Capital and distributions of the surplus in the 21st century

from David Ruccio

Thanks to Thomas Piketty’s new book, the returns to capital are now back on the intellectual—if not the political—agenda. But, as one of my students (who just completed a wonderful senior thesis on “The Gilt and the Glitter: Thorsten Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, and the Second Gilded Age”) noticed, the composition of incomes of the leisure class changed between the first and second Gilded Ages: in 1916, most of their income came from “capital”; now, a large portion comes from “salaries”—although, as we can see below (in data from 2007), that’s less true of the top 0.1 percent than of the rest of the top 1 percent.

Robert Solow, in the clearest review of Piketty’s book to date, is the first to notice this change.

You get the picture: modern capitalism is an unequal society, and the rich-get-richer dynamic strongly suggest that it will get more so. But there is one more loose end to tie up, already hinted at, and it has to do with the advent of very high wage incomes. First, here are some facts about the composition of top incomes. About 60 percent of the income of the top 1 percent in the United States today is labor income. Only when you get to the top tenth of 1 percent does income from capital start to predominate. The income of the top hundredth of 1 percent is 70 percent from capital. The story for France is not very different, though the proportion of labor income is a bit higher at every level. Evidently there are some very high wage incomes, as if you didn’t know.

This is a fairly recent development. In the 1960s, the top 1 percent of wage earners collected a little more than 5 percent of all wage incomes. This fraction has risen pretty steadily until nowadays, when the top 1 percent of wage earners receive 10–12 percent of all wages. This time the story is rather different in France. There the share of total wages going to the top percentile was steady at 6 percent until very recently, when it climbed to 7 percent. The recent surge of extreme inequality at the top of the wage distribution may be primarily an American development. Piketty, who with Emmanuel Saez has made a careful study of high-income tax returns in the United States, attributes this to the rise of what he calls “supermanagers.” The very highest income class consists to a substantial extent of top executives of large corporations, with very rich compensation packages. (A disproportionate number of these, but by no means all of them, come from the financial services industry.) With or without stock options, these large pay packages get converted to wealth and future income from wealth. But the fact remains that much of the increased income (and wealth) inequality in the United States is driven by the rise of these supermanagers.

And Solow’s interpretation?

It is of course possible that “supermanagers” really are supermanagers, and their very high pay merely reflects their very large contributions to corporate profits. It is even possible that their increased dominance since the 1960s has an identifiable cause along that line. This explanation would be harder to maintain if the phenomenon turns out to be uniquely American. It does not occur in France or, on casual observation, in Germany or Japan. Can their top executives lack a certain gene? If so, it would be a fruitful field for transplants.

Another possibility, tempting but still rather vague, is that top management compensation, at least some of it, does not really belong in the category of labor income, but represents instead a sort of adjunct to capital, and should be treated in part as a way of sharing in income from capital. There is a puzzle here whose solution would shed some light on the recent increase in inequality at the top of the pyramid in the United States. The puzzle may not be soluble because the variety of circumstances and outcomes is just too large.

Solow seems to be onto something: the source of the salary incomes of the top 1 percent is just as much capital as are the other sources of their income, such as profits, dividends, interest, rent, and capital gains. All of them—including the salaries of “supermanagers”—represent distributions of the surplus initially appropriated by capital.

Therefore, as Solow concludes, “it is pretty clear that the class of supermanagers belongs socially and politically with the rentiers, not with the larger body of salaried and independent professionals and middle managers.”