Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?

Abstract

Over the past decade, Anglophone geographic political economy has experienced a renewed interest in long-dormant theories of land rent, alongside a growing interest in intellectual property, resources, financialization, infrastructure, and platform capitalism. If this seems a disparate list, Brett Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism begs to differ. Taking the UK as his case study, with an eye on broader developments, he argues that late neoliberal North Atlantic capitalism is now about assets, not commodities—speculation, not profit making—and that these are all assets. Assets as a concept is conspicuous by its absence from theorizations of the capitalist space economy. Marx rarely uses it, only in reference to money, and Karl Polanyi famously dubbed land and money fictitious commodities. Setting out to challenge such conceptual marginalization, Rentier Capitalism makes important contributions to theory, empirics, and policy. Christophers defines assets as scarce items essential to capitalism; privately owned assets “endow the owner with the capacity to generate future income” (p. xvi): rent, “derived from possession or control of scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition” (p. xvii). Asset holders are rentiers, making money from owning things not producing them. Landlords and land rent come immediately to mind for geographers; Christophers’s major theoretical contribution is to greatly expand such limited thinking. In successive chapters, extending arguments in his preceding books, he argues that assets include financial instruments, natural resources, intellectual property, platform data, contracts, and infrastructure, as well as land. Contracts, beloved of mainstream economists, seem part and parcel of commodity production and exchange, yet Christophers argues that these are also valuable assets because of the future cash flows they make possible. If we are willing to buy even aspects of his typology, this suggests that economic geographers’ focus on land when theorizing rent needs rethinking. Empirically, Christophers examines the growth of each asset class in the UK, documenting its growth, rentier institutions, how UK neoliberalizing state policy accelerated assetization of the economy by subsidizing rentiers, and its association with widening class inequality. He combines a variety of statistical sources with analysis of tax codes and policy documents, leavened by investigative reporting into key asset-holding firms and individuals. He reveals the UK economy as paradigmatic of rentier capitalism: “dominated by sectors in which rentierism is a significant factor” (p. 17); real estate contributes more than twice as much to the national economy as any other economic sector. Noting how falling economic growth rates and rising inequality accompanied this assetization, the Coda lists four policy interventions to counteract rentier capitalism: antimonopoly regulation, tax policies targeting rents and incentivizing nonrentier activities, industrialization policy-shaping investment priorities (suddenly on the UK and US agenda), and de-concentrating and renationalizing asset ownership. Only this last proposal implies “moving away from capitalism” (p. 408). Christophers offers a powerful and persuasive diagnosis of a national territorial economy that is a leading light of neoliberalization. His writing is accessible to a broad audience, and he tells a gripping story. Unlike most geography monographs this is a page-turner, which is being prominently discussed by analysts of the UK economy. This makes Rentier Capitalism BO O K R EV EW