The Plutonomy of the 1%: Dominant Ownership and Conspicuous Consumption in the New Gilded Age
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".