Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/373

 OUR NATIONAL PROSPERITY 367

From Kg. 2 it would seem probable that the continuity of change in the higher incomes was continued down to incomes in the neighbor- hood of $1,600, but below that point the curve seems to change its nature^ becoming much straighter. The cause of this probably lies in the fact that incomes, unlike property, can not fall below a certain Tnim'mnTn if life continues. This is what economists call an income or wage of "bare subsistence.^' For aU incomes in the lower portion of the diagram the term wage, would, of course, be synonymous with in- come. Wages cannot fall below some such minimum because if the masses are to produce for the few, then the few must pay them at least enough to keep life going, even though they possessed the power to make them work for nothing. A man may possess power of life and death over his slave, but he wiU not get much out of him unless he feeds him. The nature of the horizontal limb of the curve clearly shows this principle. No such principle is illustrated in the curve for prop- erty, for a man may live without property, though he can not live without income, which makes it possible for the few to acquire all property. This the few actually do in a population made up mostly of chattel slaves, and Fig. 1 would seem to show that in effect this has been done in our glorious land of freedom to-day.

Although the figures and assumptions entering into these diagrams are extremely rough from a mathematical standpoint, nevertheless, the errors they involve can not affect the broad facts they display. The pit- falls of statistics do not lie in a failure to refine, but rather in a failure to interpret. Probably that group of family incomes where the distri- bution is least known is the group from $2,100 to $5,250. And the group where the distribution is best known is the group of family in- comes from $5,250 up. This is the group of individual incomes from $2,500 up. Owing to the returns from the income tax, accurate infor- mation as to distribution in this high income group is obtainable, and it is worthy of separate consideration.

The ATiTiiml Eeport of the Commissioner of Internal Eevenue for 1914 gives the number of persons receiving incomes in each of eighteen specified groups above $2,500. Owing to omissions that are discussed in the report, the incomes mentioned are all less than the actual incomes, but since the omissions would apply with approximately the same pro- portional weight throughout, the figures lose none of their significance as far as distribution is concerned. Fig. 3 is a diagram which treats these incomes as we treated aU incomes in Fig. 2. It is the attenuated vertical point of Fig. 2 brought down to a horizontal and vertical scale that will make the distribution apparent.

When we remember that the statistics bind this curve much more fully than the curves of Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, there is something very $triking about its continuity. So striking, in fact, that it makes us sub-

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