The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

by Mariana Mazzucato

The third class was the unproductive ‘proprietor’, ‘distributive’ or ‘sterile’ class, which was made up of landlords, nobility and clergy. Here, ‘distributive’ was meant pejoratively: this class redistributes value, but only to itself, for the sole reason that it owns the land and does not give anything in return.16