When you think of high-end luxury commodities, you might imagine yachts, private jets, or even whole islands. But in the last few years, another commodity has started to receive a lot of attention from the world’s wealthiest people: citizenship.
With enough money, people can buy their way into becoming a citizen of a growing list of countries around the world. While this trend has garnered lots of attention in the last few years, as our guest on this episode explains, there’s so much more to the story than meets the eye.
Kristin Surak is a sociologist and author of the new book “The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires.” In it, she pulls back the curtain on this rarified luxury market — who’s buying, who’s selling, and the complex web of middlemen that make it all work.
On this episode, Mark Blyth talks with Surak about what might be called the “citizenship industrial complex”’ and what it says about our global economy.
Learn more about and purchase “The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires”
Learn more about our other podcasts at the Watson Institute for International and Public AffairsWhen you think of high-end luxury commodities, you might imagine yachts, private jets, or even whole islands. But in the last few years, another commodity has started to receive a lot of attention from the world’s wealthiest people: citizenship.
With enough money, people can buy their way into becoming a citizen of a growing list of countries around the world. While this trend has garnered lots of attention in the last few years, as our guest on this episode explains, there’s so much more to the story than meets the eye.
Kristin Surak is a sociologist and author of the new book “The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires.” In it, she pulls back the curtain on this rarified luxury market — who’s buying, who’s selling, and the complex web of middlemen that make it all work.
On this episode, Mark Blyth talks with Surak about what might be called the “citizenship industrial complex”’ and what it says about our global economy.
Learn more about and purchase “The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires”
Learn more about our other podcasts at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Dr. Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires (Harvard University Press 2023).
She is a leading expert on elite mobility, international migration, nationalism, and Japanese politics, whose research has been translated into half-dozen languages.
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