History

Created 3/5/1996
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page

Billionaires in Historical Perspective

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Under Construction

In the Beginning

In the beginning the United States was a remarkably egalitarian country. High productivity and near-free agricultural land on the frontier meant high wages. Near-free land meant low rents. Low returns to landlording and the relatively small scale of industry together closed off many of the avenues of individual accumulation that create the very rich.

As best as Alice Hanson Jones could estimate in Wealth of a Nation To Be (using probate records), three-quarters of the way through the eighteenth century the richest one percent of American households held approximately fifteen percent of the nation-to-be's net worth: the average household in the wealthiest one percent had seventeen and a half times the wealth of the average household in the other ninety-nine percent of the population.

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The Nineteenth Century

Things changed over the nineteenth century.

Lee Soltow's work ("Men and Wealth, 1850-1870") based on the mid-nineteenth century Censuses gives us a snapshot of the nineteenth century process of wealth concentration in mid-stream.

1900 to 1930
The Great Levelling
What Has Happened Since 1980?

Worth Reading

Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert, Three Centuries of American Inequality.
Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be.
Lee Soltow, "Men and Wealth, 1850-1870"

History

Created 3/5/1996
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page