They’ll Take the Money and Spread It Out Equal?: Historians Confront U.S. Economic Inequality

Sometimes, new popular concerns drive academic questions; other times, pioneering new work in the academy does so. The Occupy Movement, originating with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations beginning in September 2011, focused national attention on the widening gap between the “1 percent” and the “99 percent.” Two years later, French economist Thomas Piketty published the academic blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2013). At first blush, those events in tandem could be assumed to have inspired the books under consideration here. That said, actually reading them reveals a more complicated story: the beginnings of work on at least two of these three books predated those events. What happened subsequently, then, is that the authors have placed their books in the context of current popular and intellectual ferment concerning economic inequality, providing the basis for a dialogue useful for the consideration of the past and the present. However, just as the appearance of these three fine books not long after public and academic concern with economic inequality does not tell the whole story, after reading them I would argue that perhaps the central driving factor of economic inequality remains hiding in plain sight.

When two past presidents of the Economic History Association combine to write a book building upon decades of methodological trailblazing, and they simultaneously take issue with long-term economic history orthodoxy and with the most-discussed recent innovative synthesis of economic history, the much-anticipated volume commands serious consideration—and, after reading it, I can say the result was worth the wait. Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson’s Unequal Gains—with its sixty-eight tables, thirty figures, and eight appendices, not to mention reams of supporting data the authors have made available online—addresses many specific dimensions of economic inequality, among them racial, gendered, international, regional, urban-rural, and the inequality between the very wealthy and the rest of the population, as well as that among the lower 90 percent. Lindert and Williamson place all of these in the context of economic growth, which traditionally has been the primary organizing question of economics and economic history. In addition to engaging in a number of smaller methodological and historiographical debates, Unequal Gains makes two major historiographical interventions, and it does so through an unconventional methodology that Lindert and Williamson have pioneered and refined since the 1980s. Economists have traditionally measured total economic output from the production end, by adding up the value of all the widgets made and services provided, or from the consumption end, by tallying the cost of everything consumers, businesses, and governments bought. Unequal Gains, by contrast, relies on aggregate total income. The comparative downside of this methodology is that historical production and consumption figures, while challenging and subject to debate, are much easier to compile based upon industry and government sources than is income, especially before the institution of the federal income tax in 1913. However, by multiplying “social tables”—that is, the quantified division of labor (30 percent of the population working as widget-makers, 10 percent in widget delivery, 15 percent in widget repair, etc.—by data indicating the wage ranges for each occupation, Lindert and Williamson construct aggregate numbers with a convincing degree of precision for their six new snapshots (1774, 1800, 1850, 1860, and 1870) of American incomes and economic output.

Lindert and Williamson’s first, and in some ways less broadly controversial, major argument is that, in general, and in contention with economic history’s conventional wisdom, even before the American Revolution, median incomes, income equality, and economic...