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Abstract

This article engages with the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as an event that is moving us towards a new era. Highlighting the paradox that this question has emerged in the context of the stoppages and shutdowns associated with the pandemic, we suggest that any assessment of social change and the futures such change might unfold must be situated on the terrain formatted by the temporal logics of capitalism. At our current juncture this requires that sociology as a discipline understand these logics as asset rather than commodity based. Drawing on state responses to the pandemic in Australia, we show how mundane payments play a critical role in these logics, operating as differentiating technologies of time. We suggest that for sociology to build a sociology of futures that is relevant for the 21st century, it must come to terms with the time machine of the asset economy.

Keywords

asset economy COVID futurity housing payments speculation

Introduction

The pausing of economic activities and stay-at-home orders put in place by authorities around the world to mitigate COVID-19 infection rates have been widely understood to have upended and transformed the collective experience of time (see, for example, Grove et al., 2021; Suckert, 2021). The pandemic seemed to lock us into a suspended, enduring present, engendering a sense that time had stopped flowing in the way that it usually does; ushering in a world of temporal asynchrony, confusion and disorientation (Warner, 2020). Paradoxically, the sudden stoppage of things gave rise to a sense of potential novelty, including the possibility that the pandemic may precipitate a new era. The responses to COVID-19 – the shutdown, lockdown and stay-at-home orders – were, as Suckert (2021: 1162) has recently framed it, ‘at odds with the temporal order of capitalism’.

For others, however, time as we knew it already ended some time ago – at the hands of neoliberal capitalism. The collapse of the future as a horizon of hope and possibility and the emergence of an enduring and extended present from which there appears to be no respite or escape has, for example, been widely located as a leitmotif of the contemporary age (Baraitser, 2017; Berardi, 2011; Fisher, 2014; Lazzarato, 2011). Seen from this perspective of already stolen futures, the pandemic has mainly amplified existing tendencies in the organization and experience of time. And far from presenting novelty, we are simply witnessing the final collapse of possibility and a deeper entrenchment of the temporal structures of late capitalism. When we recall how often the end of globalization, neoliberalism or other manifestations of contemporary capitalism have been erroneously declared in recent decades, such a reality-check seems apposite.

In this article we engage the question of whether the pandemic can be understood as moving us into a new era; whether, in Sewell’s (1996, 2005) terms, it represents an event that has durably transformed existing structures and processes. In engaging with this question our aim is less to address it literally or directly but to draw attention to some of the factors that any sustained analysis of social transformation in the 21st century will have to take into account. We pursue this objective by foregrounding the logic of the contemporary asset economy. Most understandings of capitalist temporality are grounded in an emphasis on the commodity as the paradigmatic social form. Although sophisticated analyses can be generated through this lens, we argue that it is no longer sufficiently attuned to the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, which are dominated by the logic of assets, a social form that is principally not thinkable without reference to a temporal dimension.

The asset economy is all too often cursorily reduced to the speculative logic of the debt economy, seen to be unsustainable and incoherent. But that is to give short shrift to the undeniable element of resilience embedded in the asset economy – an economy of institutionally backed asset price inflation and wage stagnation operating across Anglo-capitalist societies (Adkins et al., 2020). A focus on the logic of payment is critical here, as both a window into, and a key technology of, the temporal reordering of asset-based capitalism. It is through a particular politics and policy of payment that asset price inflation can be sustained. In the asset economy everyday payment practices such as mortgage and rental payments serve as differentiated technologies of time that distribute futurity unevenly between those who are locked in to, and locked out of, asset ownership. A sociology for the 21st century should, then, have asset-based futures at its core.

Although we are still very much in medias res, the policy measures that have been pursued in response to the pandemic should temper any headlong rush into proclamations of fundamental rupture and change. These responses further embedded and extended the dynamics of the asset economy, incorporating the plentiful eventuality of the present moment in a dynamic that benefits asset owners at the expense of others. Many furloughed or laid-off mortgaged homeowners were able to shore up their asset-based futures through government-provided liquidity injections and pauses and suspensions to their mortgage payments. In such cases, temporal interruption therefore brought with them not a rupture but institutional support for anticipated futures. But the very same emergency measures consigned many non-asset owners, and specifically renters, to live in a precarious short-termism of the now. In such cases, the suspension and pause entailed an often-severe intensification of economic pressures, without the reprieve of a strengthening balance sheet.

To lay out these interventions, this article is structured as follows. In the next, second section, we survey key contours of existing sociological efforts to understand time and social change within capitalism. The third section outlines the distinctive features and dynamics of the asset economy, highlighting the integral role of payments against mortgaged assets securing pathways to capital gains. Fourth, we discuss how, contrary to expectations, the pandemic precipitated a global boom in house prices. The fifth section then shows how government measures enabled this boom through a particular politics of payment that maintained the liquidity and solvency of mortgaged residential property owners and investors, with particular reference to the Australian case. Sixth and finally, in the conclusion we reflect on the implications of the rise of the asset economy for the contours of a sociology of the 21st century and especially on how sociology must come to terms with the temporal order of asset-based capitalism.

Sociology, Time and Capital

Sociology has long grappled with issues of social transformation, and especially with questions of epochal change (see Susen, 2020). Although many have pointed to the problems with epochal social thought (see, for example, Savage, 2009), the felt need to generate reliable periodization has proven equally tenacious. It is hardly an exaggeration to see this as akin to an existential predicament of the discipline – the ever-present concern to periodize despite widespread awareness of the fraught nature of the terrain. The work of Sewell (1996, 2005) has become a key point of reference in these debates, especially his theorization of the transformation of social structures in terms of the event. As Sewell theorizes it, an event is a sequence of occurrences that begin in a rupture of some kind, or as he frames it a ‘surprising break with routine practice’ (Sewell, 1996: 843).

While breaks with routine practice are themselves routine, for Sewell (1996: 843) an occurrence only becomes an historical event when ‘it touches off a chain of occurrences that durably transforms previous structures and practices’. Writing in broadly Sewellian terms, Wagner-Pacifici (2021) has recently asked if the pandemic has event status. She notes that events usually become apparent only in retrospect, not least because ruptures always contain contradictory temporalities (speeding up, slowing down, stoppage) (see also Wagner-Pacifici, 2017). The executive lockdown and stay-at-home orders paradigmatic of the pandemic response on the part of governments illustrate such contradictory temporalities well. On the one hand, these orders suspended much of life, involving the ‘closing of institutions, the halting of normal work processes, and [. . .] the shutting down of modes of transportation’ (Wagner-Pacifici, 2021: 14). On the other, these orders were framed as temporary and short-lived, implying that ‘normal life’ would soon resume. The Governor of New York’s 2020 shutdown executive orders (‘New York on Pause’) for example, ‘simultaneously proceeded and halted, lurching forward with suspensions and modifications in the face of what may or may not be a real “disaster emergency”’ (Wagner-Pacifici, 2021: 13–14).

Such conflicting temporalities disorient and confuse because they hold rupture and continuity, the unknown and the known, the possible and the probable, the non-linear and the linear, together. Consequently, they make any evaluation of an occurrence’s or set of occurrences’ event status particularly fraught. We lack objective standards and criteria that would allow us to answer the relevant questions (what is a trend? what is a definitive turning point? what is a new era? and are current ruptures connecting into a single over-arching event, one that might meet the criteria of transformation of structures established by Sewell?) in unambiguous ways.

In this article, we seek to go beyond the (compelling but by now well-established) claim that assessments of change vs continuity cannot be adjudicated according to timeless, externally derived standards and instead require contextualized assessments that are attentive to the complexities generated by the interactions of trends, counter-trends and feedback loops. In the present, we suggest, such assessments need to be situated more specifically on the terrain formatted by the temporal logics of capitalism. That is to say, they need to be thought not just with reference to capital as one empirical area among others, but with reference to capital as formatting the very temporal field of contemporary life, inclusive of the standards, measures and points of orientation that we use to make assessments about novelty, change and persistence.

As we have already indicated, the tension pervading questions of social transformation features prominently and productively in Sewell’s (1996, 2005) work. But when it comes to the question of capitalism, his work does not press this concern as far as it might. According to Sewell (2008), capital is on the one hand an evental force, constantly generating novelty and revolutionizing the concrete conditions of human life; and on the other hand, it is repetitive, still and abstract. Sewell translates this into a cyclical model of capitalism, albeit one that does not see continuity and change alternating but rather sees capital’s lawlike regularities as working ‘through the medium of events’ (Sewell, 2008: 528, emphasis added). But this is still a little cryptic. It leaves aside the question of how we could differentiate events that are consistent with capital’s abstract stillness from events that challenge it. For all intents and purposes this would remain an empirical question, and our ability to answer would be dependent on external criteria, derived from outside the logic of capital. That is of course hardly an unreasonable position, and, as we have already indicated in the context of the discussion of Wagner-Pacifici’s work, considerable insight can be generated in this way. This position is, however, unable to clarify the paradoxical character of the present; that is, the fact that many events that we might have thought would constitute an obvious break with the logic of capital in fact turn out to be entirely serviceable to its further expansion.

That insight is at the heart of the ‘stolen future’ literature referenced above, which exemplifies the idea that any change is already fully incorporated into the logic of capital. There is something inherently unprovable about this position, but its very contemporary prominence is telling and suggestive. After all, there is something inherently paradoxical about the fact that we have ended up imagining the stoppage of things as the true novelty, the occasion of a qualitative break. In a similar way, the ‘capitalist realism’ literature draws attention to the fact that the disappearance of hopes for a better future has never induced calm resignation. The present is not an actionless void or an empty plane but instead exists as generalized precarity that requires us to furiously tread water just to stand still (Bauman, 2007; Berlant, 2011; Southwood, 2011). If this perspective captures something of the zeitgeist, in this article we aim to provide a more rigorous treatment of the paradoxical character of the time of contemporary capitalism.

Asset Logics

Capitalism’s temporal logics are most often understood with reference to the commodity – and especially the process of the commodification of time that Thompson (1967) illustrated to be critical to the rise of industrial capitalism and mass society. Turning on the transformation and organization of time into reversible, standardized units, commodification enabled the extraction of surplus from labour at scale, exponential rates of exchange, the boundless expansion of capital and the governance and organization of social life such that it aided and abetted the extraction of surplus from populations (Postone, 1993; Sewell, 2008). The process of the commodification of time afforded a form of time that is linear and predictable, facilitating modes of anticipation that enable the endless reproduction and repetition of the same. This understanding of time as commodity time lies at the very heart of understandings of the logic of capitalism within sociology, fuelling, for example, analyses of social speed and acceleration (see, for example, Rosa, 2013; Vostal, 2016) as well as the view that more and more aspects of social life – including the most intimate crevices of social lives – have become the subject and object of the logic of commodification (see, for example, Illouz, 2018). And in as much as sociology’s public mission has been aligned with decommodification movements, this understanding of time is also central to received understandings of ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005).

A commodity understanding of time is, however, unable to come to grips with the significance of assets within present-day Anglo-capitalism. The rise of the asset economy has upended the temporal order of capitalism. Whereas commodity time is organized around cycles of production and consumption, whether in the workplace or across the life course, asset time is organized around different and uneven trajectories of wealth accumulation. The shifting role of ‘the payment’ has been critical to this pivot. The buying and selling of commodities is facilitated by payment systems, including credit, which smooth production and consumption costs over time. Payments in the asset economy, in contrast, connect the present and the future by providing the liquidity required to sustain asset price inflation. Payments are therefore a window into the specific and consequential features of the temporal order of the asset economy, where social life is increasingly organized by asset rather than commodity logics.

Fuelled by the processes of asset price inflation and wage stagnation alongside the democratization of credit, the dynamics of asset economy emerged as distinctive features of Anglo-capitalist societies from the late 1970s onwards. In this economy returns on assets have risen faster than those on labour and asset-ownership has become a critical force in determining life chances (Adkins et al., 2020). A range of processes have been critical to the embedding of these dynamics including the democratization of mortgage credit, the transformation of residential property into a financial asset, organized reductions in stocks of social housing and the rise in residential property prices, especially (although not only) in major urban centres. This dynamic became particularly acute following the global financial crisis. In Australia’s two biggest cities, for example, real house prices increased by 129% in Sydney and 133% in Melbourne between 2009 and 2021 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021a, 2021b). Over the same period, real wages in Australia grew by only 6% (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021c).

While asset ownership has tended to be associated with the super-rich, and asset price inflation as both consolidating and boosting the fortunes of the very wealthiest 1% (see, for example, Bellamy Foster et al., 2021), this understanding understates how broadscale participation in the dynamics of the asset economy has been achieved across Anglo-capitalist societies through residential home ownership. Continual increases in house prices have seen major gains in the wealth portfolios of residential property owners (Pfeffer and Waitkus, 2021). However, the logic of residential property price inflation has translated into significant rises in wealth-based inequality and has meant that inevitably, significant portions of populations across Anglo-capitalist societies now find themselves priced out of home ownership. This price-out has translated into increases in the proportion of households privately renting (see, for example, Byrne, 2020; Crook and Kemp, 2014; Pawson et al., 2017) and steady declines in rates of home ownership (Arundel and Doling, 2017; Ronald and Lennartz, 2020).

Forty years of asset price inflation has sedimented residential property ownership and the wealth accumulation it affords as a major 21st-century problem, representing a critical axis of both inequality and politics (Adkins et al., 2020; Savage and Waitkus, 2021). Growing dependence on asset inflation has established residential property owners as a significant political constituency. In Australia, for example, residential property owners (including significant numbers of investment property owners) vote with their feet by supporting political parties that resolve to continue with the significant pro-home ownership and pro-residential property investment policies (notably capital gains tax exemption for principal residences and tax incentives for property investment) that have been features of the Australian housing landscape for decades (Hellwig and McCallister, 2018). In turn, given the electoral power of property owners and the gradual reorganization of the economic and social system around rising asset prices, governments and policy makers have found themselves locked into pro-home ownership policies alongside policies that support continuing housing price inflation, even when their interventions ostensibly attempt at their moderation (Konings et al., 2021).

Asset ownership and the wealth accumulation it allows is, in other words, not only distributed well beyond the 1%, but asset inflation has significantly shifted the economic, social and political dynamics of Anglo-capitalist societies. These dynamics might be understood as illuminating the mechanics of how economic inequality has returned with such force in the 21st century (Piketty, 2014). Yet to frame inequalities of asset-based wealth simply in terms of a return to the patterns of inequality of previous eras and not to dig into the specific logics of assets and of asset-based accumulation is to miss how these logics have transformed the coordinates of economic action and how these coordinates have become thoroughly embedded in everyday life.

Here the distinction between commodities and assets is critical because assets, asset ownership and asset-based accumulation have a distinctive temporal structure. A purchase of residential property is, for example, typically based on borrowing, which comes with a structured set of debt obligations over time requiring regular mortgage payments. The changing nature of these payments provides a critical window on the shift in emphasis from the commodity to the asset as the organizing logic of 21st-century capitalism. Home ownership was established as a crucial pillar of middle-class life in post-war Anglo-capitalism. Mortgage payments offered a means to smooth the costs of housing as a commodity. The ideal was to pay down the principal borrowed with the aim of paying off the mortgage by the end of a working life. In contrast to this Keynesian or Fordist rationality, in the asset economy mortgage payments are governed by a speculative logic. Rather than paying down or paying off, mortgage payments enable households to pay into the promise and potential of asset price appreciation.

In practical terms, what this means is that asset owners face the problem of securing a flow of liquidity in the present to meet their payment obligations. While the owners of a mortgaged property (especially if that property is in a major urban centre) may be relatively certain that their asset will appreciate and that they are likely, as a consequence of their investment, to increase their household wealth holding in the future in significant ways, they nonetheless must access liquidity to meet their structured debt commitments and to build their asset in the here and now. There are then significant temporal delays between asset building, asset appreciation and the generation of future capital gains and these delays can be highly consequential. Even a temporary shortage of liquidity in the present, for example, can have far-reaching consequences, making the difference between speculative buoyancy or deathlike stagnation. In this sense liquidity should be understood as the lifeblood of the household, allowing households to buy the time needed to make their investments in residential property work out.

The Pandemic and Asset Prices

This everyday problem of liquidity could not have been made more explicit than by the fallout of the pandemic. The pausing of economic activities and stay-at-home orders in the first waves of the pandemic, and especially the furloughing and laying off of workers on a mass scale, posed an immediate risk to the buoyancy of mortgaged households, potentially cutting off a key source of liquidity (wages) and with it the ability of households to meet their structured debt obligations and to keep themselves afloat. The economic shutdown therefore raised the spectre of stagnation for mortgaged households and even the potential of the forced liquidations of their housing assets.

For their part, governments that had pursued an asset-based politics based on ever-appreciating house prices were confronted with the prospect of a house price crash that would represent a major hit to household wealth. As lockdowns were instituted, major banks were predicting an imminent decline in house prices because of shocks to income, a squeeze on lending and reduced immigration levels. In Australia the major banks were forecasting between 10% and 20% year-on-year declines in house prices in their baseline scenarios (Janda, 2020). Similar scale declines were forecast elsewhere, such as in the UK (Collinson, 2020).

These predictions of declining asset prices were premised on models based on commodity logics and commodity time centred on the labour market. Following the experience of the 2007–2008 crisis, governments feared that newly unemployed mortgaged households, lacking liquidity, would default on their mortgage payments, leading to a vicious cycle of foreclosures, forced sales and falling house prices. Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, released modelling in April 2020 showing that historically, each 1 percentage point increase in unemployment has increased mortgage arrears by 0.8 percentage points (Reserve Bank of Australia, 2020a). Similarly, Federal Reserve data show that mortgage delinquency increased in ‘near lock-step’ with the unemployment rate during the global financial crisis in the USA (Dettling and Lambie-Hanson, 2021).

Despite historic increases in unemployment and falls in working hours, house price crashes and mass default were, however, averted across 2020 and 2021. Instead, the pandemic created the conditions for a global boom in house prices. In the two years from 2020 to 2021, the average house price increase across 56 countries surveyed by consultancy Knight Frank was 15.9% (Knight Frank, 2020, 2021). In Australia, house prices increased by 26.6% over this period. Adjusted for inflation, Australia had the fastest house price growth in the world in 2021 (Knight Frank, 2021). Other Anglo-capitalist countries experienced similarly rapid house price growth prices in the first two years of the pandemic, including New Zealand (41.2%), the United States (29.2%), Canada (24.9%) and the United Kingdom (19.3%). House prices also grew rapidly in Western European and East Asian economies, with the Netherlands, South Korea, Sweden, Austria and Germany all registering in excess of 20% growth in house prices (Knight Frank, 2020, 2021).

Similarly bucking predictions, delinquencies on mortgages and other household loans did not increase, and in many cases fell. In Australia, the proportion of mortgaged households in arrears on their mortgage payments remained at pre-pandemic levels of around 1% to June 2021 (Fitch Ratings, 2021). Similar figures were reported for the United States. There, the rate of mortgage delinquency halved from 3.2% in January 2020, to 1.6% in September 2020 (Dettling and Lambie-Hanson, 2021). In comparison, mortgage arrears hit 11% at the height of the global financial crisis, precipitating a foreclosure crisis and house price falls (Stanga et al., 2019: 47). As Federal Reserve economists Dettling and Lambie-Hanson (2021) noted, ‘delinquencies were pro-cyclical in the Great Recession, but counter-cyclical during COVID-19’.

Some commentators have understood these responses as heralding a return to Keynesian economic stimulus, which was interrupted by the post-2008 turn to austerity (Elliot, 2021). However, the political challenges faced by the Biden Administration’s attempts to enact ‘Build Back Better’ post-lockdown stimulus in the face of growing inflationary pressures suggest another explanation is needed. Rather than triggering Keynesian ‘multipliers’, government responses to COVID-19 were governed by an ‘asset inflator’ logic of maintaining household liquidity and solvency through the crisis. While governments certainly suspended commodity time in many parts of the economy, most obviously the labour market as the traditional locus of capitalist commodification, they also implemented a suite of policies directed at households to ensure that asset time could proceed apace. For housing assets in particular, this was achieved through measures that sought, very successfully, to manage payment obligations tied to residential property. These interventions can be best understood through a lens focused on the politics of payment.

The Politics of Payment

The COVID-19 policy response was guided by a politics that sought to secure household payments as the lifeblood of the asset economy. Supported by waves of central bank quantitative easing, governments around the world delivered their policy response through a two-pronged strategy that first sought to provide liquidity to households with income support payments, and second enabled households to pause or defer their mortgage payments without penalty by entering a period of forbearance. The aim was to keep households ‘on payment’, while enabling other households to effectively ‘trade while insolvent’ during lockdowns. Together, these policies bought sufficient time for asset owners to maintain their present asset positions so they could sustain their future asset trajectories.

All Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) governments supported households to pay their mortgages and other obligations by providing enhanced payments to households through a combination of increased unemployment insurance, paid furlough schemes and other cash payment systems (OECD, 2020a: 4). The United States relied more heavily on expanded unemployment payments, while Western European countries expanded existing wage subsidy and ‘short time’ work models to pay furloughed workers. The latter were also introduced on a temporary basis mostly by Anglo-capitalist countries including the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (OECD, 2020b: 7). Across all kinds of income support models, payment rates were increased, and access was made more universal as pre-pandemic conditionality norms were suspended.

For asset-owning households that nonetheless struggled to stay on payment, OECD governments enacted mortgage forbearance provisions for homeowners (OECD, 2020c: 9). These policies enabled illiquid households to suspend their mortgage payments for a period of time. Loans under forbearance do not face negative ramifications that usually come with debt arrears and delinquency. ‘Missed’ payments are simply deferred into the future. For example, in the United States, mortgage forbearance provisions were instituted as part of the CARES Act in March 2020, which also suspended foreclosure proceedings (Wavering Corcoran and Haltom, 2020). After forbearance, the next most common housing-specific measure across the OECD was the suspension of eviction for renters, a policy that was enabled by mortgage forbearance for landlords (OECD, 2020c: 9).

Australia serves as a paradigmatic case to explore these dynamics. First, over recent decades house prices in Australia have significantly outpaced wages in an economy that is increasingly structured around asset price appreciation. Australia’s economy is, in other words, definitively asset based. Second, while during the early waves of the pandemic Australia recorded some of the lowest rates of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and mortality in the English-speaking OECD countries (Stobart and Duckett, 2022), these health outcomes were achieved through a stringent application of economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders used across the world.¹ Third, the Australian policy response towards households was typical of the global policy response. Measures adopted in Australia included expanded unemployment payments, a new paid furlough scheme, a disaster payment scheme and mortgage forbearance. Finally, Australia offers a valuable case to explore these dynamics and especially for understanding the politics of payment because these policies were used at different points in time across two distinct lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021. These two periods witnessed a fine-tuning of the federal government’s approach to the politics of payment, from a more universal to targeted regime of liquidity provision.

The Australian government’s first phase policy framework to the national lockdowns instituted from March 2020 created two new payments for households, providing a crucial source of liquidity to support mortgage payments and the rental payments that back them. The government boosted unemployment payments through a new ‘JobSeeker’ payment and created a new wage subsidy scheme called ‘JobKeeper’. Under JobSeeker, fortnightly unemployment payments were doubled from A$550 to A$1100. The usual eligibility and conditionality provisions, including means testing for asset holdings and ‘workfare’ obligations, were also waived. The JobKeeper programme was implemented to encourage employers to formally retain their staff by subsiding wages, independent of hours worked. JobKeeper payments were worth A$1500 per fortnight and acted as an income floor for eligible employees. Despite excluding temporary migrant workers, some insecure workers and workers in certain sectors, JobKeeper and JobSeeker provided liquidity support to large proportions of the Australian population. About 5 million people were receiving one of these payments between April–May 2020, representing about one-third of Australia’s labour force (Klapdor, 2020; Treasury, 2020: 7).

The Australian government also implemented regulatory and monetary policy measures to allow forbearance through temporary mortgage deferrals, keeping otherwise insolvent households afloat. The banking industry regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), established the framework for mortgage deferrals by temporarily changing the definition of a loan ‘default’: COVID-19 mortgage repayment holidays would not be treated as being in arrears or a loan restructure, and banks were not required to make provisions on their balance sheets for bad loans. Authorities therefore enabled households to suspend their existing asset position in time, under circumstances that would normally be considered defaulting, to prevent threats to future asset values and pathways to future capital gains. The suspensions, in other words, enabled the connection to present and the future usually shored up by payments on time to remain intact.

Such mortgage deferrals were widely used by Australian households. In June 2020, 11% of Australian mortgages, representing about half a million loans with a total value of A$196 billion, were deferred (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, 2020). Central bank officials emphasized the importance of forbearance by banks towards struggling borrowers for ‘supporting asset prices and balance sheets’ (Reserve Bank of Australia, 2020b). In contrast, measures introduced to explicitly support renters, such as eviction moratoriums and rental payment deferrals, were introduced much more unevenly (Maalsen et al., 2020). This clear bias towards homeowners and investors over renters in these emergency policy responses to COVID-19 reflects the extent to which policymaking, driven by a distinctive politics of tenure, is locked into supporting house prices (Christophers, 2021; Konings et al., 2021) as well as to household wealth accumulation through home ownership. These policy responses, moreover, made the temporal delays involved in asset building, asset appreciation and the generation of future capital gains overt.

JobKeeper, JobSeeker and mortgage deferral programmes were phased out in early 2021 as Australia enjoyed an extended period without prolonged lockdowns. However, the Delta variant outbreaks in Melbourne and Sydney saw Australia’s two biggest cities and surrounding regions again placed under lockdown orders that extended from June to October 2021. The federal government responded with a new system of cash payments that were less universal and more targeted towards risks facing asset owners.

The 2021 payment package was more targeted towards replacing actual lost income, and therefore potential interruptions to household liquidity and debt payments, than JobKeeper and JobSeeker. Those who had lost more than 20 hours of work would be entitled to the full JobKeeper rate of A$750 per week, while those who lost between eight and 20 hours of work would be paid half that amount at A$325 a week. The government resisted calls to reintroduce the increased JobSeeker rate for those on unemployment payments. At the same time, some of the insecure and temporary migrant workers who were excluded from the 2020 schemes were able to access the 2021 payments (Klapdor, 2021).

The structure of the 2021 payments represented a finer calibration of liquidity support than offered by the 2020 policies. It provided cash payments direct from the government to individuals that were not tied to long-term employment relationships, nor special rights based on citizenship status. However, the targeting of payments based on income lost abandoned the universal basic income-like elements of the 2020 payments. The most disadvantaged, who are largely locked out of asset ownership, were temporarily lifted out of poverty in 2020 but forced to remain on below-the-poverty-line unemployment payments in 2021 (Phillips et al., 2020). The policy response had shifted to underwriting the incomes of those for whom a liquidity shock represented a threat to asset prices and to the promise of asset-based capital gains. Whereas principles of universality in the 2020 payments reflected uncertainty about where liquidity constraints that represented potential systemic risks lay, the politics of payment were fine-tuned by 2021 to reflect calculations of whose risks and what values matter in the asset economy.

Conclusion

It is useful, as Tooze (2021) has argued, to think of the pandemic event in terms of a complex process of shutdown, involving myriad politically driven decisions and contestations that can only be understood in their local institutional context. In this article, we have concentrated on the set of emergency measures enacted in Australia across 2020 and 2021, which actively worked to keep afloat the key driver of Anglo-capitalist economies – asset values and especially residential property values. These measures allowed mortgaged homeowners and investors not only to retain their assets, but also to hang on to the promise of future capital gains, that is, to the promise of the ‘wealth effects’ of asset ownership. Through distributing liquidity to households and enabling no penalty mortgage payment deferrals to mortgaged residential property owners and investors, the state kept residential property-owning households and asset values afloat and buoyant and with it the promise of future wealth accumulation. In so doing, government measures gifted to this constituency the time to ensure that their investments in residential property will work out. Certainly, other groups also benefited from some of the liquidity special measures, but the key (and increasingly obvious) target and beneficiary was mortgaged homeowners and residential property investors.

Inasmuch as these measures stabilized the dynamics of the asset economy by boosting asset values and enabling asset owners to hang on to their assets, they can hardly be presented as precipitating or moving us towards a new era. Through the crisis periods of the pandemic, key political and economic institutions worked to embed the logic of the asset economy more deeply in the overall fabric of social life. In this way, and to this extent, the temporality of the pandemic has become incorporated into the paradoxical temporalities of the asset economy. Where some might see a break from or interruption of capitalism’s modus operandi, we can in fact discern patterns of liquidity support and asset inflation that have come to be at the core of logic of asset-driven capitalism. The lockdown and stay-at-home orders gave rise to an experience of temporal asynchrony that can easily appear to be at odds with the abstracted, standardized and reversible forms of time that fuel and enable capitalist growth and extraction. Yet to instantly identify this as a rupture to the temporal order of capitalism is to misconstrue that order, mistaking it to be based on the time of the commodity rather than asset logics. In the asset economy, experiences of delay, deferral, suspension and waiting are both vital and mundane in asset building. Such futures are, of course, secured by payments on time, which is why the state backed liquidity injections to households and no penalty mortgage deferrals are of such significance since they precisely enabled these futures and the build up of wealth that they promise to be kept in place.

This is of course not an attempt to take away any importance from the frequently observed point that throughout the pandemic the pressures of work not only continued but in fact intensified for many people, especially those whose jobs were essential to the possibility of a lockdown and were forced to expose themselves to the virus so that others could remain safe. But the reason that this situation could operate at all at a society-wide level is precisely because a core lockdown constituency existed in the first place. While the biopolitical differentiations and exclusions at stake became extremely articulated and consequential (Lorenzini, 2021), they nonetheless did not lead to a collapse of social order. The jury is out on the long-term effects of such visible polarization and will remain so for some time. What is clear, however, is that state responses to the pandemic not only made explicit the distinctive temporal structure and logics of asset building and capital gains, but also the operations of an asset-based social contract whereby in times of crisis the state will step in and bail out its critical constituency. Like any other order, the asset-based social contract engenders its own contradictions and fault lines. However, our argument is that we will not get much conceptual grip on those if we assess current trends against traditional, externally derived standards of change and continuity.

In this article we have stressed the significance of not taking a strong position in the debate about change vs transformation. We consider Wagner-Pacifici’s argument that events only become apparent in retrospect to be fully on the mark, and our objective has been to emphasize the need to heed a new set of standards that have emerged endogenously from the logic of asset-driven capitalism itself. We have also suggested that sociologists interested in the issue of transformation have thus far insufficiently acknowledged these standards. The asset economy does not simply work ‘in’ linear time; instead, the asset economy produces time, and positions non-linear, non-chronological and asynchronous temporal movements at the heart of asset-building life (Adkins, 2018; Konings, 2018). The asset economy actively structures, distributes and differentiates time, setting asset-owners on pathways to futures filled with the prospect of capital gains, further investments and inter-generational transfers of wealth, while leaving non-asset-holders to tread water in a precarious and seemingly never-ending now. In that sense, the asset economy can be said to operate as a ‘time machine’.

It is critical for sociologists to come to terms with this temporal order of the asset economy, and especially with how it diverges from the temporal order of the commodity-based economy. Such an orientation will need to appreciate how the mundane logic of payment has become a critical technology of time. To be sure, sociologists have pointed to the significance of payments for the securing and maintenance of different forms of social relations (Granovetter, 1985; Zelizer, 1996). In some respects, they have also registered the difference between ‘payment’ and ‘exchange’. However, such contributions still understand payment as transfers of money on objects whose value is already settled (see, for example, Mützel, 2021). Similarly, while the financial rating, ranking and scoring of people represents a critical gateway into asset ownership by enabling access to credit (Feher, 2018), the burgeoning literature on payments and the transfer systems they require (see, for example, Maurer, 2015; Maurer and Swartz, 2015; O’Dwyer, 2019) generally does not thematize how regular payments against mortgaged assets serve as a pathway to future capital gains. Payments on debts associated with assets are never mere transfers against liabilities since they always have a speculative, future-orientated dimension: I might be paying my structured mortgage obligation in the now and may even struggle to make my regular payment on time, but I also know that the value of my asset is appreciating day by day. A payment against an asset and especially residential property therefore always has a speculative dimension.

It is this speculative aspect of futurity that sociology must come to terms with. The speculative logics and trajectories of asset-based futures cannot, for example, be simply accounted for in the received sociological maxim that futures are inscribed in our actions in the present (see, for example, Bourdieu, 2000). That is of course true in a transhistorical way and as an existential condition, but it does not provide much conceptual leverage on the distinctive temporal ordering engendered by the contemporary asset economy, and it does not allow us to understand how everyday action in the present is connected to the production of 21st-century social problems, including rapidly widening inequalities of wealth. In short, for the discipline to build a sociology of futures that is relevant for the 21st century, it must come to terms with the time machine of the asset economy. In our present-day context, where inflationary pressures and interest rate rises are now rendering the wealth inequalities associated with the asset economy even more apparent, especially for non-property-owning renters, coming to grips with this time machine is ever more pressing.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Lisa Adkins and Martijn Konings acknowledge the support of Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative Award SR200200443. Gareth Bryant acknowledges the support of Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award DE210101175.

ORCID iDs

Lisa Adkins

Gareth Bryant

Martijn Konings

Notes

Lisa Adkins is Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her contributions to the discipline of sociology are in the areas of economic sociology, social theory and feminist theory. Recent publications include The Asset Economy (co-authored with Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings, 2020) and The Time of Money (2018). She is joint Editor-in-Chief of Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor & Francis).

Gareth Bryant is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, and Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Political Economy, at the University of Sydney. His research explores changes in the organization of public finance, with a current focus on climate transitions and the rise of asset-based policies. Gareth is the author of the Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism, published by Cambridge University Press, as well as various journal articles and book chapters on issues including climate finance, renewable energy, housing, social welfare, higher education, labour and Indigenous justice.

Martijn Konings is Professor of Political Economy and Social Theory at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Development of American Finance (2011), The Emotional Logic of Capitalism (2015), Neoliberalism (co-authored with Damien Cahill, 2017), Capital and Time (2018), and The Asset Economy (co-authored with Lisa Adkins and Melinda Cooper, 2020).

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Asset-Based Futures: A Sociology for the 21st Century

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Sociology, Time and Capital

Asset Logics

The Pandemic and Asset Prices

The Politics of Payment

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

References