Concentrated Wealth

"The most complete picture ever presented of the division of the national income" is what the National Resources Committee called the report it issued fortnight ago showing that 32% of the nation's family units and individuals had incomes under $750 a year, 47% under $1,000, 69% under $1,500 (TIME, Sept. 12). Last week the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a somewhat supplementary treatise written by an economist as close to Capital as the National Resources Committee is to the New Deal.

Piqued by the saying that there was increased concentration of wealth, Dr. Rufus Stickney Tucker, rumbly-voiced associate economist for General Motors, year ago began studying The Distribution of Income among Income Taxpayers in the U. S., 1863-1935. His chief conclusions, which he presents in a mass of charts: There is a great concentration of wealth, but it is far less than it once was, for "persons with incomes equivalent in purchasing power to between 4,000 and 10,000 1929 dollars have become a much larger proportion of the population since 1916, and those with incomes equivalent to $50,000 or more have become a smaller proportion."

Dr. Tucker's "study of real wages of workingmen" convinced him that the most rapid improvement in their purchasing power occurred from 1864 to 1873, 1880 to 1892, 1922 to 1929. He found that the first and third periods were also marked by the greatest concentration of wealth. This led him to postulate that concentration of wealth derived from legitimate business profits is a concomitant of general prosperity, while concentration from speculation (as in 1929) or war profits (as in 1863-65) is not. His inference: "Any measures that may be taken to diminish the concentration of wealth and income should discriminate sharply between the socially desirable and socially undesirable forms of income, and great care should be exercised not to reduce business activity by too closely limiting the opportunities for legitimate business profits."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.