The Kuznets Curve: Good News in the Midst of the Cold War
In fact, Kuznets himself was well aware that the compression of high US incomes between 1913 and 1948 was largely accidental. It stemmed in large part from multiple shocks triggered by the Great Depression and World War II and had little to do with any natural or automatic process. In his 1953 work, he analyzed his series in detail and warned readers not to make hasty generalizations. But in December 1954, at the Detroit meeting of the American Economic Association, of which he was president, he offered a far more optimistic interpretation of his results than he had given in 1953. It was this lecture, published in 1955 under the title “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” that gave rise to the theory of the “Kuznets curve.”
According to this theory, inequality everywhere can be expected to follow a “bell curve.” In other words, it should first increase and then decrease over the course of industrialization and economic development. According to Kuznets, a first phase of naturally increasing inequality associated with the early stages of industrialization, which in the United States meant, broadly speaking, the nineteenth century, would be followed by a phase of sharply decreasing inequality, which in the United States allegedly began in the first half of the twentieth century.
Kuznets’s 1955 paper is enlightening. After reminding readers of all the reasons for interpreting the data cautiously and noting the obvious importance of exogenous shocks in the recent reduction of inequality in the United States, Kuznets suggests, almost innocently in passing, that the internal logic of economic development might also yield the same result, quite apart from any policy intervention or external shock. The idea was that inequalities increase in the early phases of industrialization, because only a minority is prepared to benefit from the new wealth that industrialization brings. Later, in more advanced phases of development, inequality automatically decreases as a larger and larger fraction of the population partakes of the fruits of economic growth.14
The “advanced phase” of industrial development is supposed to have begun toward the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century in the industrialized countries, and the reduction of inequality observed in the United States between 1913 and 1948 could therefore be portrayed as one instance of a more general phenomenon, which should theoretically reproduce itself everywhere, including underdeveloped countries then mired in postcolonial poverty. The data Kuznets had presented in his 1953 book suddenly became a powerful political weapon.15 He was well aware of the highly speculative nature of his theorizing.16 Nevertheless, by presenting such an optimistic theory in the context of a “presidential address” to the main professional association of US economists, an audience that was inclined to believe and disseminate the good news delivered by their prestigious leader, he knew that he would wield considerable influence: thus the “Kuznets curve” was born. In order to make sure that everyone understood what was at stake, he took care to remind his listeners that the intent of his optimistic predictions was quite simply to maintain the underdeveloped countries “within the orbit of the free world.”17 In large part, then, the theory of the Kuznets curve was a product of the Cold War.
To avoid any misunderstanding, let me say that Kuznets’s work in establishing the first US national accounts data and the first historical series of inequality measures was of the utmost importance, and it is clear from reading his books (as opposed to his papers) that he shared the true scientific ethic. In addition, the high growth rates observed in all the developed countries in the post–World War II period were a phenomenon of great significance, as was the still more significant fact that all social groups shared in the fruits of growth. It is quite understandable that the Trente Glorieuses fostered a certain degree of optimism and that the apocalyptic predictions of the nineteenth century concerning the distribution of wealth forfeited some of their popularity.
Nevertheless, the magical Kuznets curve theory was formulated in large part for the wrong reasons, and its empirical underpinnings were extremely fragile. The sharp reduction in income inequality that we observe in almost all the rich countries between 1914 and 1945 was due above all to the world wars and the violent economic and political shocks they entailed (especially for people with large fortunes). It had little to do with the tranquil process of intersectoral mobility described by Kuznets.
Putting the Distributional Question Back at the Heart of Economic Analysis
The question is important, and not just for historical reasons. Since the 1970s, income inequality has increased significantly in the rich countries, especially the United States, where the concentration of income in the first decade of the twenty-first century regained—indeed, slightly exceeded—the level attained in the second decade of the previous century. It is therefore crucial to understand clearly why and how inequality decreased in the interim. To be sure, the very rapid growth of poor and emerging countries, especially China, may well prove to be a potent force for reducing inequalities at the global level, just as the growth of the rich countries did during the period 1945–1975. But this process has generated deep anxiety in the emerging countries and even deeper anxiety in the rich countries. Furthermore, the impressive disequilibria observed in recent decades in the financial, oil, and real estate markets have naturally aroused doubts as to the inevitability of the “balanced growth path” described by Solow and Kuznets, according to whom all key economic variables are supposed to move at the same pace. Will the world in 2050 or 2100 be owned by traders, top managers, and the superrich, or will it belong to the oil-producing countries or the Bank of China? Or perhaps it will be owned by the tax havens in which many of these actors will have sought refuge. It would be absurd not to raise the question of who will own what and simply to assume from the outset that growth is naturally “balanced” in the long run.
In a way, we are in the same position at the beginning of the twenty-first century as our forebears were in the early nineteenth century: we are witnessing impressive changes in economies around the world, and it is very difficult to know how extensive they will turn out to be or what the global distribution of wealth, both within and between countries, will look like several decades from now. The economists of the nineteenth century deserve immense credit for placing the distributional question at the heart of economic analysis and for seeking to study long-term trends. Their answers were not always satisfactory, but at least they were asking the right questions. There is no fundamental reason why we should believe that growth is automatically balanced. It is long since past the time when we should have put the question of inequality back at the center of economic analysis and begun asking questions first raised in the nineteenth century. For far too long, economists have neglected the distribution of wealth, partly because of Kuznets’s optimistic conclusions and partly because of the profession’s undue enthusiasm for simplistic mathematical models based on so-called representative agents.18 If the question of inequality is again to become central, we must begin by gathering as extensive as possible a set of historical data for the purpose of understanding past and present trends. For it is by patiently establishing facts and patterns and then comparing different countries that we can hope to identify the mechanisms at work and gain a clearer idea of the future.
The Sources Used in This Book
This book is based on sources of two main types, which together make it possible to study the historical dynamics of wealth distribution: sources dealing with the inequality and distribution of income, and sources dealing with the distribution of wealth and the relation of wealth to income.
To begin with income: in large part, my work has simply broadened the spatial and temporal limits of Kuznets’s innovative and pioneering work on the evolution of income inequality in the United States between 1913 and 1948. In this way I have been able to put Kuznets’s findings (which are quite accurate) into a wider perspective and thus radically challenge his optimistic view of the relation between economic development and the
distribution of wealth. Oddly, no one has ever systematically pursued Kuznets’s work, no doubt in part because the historical and statistical study of tax records falls into a sort of academic no-man’s-land, too historical for economists and too economistic for historians. That is a pity, because the dynamics of income inequality can only be studied in a long-run perspective, which is possible only if one makes use of tax records.19
I began by extending Kuznets’s methods to France, and I published the results of that study in a book that appeared in 2001.20 I then joined forces with several colleagues—Anthony Atkinson and Emmanuel Saez foremost among them—and with their help was able to expand the coverage to a much wider range of countries. Anthony Atkinson looked at Great Britain and a number of other countries, and together we edited two volumes that appeared in 2007 and 2010, in which we reported the results for some twenty countries throughout the world.21 Together with Emmanuel Saez, I extended Kuznets’s series for the United States by half a century.22 Saez himself looked at a number of other key countries, such as Canada and Japan. Many other investigators contributed to this joint effort: in particular, Facundo Alvaredo studied Argentina, Spain, and Portugal; Fabien Dell looked at Germany and Switzerland; and Abhijit Banerjeee and I investigated the Indian case. With the help of Nancy Qian I was able to work on China. And so on.23
In each case, we tried to use the same types of sources, the same methods, and the same concepts. Deciles and centiles of high incomes were estimated from tax data based on stated incomes (corrected in various ways to ensure temporal and geographic homogeneity of data and concepts). National income and average income were derived from national accounts, which in some cases had to be fleshed out or extended. Broadly speaking, our data series begin in each country when an income tax was established (generally between 1910 and 1920 but in some countries, such as Japan and Germany, as early as the 1880s and in other countries somewhat later). These series are regularly updated and at this writing extend to the early 2010s.
Ultimately, the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world, is the largest historical database available concerning the evolution of income inequality; it is the primary source of data for this book.24
The book’s second most important source of data, on which I will actually draw first, concerns wealth, including both the distribution of wealth and its relation to income. Wealth also generates income and is therefore important on the income study side of things as well. Indeed, income consists of two components: income from labor (wages, salaries, bonuses, earnings from nonwage labor, and other remuneration statutorily classified as labor related) and income from capital (rent, dividends, interest, profits, capital gains, royalties, and other income derived from the mere fact of owning capital in the form of land, real estate, financial instruments, industrial equipment, etc., again regardless of its precise legal classification). The WTID contains a great deal of information about the evolution of income from capital over the course of the twentieth century. It is nevertheless essential to complete this information by looking at sources directly concerned with wealth. Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.25
In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.26 This approach was introduced by Robert Lampman in 1962 to study changes in the inequality of wealth in the United States from 1922 to 1956. Later, in 1978, Anthony Atkinson and Alan Harrison studied the British case from 1923 to 1972.27 These results were recently updated and extended to other countries such as France and Sweden. Unfortunately, data are available for fewer countries than in the case of income inequality. In a few cases, however, estate tax data extend back much further in time, often to the beginning of the nineteenth century, because estate taxes predate income taxes. In particular, I have compiled data collected by the French government at various times and, together with Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, have put together a huge collection of individual estate tax returns, with which it has been possible to establish homogeneous series of data on the concentration of wealth in France since the Revolution.28 This will allow us to see the shocks due to World War I in a much broader context than the series dealing with income inequality (which unfortunately date back only as far as 1910 or so). The work of Jesper Roine and Daniel Waldenström on Swedish historical sources is also instructive.29
The data on wealth and inheritance also enable us to study changes in the relative importance of inherited wealth and savings in the constitution of fortunes and the dynamics of wealth inequality. This work is fairly complete in the case of France, where the very rich historical sources offer a unique vantage point from which to observe changing inheritance patterns over the long run.30 To one degree or another, my colleagues and I have extended this work to other countries, especially Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. These materials play a crucial role in this study, because the significance of inequalities of wealth differs depending on whether those inequalities derive from inherited wealth or savings. In this book, I focus not only on the level of inequality as such but to an even greater extent on the structure of inequality, that is, on the origins of disparities in income and wealth between social groups and on the various systems of economic, social, moral, and political justification that have been invoked to defend or condemn those disparities. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it.
Last but not least, we can also use data that allow us to measure the total stock of national wealth (including land, other real estate, and industrial and financial capital) over a very long period of time. We can measure this wealth for each country in terms of the number of years of national income required to amass it. This type of global study of the capital/income ratio has its limits. It is always preferable to analyze wealth inequality at the individual level as well, and to gauge the relative importance of inheritance and saving in capital formation. Nevertheless, the capital/income approach can give us an overview of the importance of capital to the society as a whole. Moreover, in some cases (especially Britain and France) it is possible to collect and compare estimates for different periods and thus push the analysis back to the early eighteenth century, which allows us to view the Industrial Revolution in relation to the history of capital. For this I will rely on historical data Gabriel Zucman and I recently collected.31 Broadly speaking, this research is merely an extension and generalization of Raymond Goldsmith’s work on national balance sheets in the 1970s.32
Compared with previous works, one reason why this book stands out is that I have made an effort to collect as complete and consistent a set of historical sources as possible in order to study the dynamics of income and wealth distribution over the long run. To that end, I had two advantages over previous authors. First, this work benefits, naturally enough, from a longer historical perspective than its predecessors had (and some long-term changes did not emerge clearly until data for the 2000s became available, largely owing to the fact that certain shocks due to the world wars persisted for a very long time). Second, advances in computer technology have made it much easier to collect and process large amounts of historical data.
Although I have no wish to exaggerate the role of technology in the history of ideas, the purely technical issues are worth a moment’s reflection. Objectively speaking, it was far more difficult to deal with large volumes of historical data in Kuznets’s time than it is today. This was true to a large extent as recently as the 1980s. In the 1970s, when Alice Hanson Jones collected US estate inventories from the colonial era and Adeline Daumard worked on French estate records from the nineteenth century,33 they worked mainly by hand, using index cards. When we reread their remarkable work today, or look at François Siminad’s work on the evolution of
wages in the nineteenth century or Ernest Labrousse’s work on the history of prices and incomes in the eighteenth century or Jean Bouvier and François Furet’s work on the variability of profits in the nineteenth century, it is clear that these scholars had to overcome major material difficulties in order to compile and process their data.34 In many cases, the technical difficulties absorbed much of their energy, taking precedence over analysis and interpretation, especially since the technical problems imposed strict limits on their ability to make international and temporal comparisons. It is much easier to study the history of the distribution of wealth today than in the past. This book is heavily indebted to recent improvements in the technology of research.35
The Major Results of This Study
What are the major conclusions to which these novel historical sources have led me? The first is that one should be wary of any economic determinism in regard to inequalities of wealth and income. The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of inequality that took place in most developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. Similarly, the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to the political shifts of the past several decades, especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.
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