ABSTRACT

In contrast, recent analysis of twentieth-century evidence has shown that conventional property income distribution and its share in total income explains very little of the variance in incomes in today's industrialized societies. What is true of cross-sections also seems to be true of time series. Indeed, while it has long been appreciated that the wage share in Britain has been 'miraculously stable' since the 1860s (Keynes, 1939), this chapter and the next will show that both the earnings and the income distribution leveled over the same period.