Rentier Class

A class of people who rely largely on rent, pensions, or similar means for their income. For example, a landlord who agrees to rent out a house for a set amount each month for a year is a member of the rentier class. So is a pensioner living on a fixed income. The rentier class may be particularly susceptible to bouts of high inflation.

References in periodicals archive ?

Some emphasize getting a large economic payday, allowing them to join the rentier class and achieve permanent economic security.

Venture labor, media work, and the communicative construction of economic value: Agendas for the field and critical commentary: Entrepreneuring the good life?

Housing benefit is an unaffordable scam, a giant public handout to a propertyowning rentier class fleecing the Treasury and tenants.

HOUSING BENEFITS RICH

The nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie was a largely rentier class, and few questioned their work effort.

Basic income revisited

As French economist Thomas Piketty has empirically shown in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the West is lurching back to a past where society can be divided into two distinct classes: a rentier class who live of off the proceeds of their capital assets and everyone else who works for a living, often making meager and falling wages unless they're fortunate enough to be pulling down the "supersalaries" of America's financial elite.

What's left after Marx

Instead of a growing rentier class that shoved its way ever upward, he said that the luxuries of today become tomorrow's necessities.

Too much hype chasing too little wisdom

In Lebanon, the rentier class wealth was buoyed by the rising return on financial capital since 1992 fuelled by public debt rise -- if we had data on wealth since 1993, I conjecture that it would show a significant rise in the wealth-to-income ratio in Lebanon after the end of the civil war -- and by the rise in real estate prices since 2007.

Wealth in Lebanon

In Picketty's thinking, this tendency leads to a condition in which entrepreneurs become a rentier class that dominates those who own only their own labor.

Thomas Piketty: Pinko or Prophet?

This meant that a major category of financial industry profit--buying, selling, and speculating in Treasury bonds--was eliminated, at the expense of the rentier class.

The hidden history of prosperity

This is similar to what happens in many poorer states with a great deal of natural resources, where a rentier class develops and maintains itself without providing services to the population.

The failure of state building in Afghanistan, review of The Rule of Law in Afghanistan: Missing in Action

The new capitalist class that has emerged under the NEP may be a rentier class, he argues, but this concern is relevant only to the extent that it has detracted from reducing poverty and income inequality.

The institutional imperative: The politics of equitable development in Southeast Asia

Just as, in Voltaire's phrase, the rich require an abundant supply of the poor, so too does the rentier class require an abundant supply of debtors.

The new road to serfdom: an illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse

However you look at it--welfare for the rentier class, a legal mare's-nest that will enrich lawyers, a deficit deepener--Bush's tax-cut plan is a lousy idea.