The richest 20 Americans now have as much wealth as the half of the bottom of the country, and the top 1% of the population accounts for one-fifth of GNI.
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“A dangerous and growing inequality”
How many billionaires are needed to make up half of the world’s net worth? In 2015, the wealthiest 62 individuals on Earth had the same net worth of private wealth as the half of the poorer human beings, that is, more than 3.5 billion people. If they decide to travel together in the wild, a bus can put them all down. In the previous year, 85 billionaires were needed to reach this threshold, and perhaps a more spacious double-decker bus could accommodate them. In 2010, in the recent 2010, there were no fewer than 388 such people. Their assets were equivalent to the assets of the poorer half of the world. This required a small team, or a normal Boeing 777 or empty. Passenger A340 aircraft.
However, inequality is not just caused by some billionaires. The world’s richest 1% of households now have a slightly more than half of the global net worth of private wealth. If you include some of their assets hidden in overseas accounts, this distribution will be further skewed. Such disparity is not simply caused by the huge difference in average income between developed and developing countries. There is a similar imbalance in various societies. The richest 20 Americans now have as much wealth as the half of the bottom of the country, and the top 1% of the population accounts for one-fifth of GNI. Inequality is rising in most parts of the world.
At the same time, wealthy people will gain more wealth on this basis: in the United States, the most profitable 1% of the highest income group of 1% (the highest income of 0.01%) will account for their income from 20% The level in the 1970s has increased almost six-fold, with the top 10% of the group (the highest income of 0.1%) increasing four-fold, and the remaining 75% of the average income growth is much lower than these A higher level group.
This so-called “1%” may be a simple pronoun to go out, but it may also play a role in blurring the extent to which wealth is concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of people. In the 1950s, Nathanyar Parker Willis coined the term “one thousand above” to describe the upper class in New York. We may now need to use a variant of the term – “the first 10,000 people above” to give a fair assessment of those who make the “biggest contribution” to widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Even among such high society groups, thoseThe people at the top will still surpass others. Currently, the largest private wealth in the United States is about one million times the annual average household income in the United States. This multiple is 20 times higher than it was in 1982.
All of this has led to more and more anxiety. In 2013, the then US President Barack Obama has seen rising inequality as a “clear challenge”:
This is a dangerous and growing inequality, and the lack of upward mobility has jeopardized the basic beliefs of the US middle class – if you work hard, you have a chance to succeed. I believe this is the clear challenge we need to face in this era, to ensure that our economic development serves every hardworking American.
In 2011, investor and billionaire Warren Buffett said with anger that he and his “super rich friends” did not pay enough taxes. These views have been widely disseminated.
Do rich people simply become more and more rich?
Not exactly the same. Relative to the billionaire class, or more broadly speaking, all the controversial greed of the “1%” class, the income share of the highest income group in the United States has only recently caught up with the level of 1929, now assets The severity of the concentration is slightly less than that of that era.
In the UK on the eve of World War I, the richest 1/10 families were shocked to have 92% of all private wealth, almost all of them were excluded; today their income is only slightly More than half of the whole. Higher levels of inequality have a very long lineage. Before 2000, the greatest private wealth of ancient Rome was almost equal to 1.5 million times the average annual per capita income of the Empire, roughly equivalent to the ratio of the wealth of Bill Gates to the wealth of ordinary Americans today. As far as we know, the overall extent of income inequality in Rome is not much different from that in the United States.
However, by the time of Pope Gregory around 600 AD, the manor had disappeared, leaving the Roman aristocracy with less wealth than they had to rely on the Pope’s charity to survive. In this case, inequality is reduced because, although many people become poor, the rich lose more. In other cases, the quality of life of workers has improved, and the rate of return on capital has fallen: in Western Europe after the Black Death, real wages have tripled. Workers eat meat while drinking beer, and landlords try to stay decent. This is a famous example.
How does the distribution of income and wealth evolve over time? Why is it sometimes so big? In terms of the huge concerns that inequality has suffered in recent years, our understanding of this has been much less than expected.
A problem that is often dealt with by high-technical bonus-funded institutions is huge and growing, and urgent: why income was in the process of the previous generation’s developmentMore and more concentrated? There are few records of the drivers of a significant reduction in inequality in most parts of the world in the early 20th century, and in the more historical period, the distribution of material resources is far less.
It is certain that people are worried about the growing income gap in the world today, which provides the impetus for long-term inequality research, just as contemporary climate change encourages people to analyze relevant historical data. But we still lack a correct understanding of the big picture, a global survey that covers most of the observable history. A cross-cultural, comparative, and long-term perspective is critical to our understanding of the mechanisms that influence income and wealth distribution.
With regard to economic inequality, I have not tried to address various aspects. What I focus on is the distribution of material resources within society, which is an important and subject of much discussion. I mainly want to answer the question of why the degree of inequality will decline, and the various mechanisms for identifying corrections.
Broadly speaking, after we humans accept food production and the general inevitable result of it, settle down and form a country, and recognize the right to some form of hereditary property, the upward pressure on material inequality has become a The established facts – a basic feature of the existence of human society. Thinking about the nuances of these pressures over the centuries and thousands of years of evolution, especially for the complex synergies between us that may be rudely identified as coercion and market forces, will require a longer time span Conduct a separate study.
How to measure inequality?
There are many ways to measure inequality. In Inequality Society, I generally use only two of the most basic indicators: the Gini coefficient and the percentage of total income or wealth. The Gini coefficient measures the extent to which income or material assets are deviated from full equality. If each member of a particular group receives or holds the same number of resources, the Gini coefficient is 0; if one member controls all of them, and any other member has nothing, it is close to 1. Therefore, the more uneven the distribution, the higher the Gini coefficient.
These shares tell us that for a given population, a certain part of total income or total wealth is acquired or possessed by a particular group, which itself is based on its overall distribution. The location in which it is located is defined. For example, the widely quoted “1%” represents these units (usually referred to as households), which are more profitable or able to dispose of larger assets than 99% of units in a given group. The Gini coefficient and income share are two complementary measurement tools that emphasize the different nature of a given distribution: the former calculates the overall degree of inequality, while the latter provides a much-needed deep understanding of the assigned model.
These two metrics can be used to measure the distribution of different versions of income distribution. Income before taxes and public transfer payments is called “market”Revenue, the income after transfer payment is called “total” income, and the net income after all taxes and transfer payments are defined as “distributable” income. In “Inequality Society”, I only deal with market income and Disposable income. For most documented histories, market income inequality is the only type that can be understood or estimated.
The measurement of material inequality raises two types of questions: conceptual and evidentiary. There are two important conceptual issues worth noting here.
First, most of the indicators available measure and show “relative” inequalities due to differences in the share of resources held by different parts of the population. On the contrary, “absolute” inequality focuses on the “quantity” of the resources generated by this part of the population. These two methods tend to produce very different results. Consider a sample of the population in which the average household income at the top 10% is 10 times the average of the 10% bottom household, which is the relative level of $100,000 relative to $10,000. Subsequently, national income doubled and income distribution remained unchanged. The Gini coefficient and income share are the same as before.
From this perspective, rising incomes do not increase inequalities in the process. At the same time, however, the income gap between the top and bottom 10% groups has doubled – from $90,000 to $180,000, making the rich more profitable than low-income families.
Another question comes from the sensitivity of the Gini coefficient of income distribution to meeting the needs of survival and the level of economic development. At least in theory, it is entirely possible for a single person to have all the wealth in a particular group. However, no one can survive without being completely deprived of income.
This means that the highest feasible Gini coefficient value for income is destined to be below its nominal upper limit, ie 1. More specifically, they cannot exceed the total amount of resources that meet the minimum living needs. This limitation is particularly strong in the typical low-income economies that have emerged in most human history, and is still the case today. For example, in a society where GDP is twice as high as the standard of living, even if a single person successfully monopolizes all income beyond the needs of any other person, the Gini coefficient will not exceed 0.5. At higher output levels, the maximum level of inequality is further controlled by changing the definition of minimum living standards and, to a large extent, the poor population cannot sustain advanced economies. The nominal Gini coefficient needs to be adjusted accordingly to calculate the so-called extraction rate, the degree to which the theoretically maximum possible level of inequality has been achieved in a given environment. This is a complicated issue, and it is particularly prominent for any long-term inequality comparison, but it has only recently begun to attract people’s attention.
This raises the second category of questions: issues related to the quality of evidence.
The Gini coefficient and the highest income share are generally consistent measures of inequality: they usually (though not statically) change over timeAnd move in the same direction. Both are sensitive to the shortcomings of the underlying data source. The modern Gini coefficient usually comes from household surveys, from which national income distribution can be introduced. This model is not particularly suitable for capturing the largest income group. Even in Western countries, the nominal Gini coefficient needs to be adjusted upwards to take full account of the actual contribution of high-income people.
Once these attempts to extend the study of income and wealth inequality to a much longer time, all of the above analysis is dwarfed. Regular income tax collection is rarely done earlier than the 20th century. In the absence of household survey data, we must rely on proxy data to calculate the Gini coefficient.
Before 1800, income inequality in society as a whole could only be estimated by means of social tables, which were developed by contemporary observers or approximate incomes obtained by different populations that were later inferred by later scholars. It is worth mentioning that more and more data about parts of Europe can be traced back to the middle of the Middle Ages, revealing the situation of a single city or region. The surviving records of property taxes in French and Italian cities, the Dutch tax on rental income from houses and the income tax in Portugal allowed us to rebuild assets and sometimes even know the basic distribution of income.
The record of the degree of dispersion of agricultural land in France in the early modern times and the value of British inherited real estate. In fact, the Gini coefficient can be successfully applied to evidence that is more distant in time: the pattern of land ownership in late Egypt under Roman rule; Greece, Britain, Italy, and North African and Mexican Aztecs in ancient and early Middle Ages The size of the house changes; the share of inheritance in the Babylonian society and the distribution of dowry; even the spread of stone tools that was built by Chatajoyuk, one of the earliest known primitive urban settlements in the world almost 10,000 years ago, This is analyzed. Archaeology has enabled us to push the boundaries of material inequality research back to the Paleolithic Age of the last glacial period.
To be sure, both methods have serious weaknesses. However, these proxy indicators often give us a profile that allows us to see trends in unequal trends over time.
The scale, scope and progress of research on historical income and wealth inequalities make us hopeful about the future of this field. It is undeniable that the long history of humanity does not allow us to conduct even the most basic quantitative analysis of the distribution of material resources. However, even in this case, we can identify signals that evolve over time.
This article is excerpted from “Inequality Society” by Walter Scheider, CITIC Publishing Group 2019.6
Author introduction
Walter Scheidel
Daksen Professor of Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, Stanford University, and Kennedy Grossman, a researcher in the Department of Human Biology, is an important and active scholar in the field of international ancient Greek and Roman history. one.
Shaid has published more than a dozen books, including “Roman and China”, “Cambridge Greek and Roman Economic History”, and published a large number of articles in the fields of pre-modern social and economic history, demographics and comparative history.