The Economists Who Found the Richest People of All Time | The New Republic

Source: The Economists Who Found the Richest People of All Time | The New Republic

…The current method by which we measure economic inequality is through the mathematical distribution of wealth and income. We speak less of bloodlines and class divisions and more of medians and fractiles. But up until the tail end of the nineteenth century, Branko Milanovic writes in Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War, economists attached little weight to economic distribution. Indeed, the very word “equality” possessed no political or economic meaning at all before the early seventeenth century. Economic injustice, when considered, was assessed based on relations among (for Marx, warfare between) the classes. Consequently, only recently have we acquired much specific knowledge, looking backward, about the distribution of wealth throughout history.

…What’s inarguable is that medieval Europe was more egalitarian by the mathematical measure that’s captured popular imagination today. That’s the share of a nation’s combined wealth owned by the top one percent in the wealth distribution. In the United States, the top one percent—about 1.7 million people—possesses 35.4 percent of the nation’s total wealth, according to a website maintained by the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. By comparison, in 1300, in the Florentine city of Prato, the top one percent possessed 29.2 percent of the city’s total wealth, according to property-tax records. Elsewhere in the Florentine state, in the village of Poggibonsi, the top one percent possessed 19.9 percent of the total wealth. In the Sabaudian state, an area that corresponds to present-day Piedmont, the top one percent possessed 22.3 percent of the wealth. These percentages, Alfani writes, approximate wealth concentration today in the now-unified Republic of Italy, which (unlike these city-state predecessors) is governed democratically.