Unequal ownership: Perspectives on a class-based investigation of wealth

Abstract

The schism between ownership and non-ownership of property was once considered the main class antagonism in capitalist societies. Class-analysis, however, has been reluctant to address the rising levels of wealth concentration in the last decades. While the richest 1% owns 35% of total wealth in Germany, middle class households are increasingly drawing on housing property and financial assets as a means for social security and status reproduction. The article discusses to what extent class analysis can examine wealth as a dimension of inequality. Using the German Socio-economic panel, it compares three different approaches, namely employment-based, property-based and portfolio-based concepts to see whether and how they allow to determine wealth inequalities as class inequalities. It is shown that beyond the unequal extent of net wealth, different asset portfolios are essential for differentiating class differences: In the upper part of the wealth and employment structure, we observe horizontal differentiations of asset portfolios that would be obscured if only net wealth was considered. The employment-aggregate approach is of limited purchase to study wealth and asset variations across classes in Germany. A property-based perspective is an easy and useful alternative when we want to simply understand vertical differences in wealth and asset ownership. Based on a Bourdieusian perspective of economic capital, the asset-portfolio class model is used as a possible alternative to see whether it is able to provide a more accurate picture of the composition of assets and their socio-structural location.