Crisis and Inequality. Mattias Vermeiren

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СКАЧАТЬ these households had liabilities exceeding the value of their assets (because, for instance, the value of their house was lower than the value of their mortgages and other real estate debt).

Table 1.2 Distribution of net wealth in the OECD world, 2015 or latest available year

	Bottom 40% share	Bottom 60% share	Top 10% share	Top 5% share	Top 1% share
Australia	4.9	16.5	46.5	33.5	15.0
Austria	1.0	8.0	55.6	43.5	25.5
Belgium	5.7	19.0	42.5	29.7	12.1
Canada	3.4	12.4	51.1	37.0	16.7
Denmark	-8.6	-3.9	64.0	47.3	23.6
Finland	2.2	13.6	45.2	31.4	13.3
France	2.7	12.1	50.6	37.3	18.6
Germany	0.5	6.5	59.8	46.3	23.7
Greece	5.3	17.9	42.4	28.8	9.2
Ireland	-2.1	7.2	53.8	37.7	14.2
Italy	4.5	17.3	42.8	29.7	11.7
Japan	5.3	17.7	41.0	27.7	10.8
Luxembourg	3.9	15.3	48.7	36.3	18.8
Netherlands	-6.9	-4.0	68.3	52.5	27.8
New Zealand	3.1	12.3	52.9	39.7	…
Norway	-3.0	7.3	51.5	37.8	20.1
Portugal	3.2	12.4	52.1	36.5	14.4
Spain	6.9	18.7	45.6	33.3	16.3
United Kingdom	3.4	12.1	52.5	38.8	20.5
United States	-0.1	2.4	79.5	68.0	42.5
Source: OECD

The level of wealth inequality has also been rising since the 1980s. Figure 1.7, drawn from Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, reveals that wealth inequality was extremely high in the beginning of the twentieth century – even higher in Europe than in the United States. For reasons we will explore in this book, the level of wealth inequality was brought down in the United States during the interwar years and continued to decline in Europe until the 1970s. In other words, the post-war Golden Age of capitalism was the most egalitarian period in human history in terms of both income and wealth distribution. The period from the 1930s to the 1970s saw the emergence of what Piketty calls the ‘patrimonial middle class’ – ‘the principal structural transformation of the distribution of wealth in the developed countries in the twentieth century’: the wealth share of the middle 40 per cent reached 35 per cent in the 1970s in the United States and as much as 40 per cent in several European countries. Since the end of the 1970s, the share of the middle classes has been declining, while the share of the top 10 per cent – and especially of the top 1 per cent – has been rising in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in other advanced capitalist countries. One of the central objectives of this book is to explain what happened during this unique period of democratic capitalism, why this egalitarian period came to a halt in the course of the 1970s, and why a less egalitarian period has followed ever since.

Figure 1.7 Wealth shares of top 10 per cent in Europe and the United States, 1810–2010

      Source: Piketty 2014

      The central thesis in Piketty’s book is that wealth inequality in the United States and Europe is set to rise because, historically, the net rate of return to capital (r) exceeds the growth rate СКАЧАТЬ