it may not be enough to overcome the constraints on access to other forms of capital that are embedded in social structure. Understanding the causes and consequences of this potentiality will remain of vital importance in future social science research.

If the past half-century of social science research has taught us anything, it has taught us both that people can gain advantages and resources through social networks and, at the same time, that any valuable resource is prone to unsparing social inequality. This book is therefore motivated by the worrying concern that access to social network ties is not, in fact, distributed equally throughout the population. This chapter outlines the scope and structure of our foray into this complex problem. It briefly discusses the outline of the book, addressing what we cover in each chapter: the theoretical origins of and controversies surrounding the concept of social capital, introducing the questions of how it is distributed throughout society and whether it is linked to other forms of capital (Chapter 2); an overview of the data and methods we use to study this topic (Chapter 3); a detailed set of analyses using multiple indicators and data sources to ascertain how social capital is distributed (Chapter 4); an examination of how social capital is linked to other valuable resources, such as money (Chapter 5); and our ultimate conclusions and suggestions for future research on this topic (Chapter 6).

Islamic legal scholarship is split on the permissibility of corporate personhood. While some scholars advocate unequivocal permissibility, others are critical because Islamic law prohibits limited liability in most contracts. The religion also regards the human being as the only subject of Divine command. Despite their differences, most jurists agree that the corporate form is an effective tool to mobilize large amounts of capital. However, only one scholar, Ahmad Ali Abdullah addresses the exploitative impact corporations have on human rights and the environment. In this context, I argue that we should address the issue of corporate personhood from a maqasid framework. The preservation and protection of wealth is a legitimate purpose of Islamic law. However, the preservation and protection of life is a higher purpose in the hierarchy. The preservation of life is directly linked to the preservation of the earth. While recognizing the corporate form’s utility, I advocate creating alternative business models that lead to more sustainable development.

This chapter examines the presence of women in the Roman census and its socio-economic and political implications during the Republic. In the professio, citizens sui iuris had to declare their name, age, offspring, place of residence, occupation and properties. Viduae (a term including not only widows but also women who were no longer married) and women sui iuris also submitted census declarations. Special lists existed, for instance, of viduae and female wards, who were subject to specific taxes, namely, the aes equestre et hordiarium. This study explores the nature of the information recorded about female citizens in the census and the ways in which they were categorized. In sum, it argues that Roman female citizens should be included into a history of the census and taxation during the Roman Republic, rather than being treated as a marginal or overlooked group.

“Manners” alternates between the portrayal of self-reliant “gentlemen” like Montaigne, Socrates, and El Cid, who are “original and commanding” and “fashion,” an imitative “hall of the Past” where “virtue [has] gone to seed.” But near the end of the essay he turns away from forms of aristocratic morality by introducing two new heroes: a woman, “the Persian Lilla,” who reconciles “all heterogeneous persons into one society”; and then “Osman,” a poor beggar at the gates of the Shah who is a “great heart … so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country,” and whose wealth lies in his ability to “harbor” madness without sharing it. The introduction of Lilla and Osman late in “Manners” raises the question of how they align with its other heroes. Are they part of a turn or contrary tendency showing up late in the essay, or a deeper exploration of forms of virtue – especially love – already introduced?

This chapter addresses the evidence for the burial of moneyed laymen. The latter are, perhaps not unexpectedly, both ubiquitous and largely invisible in this collection. The necrosima includes only one hymn specifically addressing the death of a husband and father. By contrast, the majority of its forty “generic” hymns contemplate a male lay Christian subject, mourned by his children, anxious about abandoning his family, and plagued by anticipation of the harsh judgement he might receive. These hymns become a site for working out the necrosima’s theology of possessions – a topic that appears explicitly in some of the collection’s most paraenetically focused hymns, including, for example, madrāshâ 28 (“In funere principum, & Divitis cuiusque”/“On the burial of a prince or some kind of rich man”), but is a prominent theme in much of the corpus. This chapter accordingly examines anxieties about wealth and poverty, and the ethical pedagogy inherent in the necrosima, including its emphasis on charity.

Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.

This chapter examines the distinctive hardheadedness of the Bloomsbury group’s famous devotion to the life of the mind. While Bloomsbury is virtually synonymous with the prizing of aesthetic appreciation, emotional intensity, and intellectual reflection, many of the group’s members were equally concerned with the inextricability of such rarefied states from very material sources of maintenance, support, and security. The chapter foregrounds the inseparable connection between economics and aesthetics in the thought and practice of the Bloomsbury group, identifying a concern with this connection as one of the key preoccupations stemming from the influence of G. E. Moore’s philosophy, and tracing its significance in a range of economic, artistic and literary works.

The modern study of the Peloponnesian War has suffered from a double blind spot. On the one hand, the traditional study of political history based on events has shown little interest in the great development in the study of ancient Greek economic, social and cultural history. On the other hand, social, economic and cultural history has shown little interest in the study of events like the Peloponnesian War. In this chapter I want to discuss an alternative framework that can incorporate the full wealth provided by Thucydides and bridge the gap between economic, social and cultural history based on static analysis and political history based on dry narrative. The key for accomplishing this task is the concept of entanglement. The Peloponnesian War can be understood as a history of three different kinds of entanglements. The first entanglement is that between different levels: local communities, micro-regions, macro-regions and the Panhellenic world. The second entanglement concerns a series of processes put into motion by certain key factors: violence, honour, wealth and political discourse. The third entanglement concerns the variety of actors involved in the Peloponnesian War: state apparatuses, alliances, empires, potentates, factions, networks, exiles, mobile humans, the enslaved.

While the British or continental marriage plot generally culminates in a high-stakes social transaction involving fixed sums of old money, the story of American marriage in realist fiction is often less about inheritance than about the abstract, dynamic, and unpredictable force of new wealth. In both its new- and old-world settings, the marriage plot is fundamentally a money plot, but the kind of money at issue tends to differ in important respects, and the role of marriage in either reproducing or disrupting social conditions also differs as a result. Simply put, if the possibilities of heteronormative social reproduction signified by marriage were the things that chiefly struck the imaginations of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, it seems that for William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and other writers of American realism, money itself was the romance of the realist moment in America. It follows that the American marriage plot often enters the period’s fiction less as the climactic mechanism of social reproduction than as a minor event in the story of money’s own reproductive capability.

This chapter contends that Italy was exceptionally wealthy during the Early Empire, both in real and nominal terms. Italy’s prosperity stemmed from several sources: substantial booty, taxes, and rents were diverted from the provinces to the empire’s core; provincial elites engaged in imperial politics were expected to spend lavishly in Rome and its environs; and returns on Italian land were relatively high. Additionally, high prices in Italy for both real estate and commodities augmented Italy’s wealth in nominal terms.