The lessons of a new paper about welfare in Victorian England
six years ago of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”—an 800-page tome that has since sold over 2.5m copies—helped reveal the huge increase in inequality in the West since the 1970s. So why has support for welfare spending to counteract it remained so stable over that period? In theory, support for redistribution should increase with the gap between rich and poor, as the envy of the have-nots is stoked.
A new paper* due to be presented on April 7th at the Economic History Society’s annual conference suggests an interesting answer. Rather than the gap between rich and poor being the main influence on attitudes to welfare, the degree of inequality within the upper classes might matter more.Jonathan Chapman ofAbu Dhabi looks at the relationship between inequality and how the poor law, a locally administered welfare system, operated in Victorian England.
There is some evidence a similar relationship could exist today. In Britain, for instance, many upper-middle-class people hate inheritance tax , as they believe that whereas they must pay it, the ultra-wealthy use clever accountants to avoid their fair share. Mr Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that between 1980 and 2014 the bottom 50% of post-tax incomes in America increased by just 21%, compared with 113% for the top 10%**. But the top 1% rose even more—by 194%—while the top 0.
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