ABSTRACT
I cannot discover any satisfactory statistical estimate of the relative shares of work and property in the income of modern communities. Professor Cannan, a considerable time ago, offered to an audience which he suspected of economic pessimism, certain figures, which he admitted to be highly conjectural, because they seemed to him “to suggest at any rate that the pessimists’ case is not to be taken as founded on notorious facts.” 1 The relative share of property at the time of the publication of Mulhall’s Dictionary of Statistics in 1884 was, according to this conjecture, in the United Kingdom 21%, in Australia 22%, in Russia 28%, in France 29%, in the United States 33% and in Greece 54%. The last figure is the only one of these which seems markedly incredible.
