Theoretically taken for granted, the deprivation of capital assets in poor populations has been investigated as a logical point of departure for development policies. As a subject of policies, the poor have been identified as a group below a quantified income line that are wanting in the resources necessary to successfully enter into the marketplace so that their needs may be met. In economic theory, the poor are understood to lack capital in addition to the sufficient means of livelihood. Such assumptions, firstly, reenact capital deprivation as a condition of possibility for being poor and, secondly, obscure the study of phenomena related to what John Maynard Keynes referred to as “the scarcity theory of capital” (1936). In this sense, by exploring how and why the poor have been defined, not only as devoid of sufficient means for livelihood but, above all, of capital returns, we challenge poverty’s presentism, the common fallacy for depicting subject without future and lacking agency.
Asset ownership, according to Adkins et al. (2020), has formed the basis for current processes of stratifying people in social classes in a new and emerging asset economy. They have defined the asset economy as an observable dimension, primarily signaling houses as real-estate assets (following in this Guyer 2015 and 2017). Raymond Firth´s work on capital in indigenous populations can also help us to turn the discipline towards the future, valuation studies and people's centered approaches by asking questions such as: " What kind of estimate is given to the future -long-term and short-term? If the values of assets derive from their expected value in the future, what is the nature of these expectations - by reference to what considerations?" (Firth 2004: 19 {1964})
