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

How did Britains economy become a bastion of inequality? In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as rentier capitalism, in which ownership of key types of scarce assets - such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms - is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers. If a small elite owns todays economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker, Christophers shows, than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism - vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation - are on full display and have led the country inexorably to the precipice of Brexit. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance, Christophers examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand this insidious economic phenomenon but to overcome it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time. The United Kingdom of Rentierism In this landmark book, the author of the acclaimed The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination of capitalism as it increasingly exists today in the 'advanced' economies of the Global North. Dominated by institutions and individuals profiting from the control of scarce, revenue-generating assets, Brett Christophers styles this contemporary socioeconomic system 'rentier capitalism', and he critically dissects its emergence, forms and implications. The empirical focus of Rentier Capitalism's critique is the United Kingdom, a country and political economy that today bear all the hallmarks of rentier ascendancy: immense concentration of resources, constrained competition, vast inequalities of income and wealth, and growing economic stagnation. From finance to land, intellectual property to infrastructure and natural resources to digital platforms, Christophers identifies the key types of assets that scaffold UK rentier capitalism, the key actors that control and profit from them and the key consequences for everyone else. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance or its growing spectre, Christophers' examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand rentierism but supplant it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time