As Shamus Kahn observes, the rich think of themselves as ‘a collection of talented individuals who have a unique capacity to navigate our world’, rather than as dependent on occupying positions in the economy from which they can extract more wealth than they contribute. They are not free-floating individuals but occupants of positions within economic relations between different groups or classes. Their fortunes are made through these relations with others – as employers with employees, shareholders with claims on the wealth produced by employees, landlords with tenants, lenders with borrowers, sellers with buyers. The first four of these relations are invariably unequal, and the last often unequal too. To understand how the rich come to be rich, we had to identify these relations. Economics is relational. Sometimes it’s a positive-sum game, sometimes a zero- or negative-sum game.

Following these connections meant confronting basic features of capitalism, particularly the control by a minority of key assets like technology, land, property and finance. Of course, there are and have been different kinds of capitalism; much depends on how it’s regulated, particularly how far labour, consumers and the environment are protected through the state and civil society. In the neoliberal version of capitalism that has developed over the last 40 years, the injustices of capitalism’s wealth extraction processes have grown, and their irrational and dysfunctional character has resulted in the worst economic crash for 80 years. The UK and the US have led the way, but most other developed countries have followed, some more closely than others, from Ireland to Turkey, to South Korea and New Zealand. Meanwhile the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have imposed neoliberal policies on developing countries and former Soviet Bloc countries as a condition of support, forcing them to privatise, reduce labour protection and taxes, and open their borders to multinational companies. Despite the economic crisis, neoliberalism stumbles on, zombie-like, creating more asset bubbles and protecting the rich by imposing austerity on the least-powerful.

At various points we have encountered other problematic features of our capitalist global economic order: the unequal division of labour, which gives good-quality work to some at the expense of meaningful work for others; unequal exchange between countries with different levels of development; and wasteful consumption. All of these things are related to the rich, but also to things beyond them.