IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/new/wpaper/1506.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Thrift, stagnation and wealth distribution in a two class economy with applications to the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Rishabh Kumar

    (Department of Economics, New School for Social Research)

Abstract

A two class (rentiers and workers) model of growth and distri- bution is applied to the study of long run stagnation in aggregate demand. The theoretical framework shows the same forces which lead to concentration of wealth and income amongst the class of rentiers, also constrain the aggregate economy's output capital ratio in the long run. We conjecture that this model addresses the secular stagnation argument that has gained prominence recently. For the period 1979- 2010, we find the US economy represents the kind of stylized economy which would be prone to falling output capital ratios due to increased savings rate differentials in its income and wealth ranking. A first approximation suggests the long decline in the rate of saving in the US maybe a consequence of a distributional paradox of thrift.

Suggested Citation

  • Rishabh Kumar, 2015. "Thrift, stagnation and wealth distribution in a two class economy with applications to the United States," Working Papers 1506, New School for Social Research, Department of Economics, revised Jul 2015.
    • Handle: RePEc:new:wpaper:1506
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/econ/2015/NSSR_WP_062015.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2015
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dennis Fixler & David S. Johnson, 2014. "Accounting for the Distribution of Income in the U.S. National Accounts," NBER Chapters, in: Measuring Economic Sustainability and Progress, pages 213-244, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Thomas Piketty & Gabriel Zucman, 2014. "Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700–2010," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 129(3), pages 1255-1310.
    3. Lance Taylor & Armon Rezai & Rishabh Kumar & Nelson Barbosa & Laura Carvalho, 2017. "Wage increases, transfers, and the socially determined income distribution in the USA," Review of Keynesian Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, vol. 5(2), pages 259-275, April.
    4. Dirk Krueger & Fabrizio Perri, 2006. "Does Income Inequality Lead to Consumption Inequality? Evidence and Theory -super-1," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(1), pages 163-193.
    5. Blinder, Alan S, 1975. "Distribution Effects and the Aggregate Consumption Function," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 83(3), pages 447-475, June.
    6. Karen E. Dynan & Jonathan Skinner & Stephen P. Zeldes, 2004. "Do the Rich Save More?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(2), pages 397-444, April.
    7. A. Drăgulescu & V.M. Yakovenko, 2001. "Evidence for the exponential distribution of income in the USA," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 20(4), pages 585-589, April.
    8. Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1969. "Distribution of Income and Wealth among Individuals," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 37(3), pages 382-397, July.
    9. Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman, 2014. "Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data," NBER Working Papers 20625, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Edward N. Wolff, 2012. "The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class," NBER Working Papers 18559, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Luigi L. Pasinetti, 1962. "Rate of Profit and Income Distribution in Relation to the Rate of Economic Growth," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 29(4), pages 267-279.
    12. Anwar Shaikh, 2009. "Economic Policy In A Growth Context: A Classical Synthesis Of Keynes And Harrod," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(3), pages 455-494, July.
    13. B. J. Moore, 1974. "The Pasinetti Paradox Revisited," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 41(2), pages 297-299.
    14. Darity, William A, Jr, 1981. "The Simple Analytics of Neo-Ricardian Growth and Distribution," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(5), pages 978-993, December.
    15. Robert J. Gordon, 2012. "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds," NBER Working Papers 18315, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Paul A. Samuelson & Franco Modigliani, 1966. "The Pasinetti Paradox in Neoclassical and More General Models," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 33(4), pages 269-301.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rishabh Kumar, 2015. "Wealth accumulation and aggregate demand stagnation in a two class economy with applications to the United States," Working Papers 1526, New School for Social Research, Department of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rishabh Kumar, 2015. "Wealth accumulation and aggregate demand stagnation in a two class economy with applications to the United States," Working Papers 1526, New School for Social Research, Department of Economics.
    2. Rishabh Kumar, 2015. "Savings from top incomes and accumulation in the United States context: Results from disaggregated national accounts," Working Papers 1524, New School for Social Research, Department of Economics.
    3. Kumar, Rishabh & Schoder, Christian & Radpour, Siavash, 2018. "Demand driven growth and capital distribution in a two class model with applications to the United States," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 1-8.
    4. Soon Ryoo, 2016. "Inequality of Income and Wealth in the Long Run: A Kaldorian Perspective," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 67(2), pages 429-457, May.
    5. Luca Zamparelli, 2017. "Wealth Distribution, Elasticity of Substitution and Piketty: An ‘Anti-Dual’ Pasinetti Economy," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 68(4), pages 927-946, November.
    6. Mattauch, Linus & Klenert, David & Stiglitz, Joseph E. & Edenhofer, Ottmar, 2022. "Overcoming wealth inequality by capital taxes that finance public investment," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 383-395.
    7. Mattauch, Linus & Klenert, David & Stiglitz, Joseph E. & Edenhofer, Ottmar, 2017. "Piketty meets Pasinetti: On public investment and intelligent machinery," VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking 168156, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    8. Linus Mattauch & Ottmar Edenhofer & David Klenert & Sophie Bénard, 2014. "Public Investment when Capital is Back - Distributional Effects of Heterogeneous Saving Behavior," CESifo Working Paper Series 4714, CESifo.
    9. Soon Ryoo, 2018. "Top income shares and aggregate wealth-income ratio in a two-class corporate economy [Growth and distribution in heterodox models with managers and financiers]," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 42(3), pages 699-728.
    10. Javier López-Bernardo & Félix López-Martínez & Engelbert Stockhammer, 2016. "A Post-Keynesian Response to Piketty's ‘Fundamental Contradiction of Capitalism’," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(2), pages 190-204, April.
    11. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2015. "New Theoretical Perspectives on the Distribution of Income and Wealth among Individuals: Part I. The Wealth Residual," NBER Working Papers 21189, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Raphaele Chappe & Willi Semmler, 2019. "Financial Market as Driver for Disparity in Wealth Accumulation—A Receding Horizon Approach," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 54(3), pages 1231-1261, October.
    13. Linus Mattauch & Ottmar Edenhofer & David Klenert & Sophie Bénard, 2016. "Distributional Effects of Public Investment when Wealth and Classes are Back," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 67(3), pages 603-629, July.
    14. Stiglitz, Joseph E., 2018. "Pareto efficient taxation and expenditures: Pre- and re-distribution," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 162(C), pages 101-119.
    15. , Stone Center & Ranaldi, Marco, 2020. "Distributional Aspects of Economic Systems," SocArXiv n7wj4, Center for Open Science.
    16. Schulz, Jan & Mayerhoffer, Daniel M., 2021. "A network approach to consumption," BERG Working Paper Series 173, Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group.
    17. Brant Abbott & Giovanni Gallipoli, 2022. "Permanent‐income inequality," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 13(3), pages 1023-1060, July.
    18. Alvarez-Cuadrado, Francisco & Japaridze, Irakli, 2017. "Trickle-down consumption, financial deregulation, inequality, and indebtedness," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 1-26.
    19. Lance Taylor, 2015. "Veiled Repression: Mainstream Economics, Capital Theory,and the Distributions of Income and Wealth," Working Papers Series 32, Institute for New Economic Thinking.
    20. Michalis Nikiforos, 2015. "A Nonbehavioral Theory of Saving," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_844, Levy Economics Institute.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Distribution; Economic Growth; Stagnation; Paradox of Thrift;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • O4 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:new:wpaper:1506. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mark Setterfield (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/denewus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.