Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Inequality in income

In this chapter I summarize and analyze the main global dynamics of income and wealth distribution, described in the book of T. Piketty, since XVIII century in more than 20 countries. What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? What do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But they have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. In the book it is argued that the main driver of inequality is the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth which today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. In particular, the reduction of inequality that has occurred in most developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was specially a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. Similarly, the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due in large way to the political shifts of the past several decades, above all in regard to taxation and finance. The core of the book, is that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveals powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence and divergence. Furthermore, there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegualitarian forces from prevailing

permanently. In his book Piketty starts from Karl Marx and his thesis that capital accumulates indefinitely, but with diminishing returns, leading to conflicts between capitalists who are always looking for new opportunities. If the returns to capital are still greater than the growth rate of the real economy, the rich become richer and inequality increases: the ratio between capital and income will grow by less than 4.5 in 2010 to 6.5 in 2100. In other words, our Western economies are not evolving in the direction of greater equality; the push towards social democracy and redistribution of the twentieth century were an exception and an illusion, what lies ahead is a return to nineteenth-century capitalism. Wealth does not accumulate, is inherited. as mentioned above, Piketty argues, with quantitative and historical analysis, that has not been progress in reducing inequality, but the Second World War. As we will see, the history of income and wealth is always deeply political, chaotic, and unpredictable. How this history plays out depends on how societies view inequalities and what kinds of policies and institutions they adopt to measure and transform them.

3.1 Preliminary definition

We can start introducing the concept of “national income” defined as the sum of all income available to the residents of given country in a given year. National income is closely related to the idea of GDP, that measures the total of goods and services produced in a given year within the borders of a given country; to calculate the national income it is necessary deduct wear and tear on buildings, infrastructure, machinery, vehicles, computers, and other items during the year in question that made the production possible. In this way the “net domestic product” or “domestic production,” is obtained which is typically 90 percent of GDP. So we can state that: National income = domestic output + net income from abroad which can be decomposed

further into: National income = capital income + labor income. But what is exactly capital and its limits? Some definitions describe it as forms of wealth accumulated by human beings (buildings, machinery, infrastructure, etc.) and therefore exclude land and natural resources without having to accumulate them. In this way, land would then be a component of wealth but not of capital. Still, other definition of “capital” hold that the term should apply only to those components of wealth directly employed in the production process. In this framework capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market, i.e. all forms of real property (including residential real estate) as well as financial and professional capital (infrastructure, machinery, patents, and so on) used by firms and government agencies. Summarizing, we define national wealth” or “national capital” as the total market value of everything owned by the residents and government of a given country at a given point in time, provided that it can be traded on some market. It consists in the sum total of nonfinancial assets (land, dwellings, commercial inventory, other buildings, machinery, infrastructure, patents, and other directly owned professional assets) and financial assets less the total amount of financial liabilities (debt). We define: ”National wealth = private wealth + public wealth”, further decomposable in “National wealth = national capital = domestic capital + net foreign capital” where domestic capital is the value of the capital stock (buildings, firms, etc.) that is located within the borders of the country in question, while net foreign capital is the difference between assets owned by the country’s citizens in the rest of the world and assets of the country owned by citizens of other countries. After giving these notions we can define the relationship between capital and income. First of all, income is a flow (quantity of goods produced and distributed in a given period), and capital is a stock (it corresponds to the total wealth owned at a given point in time).

The most natural way to measure the capital stock in a country is to divide that stock by the annual flow of income: this gives us the

capital/income ratio, denoted with β. It measures the overall importance of capital in a society, so analyzing this ratio is a necessary first step in the study of inequality. For example, if a country’s total capital stock is the equivalent of six years of national income, we will have β = 6 (or β = 600%). In the developed countries today, the capital/income ratio generally varies between 5 and 6, and the capital stock consists almost entirely of private capital; in France and Britain, Germany and Italy, the United States and Japan, national income was roughly 30,000–35,000 euros per capita in 2010, whereas total private wealth (net of debt) was typically of the order of 150,000–200,000 euro per capita, or five to six times annual national income. Now, it is possible to show the first fundamental law of capitalism, which links the capital stock to the flow of income from capital. The capital/income ratio β is related in a simple way to the share of income from capital in national income, denoted α. We have: α = r × β where, r is the rate of return on capital. Let us make an example: if β = 600% and r = 5%, then α = r × β = 30%. If national wealth represents the equivalent of six years of national income, and if the rate of return on capital is 5 percent per year, so capital’s share in national income is 30 percent. Remember that the rate of return on capital measures the yield on capital over the course of a year regardless of its legal form (profits, rents, dividends, interest etc.), expressed as a percentage of the value of capital invested.

The formula α = r × β allows us to analyze the importance of capital for an entire country or even for the planet as a whole. But it can also be used to study the accounts of a specific company: for example, take a firm that uses capital valued at 5 million euros (including offices, infrastructure, machinery, etc.) to produce 1 million euros worth of goods annually, with 600,000 euros going to pay workers and 400,000 euros in profits. The capital/income ratio of this company is β = 5 (its capital is equivalent to five years of output), the capital share α is 40 percent, and the rate of return on

capital is r = 8 percent. Now let’s imagine another company that uses less capital (3 million euro) to produce the same output (1 million euro), but using more labor (700,000 euros in wages, 300,000 in profits).

For this company, β = 3, α = 30 percent, and r = 10 percent. The latter firm is less capital intensive than the former, but it is more profitable (the rate of return on its capital is significantly higher). So in all countries, the magnitudes of β, α, and r vary a great deal from company to company; in fact some sectors are more capital intensive than others. With these definitions, it is now possible, to examine the evolution of the distribution of wealth in different countries.

3.2 Long run dynamics of growth and of capitalism in the world The first attempts to measure national income and capital date back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century; around 1700 appeared in Britain and France several isolated estimates concerning on both the national stock of capital and the annual flow of national income. One of their primary objectives was to calculate the total value of land, by far the most important source of wealth in the agrarian societies of the day, and then to relate the quantity of landed wealth to the level of agricultural output and land rents; it was mainly in the nineteenth century, however, that estimates of national wealth proliferated. From 1870 to 1900, Robert Giffen regularly updated his estimates of Britain’s stock of national capital, which he compared to estimates by other authors from the early 1800s. In France, at the same time, A. de Foville and C. Colson published estimates of “national wealth” and “private wealth and they are surprised about the considerable accumulation of private capital over the course of the nineteenth century. But we have to wait until the period between the two world wars that national accounts began to be established on an annual basis. But from the 1940s on, the goals change: the primary motivation was to respond to the trauma of the Great Depression, during which governments had no reliable annual estimates of economic

output. There was a need for statistical and political tools in order to steer the economy properly and avoid a repeat of the catastrophe.

Estimates of national wealth, so prized before 1914, now took a backseat, especially after that the economic and political chaos of 1914–1945 made it difficult to interpret their meaning; specifically, the prices of real estate and financial assets fell to very low levels, so that private capital seemed to have disappeared.

From 1950s instead, period of reconstruction, the main goal was to measure the remarkable growth of output in various branches of industry. So from this history of national accounting, we can conclude that national accounts are a social construct in perpetual evolution and hey always reflect the preoccupations of the era when they were conceived.

They represent the only consistent attempt to analyze a country’s economic activity and they should be regarded as a limited and imperfect research tool, besides as an arrangement of data from various sources.

Now we start by examining the evolution of the global distribution of production, which is well known from the early nineteenth century on and then decline to roughly 50 percent, i.e. approximately the same level as in 1860. This benefit that Europe and America achieved during the Industrial Revolution allowed these two regions to claim a share of global output that was two to three times greater than their share of the world’s population simply because their output per capita was two to three times greater than the global average. We can see from the graph 3.1 and 3.2:

Figure 3.1. The distribution of world population 1700-2012

Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c.

Figure 3.2. The distribution of world output 1700-2012

Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c.

bloc” simplifying the presentation, even if is largely artificial. In particular Europe has reached its maximum economic weight on the eve of World War I, and then has declined steadily, while America reached its peak in the 1950s. After that, Europe and the America can be broken down into two highly unequal subregions: a hyperdeveloped core and a less developed periphery. Generally speaking global inequality is best analyzed in terms of regional blocs rather than continental blocs, and it can see from the table 3.3 where is indicated the distribution of global output in 2012.

The population in the world is close to 7 billion in 2012, and global output is slightly greater than70 trillion euros, so that global output per capita is almost exactly 10,000 euros. If we subtract 10 percent for capital depreciation and divide by 12, it is possible to find that this yields an average per capita monthly income of 760 euros. This means that if global output and the income to which it gives rise were equally divided, each individual in the world would have an income of about 760 euros per month. Europe has a population of about 740 million, of which 540 million live in member countries of the European Union, and their per capita output exceeds 27,000 euros per year. The remaining 200 million people live in Russia and Ukraine, where the per capita output is about 15,000 euros per year, barely 50 percent above the global average.

Also the Americas can be divided into distinct regions that are even more unequal than the European center and periphery: the US-Canada bloc has 350 million people with a per capita output of 40,000 euros, while Latin America has 600 million people with a per capita output of 10,000 euros, exactly equal to the world average.Sub-Saharan Africa, with a population of 900 million and an annual output of only 1.8 trillion euros is economically the poorest region of the world; India is slightly higher and China with a per capita output of 8,000 euros per year, is not far from the world average.

Table 3.3 distribution of world GDP

Global inequality produces situations in which the per capita income is on the order of 150–250 euros per month (sub-Saharan Africa and India) and regions where it is as high as 2,500–3,000 euros per month (Western Europe, North America, Japan). It must be remembered also that global inequality would be markedly higher if we used current exchange rates rather than purchasing power parities, as done thus far. In fact using purchasing power parities has the advantage to be are more stable than exchange rates; exchange rates reflect not only the supply and demand for the goods and services of different countries but also sudden changes in the investment strategies of international investors and volatile estimates of the political and/or financial stability of this or that country, to say nothing of unpredictable changes in monetary policy. Exchange rates are therefore extremely volatile. However, in the poorer countries, the corrections introduced by purchasing power parity are even stronger: in Africa and Asia,

prices are roughly half what they are in the rich countries, so that GDP roughly doubles when purchasing power parity is used for comparisons rather than the market exchange rate. This results from result the fact that the prices of goods and services that cannot be traded internationally, are lower, because these are usually relatively labor intensive and involve relatively unskilled labor, as opposed to skilled labor and capital (which are relatively scarce in less developed countries); usually the poorer a country is, the greater the correction.

Until now, we assumed that the national income of each continental or regional grouping coincided with its domestic product: the monthly incomes indicated in Table 3.3 were obtained simply by deducting 10 percent from GDP and dividing by twelve. To equate income and output it is valid only at the global level and not at the national or continental level. Normally the global income distribution is more unequal than the output distribution, because the countries with the highest per capita output are also more likely to own part of the capital of other countries and therefore to receive a positive flow of income from capital originating in countries with a lower level of per capita output: that is the rich countries are doubly wealthy because they both produce more at home and invest more abroad, so that their national income per head is greater than their output per head and the opposite occur to poor countries. For example all of the major developed countries have level of national income that is slightly greater than their domestic product. If, now, we take individually to continental blocs taken as a whole we find in Europe, America, and Asia something close to an equilibrium: the wealthier countries in each bloc (generally in the north) receive a positive flow of income from capital, which is partly deleted by the overflows out of other countries (generally in the south and east), so that at the continental level, total income is almost exactly equal to total output, generally within 0.5 percent. The only disequilibrium is in Africa, where a substantial share of capital is owned by foreigners. But the mechanism by which rich countries hold part of the

capital of poor countries can have virtuous effects by promoting convergence.

Let’s suppose that rich countries abound in saving and capital, so that there is no need to build new housing or add new machinery; it can be collectively efficient to invest some part of domestic savings in poorer countries abroad. In this way the wealthy countries will obtain a better return on their investment by investing abroad, and the poor countries will increase their productivity and thus close the gap between them and the rich countries. This mechanism should lead to convergence of rich and poor countries and an eventual reduction of inequalities through market forces and competition. But this theory has two major defects: the equalization mechanism does not guarantee global convergence of per capita income. It can give rise to convergence of per capita output, provided we assume perfect capital mobility and, even more important, total equality of skill levels and human capital across countries. However the possible convergence of output per head does not imply convergence of income per head. If we look at the historical record, it does not appear that capital mobility has been the primary factor promoting convergence of rich and poor nation. Historical experience suggests that the main mechanism for convergence, is the diffusion of knowledge: that is, the poor catch up with the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know-how, skill, and education, avoiding to become the property of the wealthy countries. Diffusion depends especially on the ability of a country to mobilize financing as well as institutions that encourage large-scale investment in education and training of the population while guaranteeing a stable legal framework that various economic actors an reliably count on. It is therefore closely associated with the achievement of legitimate and efficient government.

3.3 capital-income ratio: case of Britain and France

at both its size, as measured by the capital/income ratio, and its breakdown into different types of assets, whose nature has changed since the eighteenth century. We can start by asking ourselves what actual changes have occurred in the structure of capital since the eighteenth century? His structure really changed? Capital is never reliable: it is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception, yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates in large enough amounts. To continue with this reasoning, we begin to study the changes in the capital structure of Britain and France since the eighteenth century (the richest historical sources).

3.4 Capital-income ratio in France , 1700–2010

3.5 Capital-income ratio in Britain 1700-2010

We can see from the graph above that the capital/income ratio followed quite similar trajectories in both countries, staying relatively stable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, followed by an enormous shock in the twentieth century, before returning to levels similar to those observed on the eve of World War I. Up to 1914, in both Britain and France, the total value of national capital fluctuated between six and seven years of national income throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then after World War I, the capital/income ratio suddenly has fallen, and it continued to fall during the Depression and World War II , to the point where national capital amounted to only two or three years of national income in the 1950s. Just after 1950s the capital/income ratio has started to go up again, without stop to it growth. In both countries, the total value of national capital in 2010 is roughly five to six years’ worth of national income, indeed a bit more than six in France, compared with less than four in the 1980s and barely more than two in the 1950s. so the past century has had an impressive “U-shaped curve.” The capital/income ratio fell near two-thirds between 1914 and 1945 and then more than doubled in the period 1945–2012; In the end, by 2010, the capital/income ratio had returned to its pre–World War I level. However,

despite the imperfections in the data, there are no doubt that Britain and France in the 1990s and 2000s regained a level of wealth not seen since the early twentieth century, at the conclusion of a process that originated in the 1950s; also it must not be forgotten the profound changes in the composition of capital after 1700. To simplify it can be said that over the very long run, agricultural land has gradually been replaced by buildings, business capital, and financial capital invested in firms and government organizations: More precisely, remember that national capital, which is shown in Figures 3.4 and 3.5, is defined as the sum of private capital and public capital and Government debt, seen as asset for the private sector and a liability for the public sector are canceled. As mentioned before national capital, can be decomposed into domestic capital (which measures the value of the capital stock as buildings, firms, etc.) and net foreign capital (the difference between assets owned by residents of the country in the rest of the world and assets owned by the rest of the world in the country in question). Domestic capital can in turn be broken down into further three categories: farmland, housing and other domestic capital, which covers the capital of firms and government organizations. These assets, being evaluated in terms of market value, lead to the decomposition of national capital used to create Figures 3.4 and 3.5: National capital = farmland + housing + other domestic capital + net foreign capital; these graphs shows that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the total value of farmland represented four to five years of national income, or nearly two-thirds of total national capital. But three centuries later, the value of farmland was worth less than 10 percent of national income in both France and Britain; This collapse in the value of farmland (proportionate to national income and national capital) was counterbalanced on the one hand by a rise in the value of housing, and on the other hand by an increase in the value of other domestic capital. What about foreign capital? In Britain and France there has been a singular development, considering the history of colonialism. The net assets that these two countries

owned in the rest of the world increased steadily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and attained an extremely high level on the eve of World War I, before to collapse in the period 1914–1945 and then stabilizing at a relatively low level. It was just during the nineteenth century that British subjects began to accumulate considerable assets in the rest of the world, in amounts previously unknown and never surpassed to this day. Indeed by the eve of World War I, Britain had collected the world’s preeminent colonial empire and owned foreign assets equivalent to nearly two years of national income, or 6 times the total value of British farmland. During the belle èpoque capital invested abroad was yielding around 5 percent a year in dividends, interest, and rent, so that British national income was about 10 percent higher than its domestic product. Concerning France, it commanded the second most important colonial empire, and was about in the same situation: it had accumulated foreign assets worth more than a year’s national income, so that in the first decade of the twentieth century its national income was 5–6 percent higher than its domestic product. These large net positions in foreign assets allowed Britain and France to run structural trade deficits in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However this is not a problem, because their income from foreign assets totaled more than 5 percent of national income, i.e. their balance of payments was thus strongly positive, and this allowed them to increase their holdings of foreign assets year after year. This means that the rest of the world worked to increase consumption by the colonial powers and at the same time became more and more indebted to those same powers. Indeed, the goal of accumulating assets abroad by way of commercial surpluses and colonial appropriations was precisely to be in a position later to run trade deficits. In the wake of the cumulative shocks of two world wars, the Great Depression, and decolonization, these vast stocks of foreign assets disappeared and then, in the 1950s, both France and Great Britain found themselves with net foreign asset holdings close to zero, i.e. their foreign assets were just enough to balance the assets of the two former

colonial powers owned by the rest of the world. Broadly speaking, this situation did not change much over the next half century. it is useful also to introduce the issue of public debt, and more generally the division of national capital between public and private assets. Let’s recall the notions in the previous part: namely national capital (or wealth) is the sum of public capital and private capital. Public capital is the difference between the assets and liabilities of the state (including all public agencies), and private capital is of course the difference between the assets and liabilities of private individuals. Remember that capital is always defined as net wealth, that is, the difference between the market value of what one owns (assets) and what one owes (liabilities, or debts). Public assets take two forms: they can be nonfinancial (public buildings, used for government offices or for the provision of public services) or financial. Today Britain’s net public capital is almost exactly zero and France’s is slightly less than 30 percent of national income. In other words, if the governments of both countries decided to sell off all their assets in order to immediately pay off their debts, nothing would be left in Britain and very little in France.

3.6 public wealth and private wealth in France in 2012

For last, if we examine now the follow figure we can see that Britain and France have follow different path about public wealth and the evolution of the public and private division of national capital in Britain and France;

3.7 Public wealth in Britain, 1700–2010

3.9 Private and public capital in France, 1700–2010

3.10 Private and public capital in Britain, 1700–2010

This is a significant proportion, above all in view of the fact that public ownership left small and medium firms untouched, along with agriculture, and never claimed more than a minority share of residential real estate. In the industrial and financial sectors most directly affected by the postwar nationalizations, the state’s share of national wealth exceeded 50

percent from 1950 to 1980. In the same time waves of nationalization also occurred many other countries, including Britain, where the value of public assets also exceeded a year’s national income in 1950 ( same level of the France). The difference is that British public debt at the time exceeded two years of national income, so that net public wealth was significantly negative in the 1950s, and private wealth was that much greater. Net public wealth will turn positive in Britain towards the 1960s–1970s, and even then it remained less than 20 percent of national income; the hallmark of the French trajectory is that public ownership dropped to very low levels after 1980 even as private wealth estate rose to levels even higher than Britain’s: nearly six years of national income in 2010, or 20 times the value of public wealth. So France became the promised land of the new private-ownership capitalism of the twenty-first century.

3.4 Case of North America

To enrich the world picture we can consider also North America. The capital/income ratio was much lower in the New World colonies than in Britain or France; the essential fact is that anyone could own vast quantities, and therefore it was not worth very much. In other words, the price effect more than counterbalanced the volume effect: when the volume of a given type of capital exceeds certain thresholds, its price will inevitably fall to a level so low that the product of the price and volume, which is the value of the capital, is lower than it would be if the volume were smaller. Furthermore, the other types of capital were also relatively less important in the colonial era and during the early years of the American republic. This is because new arrivals did not cross the Atlantic with their capital of homes so it took time to accumulate the equivalent of several years of national income in real estate and business capital.

3.11 Capital in the United States, 1770–2010

Then the low capital/income ratio in America reflected a fundamental difference in the structure of social inequalities compared with Europe. Since total wealth amounted to hardly three years of national income in the United States compared with more than seven in Europe, this imply that the influence of landlords and accumulated wealth was less important in the New World. But with a few years of work, the new arrivals can close the initial gap between themselves and their wealthier predecessors. In the course of the nineteenth century things will change: The share of agriculture in output decreased steadily, and the value of farmland also declined, as in Europe. Nevertheless, the United States accumulated a considerable stock of real estate and industrial capital, so that national capital was close to five years of national income in 1910, versus three in 1810; the gap with old Europe remained, but it had shrunk by half in one century. The United States had become capitalist, but wealth continued to have less influence than in Belle Époque Europe, at least if we consider the vast US territory as a whole. By the way, the shocks of the twentieth century, hit America much more less violence than Europe, so that the capital/income ratio remained far more stable: it oscillated between four and five years of national income from 1910

to 2010, while in Europe it dropped from more than seven years to less than three before rebounding to five or six. Obviously, even the American health suffers setbacks resulting from the crisis exploded between 1914 and 194: in the United States due to the cost of waging war, public debt rose precipitously and this affected national saving in a period of economic instability. The euphoria of the 1920s gives way to the Depression of the 1930s. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, moreover, the United States adopted policies designed to reduce the influence of private capital just as in Europe. After World War II, real estate and stock prices settle at historic lows, with the difference that when it came to progressive taxation, the United States went much farther than Europe, demonstrating that the goal there was more to reduce inequality than to eradicate private property. In the 1950s and 1960s inflation and growth make go down public debt to a modest level, so that public wealth was distinctly positive in 1970 (graph 3.12)

3.12 Public wealth in the United States, 1770–2010

3.13 Private and public capital in the United States, 1770–2010

Even if, at the end American private wealth decreased from nearly five years of national income in 1930 to less than three and a half in 1970, a not insignificant decline. Remains the fact that the “U-shaped curve” of the capital/income ratio in the twentieth century is smaller; in years of income or output, capital in the United States seems to have achieved virtual stability from the turn of the twentieth century on. Conversely, Europe’s relation to capital was notably chaotic in the century just past: it has gone from an idea where the wealth were indisputable to at the beginning of the twenty-first century Europe seems to be in the avant-garde of the new patrimonial capitalism, with private fortunes once again surpassing US levels. Another big difference between the history of capital in America and Europe is that foreign capital never had more than a relatively limited importance in the United States; throughout the nineteenth century, the United States’ net foreign capital position was slightly negative.

The GDP of the United States was barely more than half of the GDP of Western Europe in 1913, so this also means that the Europeans of 1913

held only a small proportion of their foreign asset portfolios (less than 5 percent) in the United States: the world of 1913 was one in which Europe owned a large part of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while the United States owned itself. Then increasingly negative in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of accumulating trade deficits. Nevertheless, US investments abroad continued to yield a far better return than the nation paid on its foreign-held debt: this made it possible to limit the degradation of the negative US position, which amounted to roughly 10 percent of national income in the 1990s and slightly more than 20 percent in the early 2010s. To sum up, the net foreign asset position of the United States has at times been slightly negative, at other times slightly positive, but these positions were always of relatively limited importance compared with the total stock of capital owned by US citizens. This examination can be concluded analyzing the problem of slavery and the place of slaves in US fortunes. After becoming president of the United States in 1801, T. Jefferson, thanks to the votes of the southern states, he signed a law ending the import of new slaves to US soil after 1808; this did not prevent a sharp increase in the number of slaves. During the Civil War broke out in 1861 the slave economy was growing rapidly. In 1800, slaves represented nearly 20 percent of the population of the United States: roughly 1 million slaves out of a total population of 5 million; in the South instead, where nearly all of the slaves were held, the proportion reached 40 percent: 1 million slaves and 1.5 million whites for a total population of 2.5 million. By 1860, the proportion of slaves in the overall population of the United States had fallen to around 15 percent (about 4 million slaves in a total population of 30 million), owing to rapid population growth in the North and West. But in the South the proportion remained at 40 percent: 4 million slaves and 6 million whites for a total population of 10 million. The total market value of slaves represented nearly a year and a half of US national income in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, which is roughly equal to the total value of farmland. Moreover, If

we include slaves along with other components of wealth, we find wealth, we find that total American wealth has remained relatively stable from the colonial era to the present, at around four and a half years of national income (graph 4.3). This can be seen even more clearly when we distinguish southern from northern states and compare the capital structure in the two regions (slaves included) in the period 1770–1810 with the capital structure in Britain and France in the same period.

3.5 The Capital/Income Ratio over the Long Run

Studying the metamorphoses of capital in Europe and North America since the eighteenth century, over the long run, we can see that the nature of wealth was totally transformed: capital in the form of agricultural land was gradually replaced by industrial and financial capital and urban real estate. Yet the most striking fact was surely that in spite of these transformations, the total value of the capital stock, measured in years of national income not to have changed very much over a very long period of time. For example In Britain and France, the countries for which we possess the most complete historical data, national capital today represents about five or six years of national income, which is just slightly less than the level of wealth observed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and right up to the eve of World War I. If then, we compare Europe and the United States unsurprisingly, the shocks of the 1914–1945 period affected Europe much more strongly, so that the capital/income ratio was lower there from the 1920s into the 1980s. But we find that the capital/income ratio has always tended to be higher in Europe.

So why did the capital/income ratio return to historical highs in Europe, and why should it be structurally higher in Europe than in the United States? What magical forces imply that capital in one society should be worth six or seven years of national income rather than three or four? Is there an equilibrium level for the capital/income ratio, and if so how is it determined, what are the consequences for the rate of return on capital, and what is the relation between it

and the capital-labor split of national income? To answer to this question we start from the a dynamic law that allows us to relate the capital/income ratio in an economy to its savings and growth rates.

3.14 Private and public capital: Europe and America, 1870–2010

3.15 National capital in Europe and America, 1870–2010

In the long run, the capital/income ratio β is related to the savings rate s and the growth rate g according to the following formula:

β = s / g 25

For example, if s = 12% and g = 2%, then β = s / g = 600%. In other words, if a country saves 12 percent of its national income every year, and the rate of growth of its national income is 2 percent per year, then in the long run the capital/income ratio will be equal to 600 percent: the country will have accumulated capital worth six years of national income.

This formula can be regarded as the second fundamental law of capitalism, reflects an obvious but important point: a country that saves a lot and grows slowly will over the long run accumulate an enormous stock of capital; in a quasi-stagnant society, wealth accumulated in the past will inevitably acquire disproportionate importance. Decreased growth is thus responsible for capital’s comeback. For example, given a savings rate of 12 percent, if the rate of growth falls to 1.5 percent a year (instead of 2 percent), then the long-term capital/income ratio β = s / g will rise to eight years of national income (instead of six). If the growth rate falls to 1 percent, then β = s / g will rise to twelve years, indicative of a society twice as capital intensive as when the growth rate was 2 percent. This is good news: capital is potentially useful to everyone, and provided that things are properly organized, everyone can benefit from it. However, this means is that the owners of capital potentially control a larger share of total economic resources. In any event, the economic, social, and political repercussions of such a change are considerable. On the other hand if the growth rate increases to 3 percent, then β = s / g will fall to just four years of national income. If the savings rate simultaneously decreases slightly to s = 9 percent, then the long-run capital/income ratio will decline to 3.

What is important is that this law can explain why the capital/income ratio seems now, after the shocks of 1914–1945 and the exceptionally rapid growth phase of the second half of the twentieth century, to be returning to very high levels. But we have to clarify some key concepts. Above all it is important to know that the second fundamental law of capitalism, β = s / g, is

applicable only if certain crucial assumptions are satisfied; is an asymptotic law, meaning that it is valid only in the long run: if a country saves a proportion s of its income indefinitely, and if the rate of growth of its national income is g permanently, then its capital/income ratio will tend closer and closer to β = s / g and stabilize at that level. This will not happen in a day, however: if a country saves a proportion s of its income for only a few years, it will not be enough to achieve a capital/income ratio of β = s/g. that the accumulation of wealth takes time: it will take several decades for the law β = s / g to become true. Now we can understand why it took so much time for the shocks of 1914–1945 to fade away, and why it is so important to take a very long historical view when studying these questions. At the individual level, fortunes are sometimes amassed very quickly, but at the country level, the movement of the capital/income ratio described by the law β = s / g is a long-run phenomenon.

There is a crucial difference between this law and the law α = r × β: According to that law, the share of capital income in national income, α, is equal to the average rate of return on capital, r, times the capital/income ratio, β. It is important to realize that the law α = r × β is actually a pure accounting identity, valid at all times in all places, by construction.

Second, the law β = s/g is valid only if one focuses on those forms of capital that human beings can accumulate. If a significant fraction of national capital consists of pure natural resources (i.e., natural resources whose value is independent of any human improvement and any past investment), then β can be quite high without any contribution from savings. Finally, the law β = s / g is valid only if asset prices evolve on average in the same way as consumer prices. If the price of real estate or stocks rises faster than other prices, then the ratio β between the market value of national capital and the annual flow of national income can again be quite high without the addition of any new savings. In the short run, variations (capital gains or losses) of relative asset prices (i.e., of asset prices relative to consumer prices) are often

quite a bit larger than volume effects (i.e., effects linked to new savings). If we assume, however, that price variations balance out over the long run, then the law β = s / g is necessarily valid, regardless of the reasons why the country in question chooses to save a proportion s of its national income. Summarizing: the law β = s / g does not explain the short-term shocks to which the capital/income ratio is subject, any more than it explains the existence of world wars or the crisis of 1929 (events that can be taken as examples of extreme shocks) but it does allow us to understand the potential

equilibrium level toward which the capital/income ratio tends in the long run, when the effects of shocks and crises have dissipated.

3.6 Inequality of labor income and Inequality of capital ownership

In all societies, income inequality is the result of the sum of inequality of income from labor and inequality of income from capital; the more

unequally distributed each of these two components is, the greater the total inequality. Another important factor is the relation between these two dimensions of inequality: to what extent do individuals with high income from labor also enjoy high income from capital? this relation is a statistical correlation, and the greater the correlation, the greater the total inequality, all other things being equal. the history of inequality has always been chaotic and political, influenced by convulsive social changes and driven not only by economic factors but by countless social, political, military, and cultural phenomena. In general the reducing inequality in the twentieth century was produced from the chaos of war, with its attendant economic and political shocks: so in the twentieth century it was war, and not harmonious

democratic or economic rationality, that erased the past and enabled society to begin anew with a clean slate. About France, looking the figure below, we see that we have gone from a society of rentiers to a society of managers, that is, from a society in which the top centile is dominated by rentiers (people who own enough capital to live on the annual income from their wealth) to a

society in which the top of the income hierarchy, including to upper centile, consists mainly of highly paid individuals who live on income from labor. In other words it is possible to say that we have gone from a society of superrentiers to a less extreme form of rentier society, with a better balance between success through work and success through capital. It is important to insist on the fact that, what happened in France is that rentiers (or at any rate nine-tenths of them) fell behind managers; managers did not race ahead of rentiers. In this large “9 percent” group (that is, the upper decile exclusive of the top centile), we find mainly individuals living primarily on income from labor, including both private sector managers and engineers and senior

officials and teachers from the public sector. Here, pay is usually 2 to 3 times the average wage for society as a whole: if average wages are 2,000 euros a month, in other words, this group earns 4,000–6,000 a month.Obviously, the types of jobs and levels of skill required at this level have changed.

3.16 The composition of top incomes in France in 2005

During the years, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, managers, engineers, and other skilled personnel saw their pay increase more rapidly than the pay of workers at the bottom and middle of the wage hierarchy, and

at first no one seemed to care; a national minimum wage was created in 1950 but was rarely increased thereafter and fell farther and farther behind the average wage. A new phenomenon instead emerged in France in the 1990s: the very top salaries, and especially the pay packages awarded to the top executives of the largest companies and financial firms, reached astonishing heights. In similar way, it happened in Usa; it is just there a subclass of “supermanagers” first emerged over the past several decades. More specifically, what caused the explosion of wage inequalities and the rise of the supermanager in the United States after 1980? What accounts for the diverse historical evolutions we see in various countries? Why is inequality of income from labor, and especially wage inequality, greater in some societies and periods than others? The most widely accepted theory is that of a race between education and technology. This theory does not offer a satisfactory explanation of the rise of the supermanager or of wage inequality in the United States after 198 but however, suggest interesting and important clues for explaining certain historical evolutions. That is, a possible explanation could be this: according to this theory, one should be able to explain this change as the result of skill-biased technological change; a possible explanation could be this: the top labor incomes have risen much more rapidly than average wages simply because unique skills and new technology have made these workers much more productive than the average. But we can state that the most convincing explanation for the explosion of the very top US incomes is the following; the vast majority of top earners are senior managers of large firms.

When a job is replicable, like the case of an assembly-line worker or fast-food server, we can give an approximate estimate of the “marginal product” that would be realized by adding one additional worker or waiter (albeit with a considerable margin of error in our estimate). But when an individual’s job functions are unique, or nearly so, then the margin of error is much greater. Indeed, once we introduce the hypothesis of imperfect

information into standard economic models , the very notion of “individual marginal productivity” becomes hard to define. In fact, it becomes something close to a pure ideological construct on the basis of which a justification for higher status can be elaborated. imagine a large multinational corporation employing 100,000 people and with gross annual revenue of 10 billion euros, or 100,000 euros per worker. Suppose that half of this revenue figure represents purchases of goods and services by the firm , so that the value added by the firm is 5 billion euros, or 50,000 euros per worker. To set the pay of the firm’s CFO, one would in principle want to estimate his marginal productivity, that is, his contribution to the firm’s value-added of 5 billion euros: is it 100,000, 500,000, or 5 million euros per year? A precise, objective answer to this question is clearly impossible.

So how are such remunerations determined in practice? They are generally set by hierarchical superiors, and at the very highest levels salaries are set by the executives themselves or by corporate compensation committees whose members usually earn comparable salaries (for example senior executives of other large corporations). In some companies, stockholders are asked to vote on compensation for senior executives at annual meetings, but the number of posts subject to such approval is small. It is impossible to give a precise estimate of each manager’s contribution to the firm’s output, then it is inevitable that this process yields decisions that are mostly arbitrary and dependent on hierarchical relationships and on the relative bargaining power of the individuals involved. It is only reasonable to assume that people in a position to set their own salaries have a natural incentive to treat themselves generously, or at the very least to be rather optimistic in gauging their marginal productivity. To behave in this way is only human, especially since the necessary information is, in objective terms, highly imperfect. It may be excessive to accuse senior executives of having their “hands in the till,” but the metaphor is probably more apt than Adam Smith’s metaphor of the market’s “invisible hand.” In practice, the invisible

hand does not exist, any more than “pure and perfect” competition does, and the market is always embodied in specific institutions such as corporate hierarchies and compensation committees. Since uncertainty about these issues is great, it is hardly surprising that perceptions vary from country to country and period to period and are influenced by each country’s specific history. The important point is that it is very difficult for any individual firm to go against the prevailing social norms of the country in which it operates; but it has been just this way since 1980, and all signs are that this change in senior management compensation has played a key role in the evolution of wage inequalities around the world.

About the distribution of wealth, and therefore of income from capital, is always much more concentrated than the distribution of income from labor. Why were inequalities of wealth so extreme, and increasing, before World War I? And why is the concentration of wealth today significantly below its historical record high? For France, looking the figure 4.7 there is no visible trend toward reduced inequality of capital ownership.

3.17 Wealth inequality in France, 1810–2010

The probate records also allow us to see that throughout the nineteenth century, wealth was almost as unequally distributed within each age cohort as

in the nation as a whole. Note that the estimates indicated in the figures above reflect inequality of wealth in the (living) adult population at each charted date: we start with wealth at the time of death but reweight each observation as a function of the number of living individuals in each age cohort as of the date in question.

For the Usa, several important differences between the European and US trajectories stand out. Since the United States was a new country whose population consisted largely of immigrants who came to the New World with little or no wealth, this is not very surprising: not enough time had passed for wealth to be accumulated or concentrated. In 1910, capital inequality there was very high, though still markedly lower than in Europe: the top decile owned about 80 percent of total wealth and the top centile around 45 percent.

3.18 Wealth inequality in the United States, 1810–2010

Inequality of wealth in the United States decreased between 1910 and 1950, just as inequality of income did, but much less so than in Europe: of course it started from a lower level, and the shocks of war were less violent. By 2010, the top decile’s share of total wealth exceeded 70 percent, and the top centile’s share was close to 35 percent. differences between the European

and US experiences are clear. In Europe, the twentieth century witnessed a total transformation of society: inequality of wealth, which on the eve of World War I was as great as it had been under the Ancien Régime, fell to an unprecedentedly low level, so low that nearly half the population were able to acquire some measure of wealth and for the first time to own a significant share of national capital; In the United States, perceptions are very different. In a sense, a (white) patrimonial middle class already existed in the nineteenth century: In the United States, the twentieth century is not synonymous with a great leap forward in social justice. Indeed, inequality of wealth there is greater today than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hence the lost US paradise is associated with the country’s beginnings: there is nostalgia for the era of the Boston Tea Party, not for Trente Glorieuses and a heyday of state intervention to curb the excesses of capitalism.

References