wealth
wealthThe term is often used in studies of social inequality to refer simply to a person's whole stock of financial resources, as contrasted with ‘income’, which is the flow of financial resources received over a particular time period. In this sense, it is possible to measure total ‘national wealth’ and to examine the share of different groups in this distribution (see income distribution). Many studies of poverty contrast the share in national wealth received by the poorest with that received by the richest groups in the population. This leads to purely statistical, and arbitrary, measures of what it is to be ‘wealthy’.
A second meaning of wealth allows a properly sociological concept of wealth and the wealthy to be formed. Townsend developed an idea of poverty as relative deprivation, according to which the poor are defined as those who are deprived of resources relative to the...
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