When did inequality rise in Britain and America?
Section snippets
Seeking a friendly divorce
To prepare the way for a richer understanding of early modern inequality movements, we must first divorce ourselves from the Kuznets curve, both because it is too restrictive and because Kuznets would have wanted us to abandon it, given what we now know.
We have great reason to want the new freedom. The problem is not that the Kuznets' curve has been refuted. The verdict is in fact mixed: Some countries, like Britain and America, seem to pass through a rise-and-fall pattern of inequality as they
Present trends invite a new search for rising-inequality episodes
The last 20 years offer another reason to start looking for a richer history of episodes, rather than a single inverted-U curve. In the U.S. and Britain, income inequality has clearly been rising since about 1977, reversing a large part of the income leveling achieved earlier in this century. In fact, the recent rise in inequality may have been even greater than the official data have revealed.
The usual data suggest that the recent rise of inequality has been more pronounced in Britain than in
When did the Americans first become so unequal?
Here, the debate continues. There is even a debate over whether American inequality ever rose.
The estimates disagree
When was it that income inequality actually rose in Britain? Scholars seeking numbers have had to be content with five kinds of trend measures:
- 1.
the inequality of housing consumption, from house-tax data;
- 2.
the inequality of labor earnings;
- 3.
wealth inequality, an indirect measure of the inequality of property incomes;
- 4.
direct estimates of income inequality, derived from early tax returns and from those social tables of Gregory King et al.; and
- 5.
crude movements in land rents versus wage rates.
The five
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