Book Review: Are We Rich Yet?

Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain, by Amy Edwards (2022). Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Amy Edwards’ Are We Rich Yet? examines the period of mass privatization and neoliberal restructuring in Britain in the 1980s and 90s. While the historiography of these reforms has centered almost exclusively on the financial institutions and technical processes of the City of London, Edwards’ focus is instead on the general public; she shows how financialization was also carried out by “ordinary” Britons as they mediated and enacted these political reforms – undermining those framings of neoliberalism as an immutable, top-down project composed and imposed by a small group of right-wing politicians.

Edwards describes how a “mass culture of investment” emerged over this period. This involved a sharp increase in the share-owning proportion of the public, which was accompanied by a permeation of the City’s imperatives within the broader popular culture. Edwards argues that central to the development of this mass culture of investment was the creation of financial subjectivities or “new ways of being” for Britons, which involved an openness to and re-orientation around financial markets (11). She identifies three key forms that these investor subjectivities take: the “investor-citizen,” “investor-shopper,” and “investment-oriented subject.”

Are We Rich Yet? reveals that this mass culture of investment, while supposedly representing a democratization of investment, did not result in a more equitable redistribution of wealth but instead formed a key part of the “steady process of disempowerment” of the investing public through the consolidation of financial infrastructures that occurred from the 1970s onwards (21). Edwards shows how the formations of the various investor-subjects ultimately served to facilitate, but also to obscure, this institutional capture.

Chapter 1 traces the development of the mid-nineteenth century investment cultures that developed around emerging financial structures, which set the stage for the 1980s mass culture of investment. The rise of financial institutions and their knowledge-dissemination apparatuses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were accompanied by that of the figure of the responsible, patriotic (male, elite) “investor-citizen.” In the mid-twentieth century, larger swathes of the general public were exposed to financial markets thanks to post-war mass affluence and an enthusiasm by social reformers for making dutiful “investor-citizens” of the working class.

Chapter 2 focuses on two groups that were situated between the public and financial markets during the period of deregulation in the 1980s: dealers who facilitated the over-the-counter, high-risk trading of unlisted securities or “penny shares,” along with financial bookmakers who solicited bets on the movement of stocks. The influence of these two groups, however, proved to be short lived; with their challenge to the interests of the London Stock Exchange (LSE), over-the-counter dealers were eliminated via the LSE regulatory authority, and bookmakers were absorbed into the City as established institutions cornered service provision in high-risk speculatory markets. Nonetheless, these fringe operations shaped and pushed forward key ideas that would be come to be held by Britain’s emerging class of small investors.

Chapter 3 tracks how novice investors were cultivated through the development of financial consumerism and the “investor-shopper subject.” “Share perks” (e.g., discounts and free products offered to those with shares in a company) became popular, while dedicated “share shops” that offered on-the-spot stock dealing also emerged on British high streets. High street banks too became “financial supermarkets” offering share-dealing and pension and mortgage services alongside their checking and savings accounts. These schemes, too, were short lived; companies stopped offering share perks as they turned their attention from retail to institutional investors, and share shops closed as they failed to compete with larger institutions with established customer bases and economies of scale. Thus, while financial consumerism changed investment patterns among factions of the public, it did not alter the ultimate trend of capital concentration within existing institutions.

Chapter 4 follows the creation of a mass-market financial-advice industry catered to customers accessing these newly available financial markets. This took the form of self-help financial-advice books, guides written by financial gurus, newspaper money pages, and columns in women’s magazines. Edwards identifies how this media, which presented investing as accessible and merely requiring “common sense” and a do-it-yourself attitude, reinforced the illusion of democratization but hid the reality that British investment culture was overwhelmingly stacked in the favor of established institutions.

Chapter 5 concentrates on representations of finance and investment in wider popular culture, largely structured around the archetype of the “yuppie.” Originally an American term, its British equivalent took on a different class connotation as it was taken up: more than simply the “young urban professionals” of New York or San Francisco, Britons used the term to refer to the “young, upwardly mobile professional,” implying someone of working or lower-middle-class origin. Edwards focuses specifically on the figure of the “yuppie-trader” – the working to lower-middle class, white male aspirant finance professional who re-appears through novels, film, and theater from this era and whose material accessories and aesthetics (Filofaxes and tailored suits) dominated fashion trends. Edwards suggests that the yuppie figure embodied a wider veneration for individualized risk-taking as a masculine virtue and complemented government framings of deregulation as a meritocratic endeavor. She argues that the prevalence of the City and its yuppies across forms of popular culture was not simply a reflection of changing political and economic contexts but rather played an active part in shaping them.

In Chapter 6, Edwards shifts her attention to the living room and village hall, as she focuses on “investment clubs” as well as the forms of investor activism and lobbying that emerged from within these. Tracing their roots to post-WWII collectivism, these groups generally consisted of friends, neighbors, and co-workers (often women) and were structured around social activities. In this regard, investment clubs stand in contrast to the dominating figure of the individualistic, “hypermasculine” investor (239). These groups were ultimately also captured by the major banks (Barclays and Natwest) via the establishment and cooption of the national organization for investment clubs, ProShare. Despite this, Edwards suggests that the investment club demonstrates that “people engaged with investment culture in complex ways, creating their own versions of life as [retail investors] based on social relations as much as economic sense” (240).

By centering the perspectives of everyday people – workers popping into the bookie’s at the end of the day to have a “flutter” on stocks, or neighbors reading investment brochures over cups of tea – and decentering those of politicians, Are We Rich Yet? advances our understanding of how neoliberalism permeated and reshaped Britain of the 1980s and 90s. As such, it represents an important contribution to the scholarship on late-twentieth-century British economic and social history. As a rich study of economic change through everyday lived experience, this book will undoubtedly appeal to scholars across the social sciences.