The Plutonomy of the 1%: Dominant Ownership and Conspicuous Consumption in the New Gilded Age
| Author | Tim Di Muzio |
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829814557345 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2015, Vol. 43(2) 492 –510
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829814557345
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
The Plutonomy of the 1%:
Dominant Ownership and
Conspicuous Consumption in
the New Gilded Age
Tim Di Muzio
University of Wollongong, Australia
Abstract
This article offers a study on the plutonomy of dominant owners and what their consumptive practices
might tell us from the lens of the capital as power framework in IPE. I argue that the differential
consumption of dominant owners is an important dimension of an internationalised capitalist mode
of power for two reasons. First, Nitzan and Bichler argue that the primary driver of accumulation
is the desire for differential power symbolically expressed in a magnitude of money. In this article,
I argue that there is a secondary dimension noted but underdeveloped in their framework and
influenced by Veblen: the drive for social status and the display of positionality through differential
intraclass consumption. Second, as identified by Kempf, I argue that the consumptive practices of
dominant owners are helping to lock global society into an unsustainable and ethically indefensible
quest for perpetual economic growth. This growth project not only undermines calls for needed
social and economic change but also threatens populations with environmental collapse.
Keywords
1%, capital, consumption, dominant owners, IPE, New Gilded Age, plutonomy
Introduction
Of all classes, the wealthy are the most noticed and the least studied.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Corresponding author:
Tim Di Muzio, School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, NSW 2522,
Australia.
Email: tdimuzio@uow.edu.au
557345MIL0010.1177/0305829814557345Millennium: Journal of International StudiesDi Muzio
research-article2014
Article
Di Muzio 493
1. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (London: British Broadcasting Corporation,
1977), 44; Maurice Zeitlin, ‘Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and
the Capitalist Class’, American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 5 (1974): 1112; Susan George,
Whose Crisis, Whose Future? (London: Polity, 2010), 82.
2. Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism, 15–18th Century
(New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 466, emphasis in original.
3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
4. Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management, World Wealth Report 2013. Available at: http://
www.worldwealthreport.com/ (accessed 16 July 2013). Additional reports can be found from
Wealth-X, Knight Frank, Allianz and Credit Suisse.
The fact is that there is far more systematic information available on the poor, on farmers,
workers … than on the men and women of the rich and the well-born, on those who make up
the ‘upper strata’ – if not the ‘capitalist class’ – of our society. Yet now it ought to be apparent
… that we must discover as much as we can about those who occupy the upper reaches of …
society if we are to understand … the present as history.
Maurice Zeitlin
Study the rich and the powerful, not the poor and powerless … not nearly enough work is being
done on those who hold the power and pull the strings. As their tactics become more subtle and
their public pronouncements more guarded, the need for better spade-work becomes crucial …
Let the poor study themselves. They already know what is wrong with their lives and if you
truly want to help them, the best you can do is to give them a clearer idea of how their oppressors
are working now and can be expected to work in the future.
Susan George1
When he reflected on his three-volume history of civilisation and capitalism, the
French historian Fernand Braudel asked a crucial question: whether it was a law of
history that the rich always be so few?2 While amounts of wealth and consumption
patterns have changed historically, Braudel’s observation remains highly prescient for
IPE scholars in the 21st century. For example, in 2011 the Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
movement drew renewed attention to the growing disparity of wealth and life chances
across the global population. Mobilising under the slogan ‘We are the 99%’, the
movement addressed deep-seated changes in the global political economy that served
to increase the wealth, income and power of a minority they referred to as the 1%.
Piketty’s recent empirical work on growing inequality confirms this for Anglo-Saxon
countries, Europe and key emerging market economies like South Africa and India.3
Various world wealth reports by leading financial institutions also confirm this dis-
parity, with an estimated 12 million individuals, or 0.2 per cent of the global popula-
tion, considered high net worth individuals with at least US$1 million in investable
income-generating assets.4
Since its inception as a body of literature in IR, critical IPE scholarship has focused
on international inequality and elite transnational social formations under a more glo-
balised capitalism – part of what Susan Strange called ‘business civilization’ and what
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