Rentier Class
 Eventually, everyone can expect to be a member of the rentier class. 
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| Dr. Fisher |
Rentier income is passive income, such as interest on savings accounts. Lord Keynes gave the definition a noticeable twist by defining the "functionless investor" as belonging to the rentier class. That suggested Keynes had sentiments like those of Karl Marx, who seems to have invented the term; both of these authors apparently thought of the rentier class in the spirit of the novels of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, or perhaps the movie stars depicted in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not gainfully employed, mainly occupied with expensive luxuries and debaucheries. This envious image dies hard, but it is unlikely to persist.
In the first place, 30-35% of American GDP would now qualify as passive income, although the varying degree of risk involved in such investment is hard to evaluate. That proportion is sure to rise as we globalize more labor-intensive work. As foreigners begin to notice this increase in passive income, Americans are sure to become defensive about it.
More importantly, a greater proportion of our population will be retired persons, living on pensions and rentier income from savings. As it becomes the universal expectation of everyone that thirty years of rentier life awaits, there will be less and less likelihood that Keynes and Marx and Fitzgerald will seem congenial to the voting class.
Curiously, another big social implication about rentier income has already almost disappeared. Interest income is paid by a debtor to a creditor; as Marx would have it, the poor workingman is paying the rich rentier. Dividend income represents the profit from a business to its owner, or a farm to the farmer. But in fact, it no longer does. We have so sterilized the investment process that we no longer think of debtors and creditors, we think of "fixed income". The appropriate income from ownership, or "equity", is now thought to bear some definable relation to the "prevailing return from fixed income". It's all, in a sense, the same thing. Future attitudes are hard to predict.
It's hard to predict what Americans will generally believe, when passive income becomes eighty percent of GDP. Or fifty percent of the population are rentiers. Eighty percent, if you exclude children.
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