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The rich and the poor in the UK are subject to radically different legislative approaches. While the behaviours of the poor are relentlessly scrutinised, those of the rich are ignored or enabled.
In this book, Sarah Kerr suggests that we live in a state of ‘wealtherty’, characterised by the hyper-concentration of wealth and a stark distinction between the rich and the rest. Drawing on evidence from the 1500s onwards, she reveals a long history of government scrutiny of the poor and ignorance of the rich. She contests contemporary policy and practice which disregards the enduring role of the rich in the production of poverty and poverty in the production of the rich.
In pursuit of social and economic justice, this radical book challenges policy makers and researchers to stop talking about poverty and to start addressing the problems caused by wealtherty.
Part I: What have we become?
1. Why wealtherty and why now?
2. The state of wealth and the state and wealth
Part II: how have we become what we are?
3. Knowing: how the state came to know richer and poorer people differently
4. Governing: how the state came to govern richer and poorer people differently
5. Being: how ways of governing enabled different forms of self for richer and poorer people
Part III: What sustains the problem?
6. Producing knowledge: think tanks and policy networks
7. Shaping behaviours: Space and the visual as tools of government
8. Shaping selves: wealth and identity
Part IV: In conclusion
9. Ways out