Pension Capitalism
Pension capitalism describes an economic system in which the owners leave their property to tenants for management in return for a significant share of the harvest (50 percent and more). The landowners' earnings ( rents ) are not reinvested, while the tenants are unable to make significant investments ; they are also hardly interested in soil conservation measures.
Fundamental research on this type of economic activity was carried out by the Austrian social geographer Hans Bobek (1903–1990), who also used the term for the fifth of the six phases of his cultural level theory . He concentrated on the relationship between the form of settlement and power (landscape and social structure). The theory of pension capitalism postulates the thesis that the development of the urban system is an expression of the development of the secondary and tertiary way of life.
Bobek illustrated his theory of pension capitalism using descriptions of the Orient: According to his account, a large part of the oasis lands are owned by rich families who live in the city and do not care about agriculture. They lease the fields to farmers and skim off their profits, often they also lease seeds, draft animals and farm implements. Some families are also water masters.
Each leased production factor has to be paid for with a fifth of the harvest. Tenants, who usually have nothing but their labor, can hardly live on the rest of the harvest. Therefore, they have to go into debt with moneylenders and so become more and more dependent on them. The farmers lack the financial means and the knowledge of agriculture to generate higher yields.
literature
- Klaus-Peter Müller: Underdevelopment through “pension capitalism”? History, analysis and criticism of a socio-geographical concept and its reception. (= Urbs et regio. Volume 29). University Library, Kassel 1983, ISBN 3-88122-127-1 .
- Reinhard Stewig : The Orient as a geosystem. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1977, ISBN 3-8100-0213-5 .
- Hans Bobek : The main stages of social and economic development in a geographical perspective. In: The Earth. Journal of the Society for Geography in Berlin. 90th year 1959, ISSN 0013-9998 , pp. 259-298.