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This chapter looks at how ways of thinking (Chapter 3) and ways of governing (Chapter 4) shape ways of being for richer and poorer people. It starts by looking at the long historical of relational self-making (us and them) and its use in policy making. Using Skeggs’ (2005) idea of ‘repertoires of self’, it then introduces types of self available to poorer people (the administrative self, the redeemed self) and richer people (the troubling family, the intermediated self). It positions these with the dispositions of scrutiny and ignorance.
This chapter looks at how the ways of thinking about richer and poorer people described in Chapter 3 are ‘made material’ in the design and enactment of policy. It looks at how the disposition of scrutiny characterised the workhouse system and endures in Universal Credit. It looks at how the disposition of ignorance characterised the early debates on direct income taxation in the 1790s, and is embedded in the ways in which the state governs the rich today through the work of its Wealthy Unit. In introduces the means through which richer and poorer people access state relief. And then it looks at hunger, mobility and work as enduring mechanisms of government for the poor; and mobility and sanction as mechanisms of government for the rich.
This chapter starts to answer the following genealogical question: ‘How have we become what we are?’ It does this from the perspective of knowledge making. It traces a history of early political numbers and explores how the early ways of knowing put in place the foundations of the dispositions of ignorance and scrutiny. It considers what directions the state has chosen to take knowledge in and what directions it has chosen not to take knowledge in (with regard to richer and poorer populations). It looks at how the state makes ‘problems’, how it attaches these problems to crises and how it produces populations to govern (or to ignore).
In this opening chapter of Part III of this book, the focus shifts to contemporary ways in which wealtherty is sustained. It looks at think tanks and the work they do to establish and make salient particular (usually partisan) problematisations. It focuses on the CSJ and its pivotal role in shaping the narrative and policy around social welfare in the 2000s. It looks at its key members, as well as their relationships in and with government. It characterises its approach as one of ‘radical grassrootsism’, it describes the effects of its work as a form of corporate welfare, and it uses framing from the agnotology literature (that is, the study of ignorance) to explore what directions in which the CSJ chooses not to take its narrative.
This chapter thinks about space and the visual as means of conducting conduct (governing). It starts by looking at the Jobcentre Plus network of buildings as a contemporary semiotics of deterrence (a parallel to the workhouse); it considers what kinds of space wealth and the wealthy are governed in/by; it considers the different forms of mobility available to richer and poorer people; and then it introduces some contemporary critical photography as a means of exploring what wealtherty looks like.
This chapter looks at the operation of what I am calling wealthed privilege in some of the communicative practices related to governing richer and poorer people. It focuses on communications in the Work and Pensions Committee Inquiries into Universal Credit and Survival Sex, and Universal Credit and Childcare, and the HMRC WEF. Using Fricker’s (2007) work on epistemic injustice, it describes how in contexts in which poorer people are engaged in communication with the state, they are restricted to lower status forms of epistemic participation (namely, sources of information). Conversely, when richer people are engaged in communication with the state, they operate as advisors and inquirers (higher-status roles). The chapter concludes that these ways of communicating entrench and reproduce relational inequalities between richer and poorer people.
The chapter introduces two individuals whose lives embody the very different experiences of people with a lot of wealth and people with no wealth as they interact with the state. It introduces distributional data on wealth (the state of wealth) looking at key contemporary trends relevant to building the definition of wealtherty. In the state and wealth it looks at how the state governs wealth and poverty and considers the rich and the poor as the focus of government. It then looks at what can’t be counted in terms of the experiences of the two individuals, through an introduction to the Capabilities Approach (CA). And it ends by introducing the historical and contemporary ‘sites of analysis’ that will thread through the rest of the book (Parts II and III), notably the 1799 Income Tax Act and the 1834 New Poor Law; and the HMRC’s Wealthy External Forum (WEF) and Universal Credit.
This Chapter summarises the book and it revisits the summary manifesto from Part I, adding detail to its eight ideas based on the intervening Chapters. The manifesto claims – stop talking about poverty; make extreme wealth into a social problem; describe the encompassing welfare universe; describe the pathways to wealtherty; change the focus of research funding; hear from the harm causers and not just the harmed; measure what needs to be measured and not just what can be counted; and reframe, rename and do better social science – close the book.
