ABSTRACT
It is important to distinguish between the distribution of income and that of wealth, although academic practice used "wealth" in both senses as recently as World War I, and popular practice still does so. Income is conventionally regarded as a flow of returns from human and nonhuman assets alike, while wealth is a stock of nonhuman assets (plus slaves, a human asset, where the institution of slavery survives) and an increment of wealth is a component of income.1 The distributions of income and wealth differ widely, depending (chiefly) on the importance of "human
capital" as an income-earning asset, and on the rate of return obtained as income in different societies.
