Resumo de Getting Rich - Lisa A. Keister

Getting Rich is about wealth
mobility. There is a general sense that being rich is better than not being
rich, but wealth ? and the processes that lead to wealth ownership ? may have
be even more important than most people realize. Wealth is the things people
own, including their homes, savings, investments, real estate, businesses, and
vehicles. Owning wealth has many advantages, from the obvious financial freedom
it provides to the even more enduring social and political privileges and power
accessible to the wealthy. These advantages and the elusive nature of true
wealth make questions about who is rich and why broadly appealing. Dramatic
economic changes in recent years, accompanied by rising wealth inequality, have
created renewed interest in wealth. These changes have also generated
speculation about new patterns in the ways people become wealthy. The
visibility of Internet millionaires created speculation that there may be an
increasing number of entrepreneurs among the wealthy, and the subsequent devaluation
of technology stocks and the bankruptcy of scores of dot com companies raised
questions about the role the sectoral shifts lay in wealth ownership. Through
all this, an increasingly skewed wealth distribution has raised questions, at
least in some corners, about why there continue to be people who accumulate
little even during periods of unprecedented economic growth. While basic facts
about wealth ownership and inequality are no mystery, we still know very little
about who is wealthy and why. That is, we still know very little about wealth
accumulation and wealth mobility. Wealth accumulation is the way people acquire
assets and debts during their lives. Wealth mobility refers to changes in
relative positions within the distribution of wealth. That is, if all people
were sorted according to how much wealth they have, mobility refers to how a
person?s position in this list changes over time. Clearly, wealth accumulation
is central to these changes. Of course, wealth mobility is also related to wealth
distribution. Given that wealth ownership is highly concentrated and that is
has become more concentrated during the time I will be considering here, moving
into the upper positions in the distribution is difficult. Researchers have
shown that there is considerable concentration of wealth ownership and have
estimated trends in the growth of wealth owned by ownership. There are also
estimates of the role that macroeconomic and demographic trends played in
shaping recent changes in wealth ownership. Yet the processes by which people
accumulate wealth, the way their wealth ownership changes over their lives, and
the way their positions in the distribution change over time have received
little attention. This book explores wealth by investigating some of the most
basic questions about wealth mobility, such as: How much mobility is there? Are
most wealthy people entrepreneurs, did they inherit their wealth, or did they
become wealthy in some other way? The starting point for
this book is the notion that understanding wealth and the processes that create
wealth are not only interesting but also of critical importance to
understanding the way people sort themselves socially and economically. That
is, understanding wealth ownership is central to understanding inequality. The
approach used here directs attention primarily toward the paths people take
during their lives in order to understand how these paths shape the
distribution of wealth. From these perspective, life paths include the starting
point as well as many of the key points of change people encounter during their
lives. The objective of this book is to explore the life
paths that underline wealth mobility in order to better understand both the
wealthy and those who never become wealthy.

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