Varieties of Wealth

SER on Tap, Podcast by the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) | Jens Beckert

In "SER on Tap," a podcast by the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), Jens Beckert (MPIfG) talks about his article “Varieties of Wealth: Towards a Comparative Sociology of Wealth Inequality,” published in the Socio-Economic Review. Research on wealth inequality has made great strides in analyzing the distribution of private wealth, but has often neglected the country-specific context. In the article, Beckert develops a new framework for comparative research that distinguishes six “wealth capacities” and can be used to show that institutional factors influence the importance of private wealth. Using the U.S. and Germany, two cases of high wealth inequality, Beckert illustrates how different aspects of wealth can be more significant, influential, or tolerable depending on the institutional and cultural context.
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