Family and kinship in Eaton Square

If there was ever any substance to the claim that governments have ‘soaked the rich’ with their taxation policies, there is infinitely more truth in the view that social research has soaked the poor. In reviewing the work that has been carried out on the rich we shall demonstrate that, with a handful of exceptions, academics have totally ignored the affluent end of the social spectrum and concentrated for a variety of reasons on the poor. The benign neglect with which the rich have been treated is seen not only as a remarkable oversight of what is in any case a tantalisingly interesting subject, but, more damningly, is an acid test of the ideology of our social science.