Wealth

Six words that relocate the subject entirely. Wealth is not an accumulation of goods or of claims on goods but of social approval, and the abstracted or otherwise clause covers both the currency form and the unabstracted forms such as reputation and standing. Currency supplies the mechanism, being abstract dissociated approval that allows access to all the benefits of a society without contribution, membership or acceptance of its values, so accumulating currency is accumulating approval that has been detached from anyone actually approving. Two consequences follow that the material account cannot produce. Wealth is dependent, since approval can be withdrawn and a holding that consists of it is only as secure as the recognition sustaining it, which is why Marsh treats even powerful states as susceptible to the world's approval. And wealth is relational rather than absolute, which is why she says there is no wealth without poverty because wealth is extracted from misery, and why poverty functions as the Dalit caste or scapegoat of wealth endo-idealism providing the same communal sacrifice. Her account of hoarding follows the same reading, since hoarding is an act of unbalanced force and stealing is not, if ownership is defined by power. The approval economy is her alternative, where reintegration is a product of subsequent good behaviour and effort expended to increase approval, which makes the same quantity earned rather than accumulated.

Economics measures wealth as the net value of assets and distinguishes it from income, with distribution studied extensively since Piketty. Thorstein Veblen's conspicuous consumption argued that wealth is displayed for status, making the social dimension a use rather than the substance. Bourdieu's symbolic capital treats recognition as a convertible form. Anthropology of wealth in societies without money documents standing measured in obligations and relationships. Marsh's definition inverts the usual order, since where Veblen has wealth purchasing status she has status constituting wealth, which makes the material holdings a representation of the quantity rather than the quantity itself.