Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/376

 370 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

A summary of our survey points to the inevitable conclusion that the inequality of the distribution of wealth in the United States is violent beyond the dreams of avarice, and that its relation to human effort and ability is a vanishing quantity, while its relation to inequality of oppor- tunity is most apparent.

With the opening of 1915 the wealth per capita was about $2,200, or, say, about $11,000 per family." But these average or per capita figures are meaningless, since the property of the merest fraction of the people approaches anywhere near the average. The inequality in distribution is such that four fifths of the people own less than one tenth of the wealth, while 1 per cent, of the people own more than the re- maining ninety-nine.

The annual production of wealth or annual income is about $300 per capita, or $1,500 per family, or $700 per person "gainfully em- ployed.*'* If we subtract from individual incomes an amount not more than enough to cover the barest necessaries to physical existence, the remaining income or balance which "makes life worth living '^ shows an inequality in distribution on a par with that for property ownership.

The rate of saving, or rate of increase in property, is about $107 per capita per year.^ Figures showing the distribution of this are lack- ing, but practically all the saving is necessarily with the few having the larger incomes. This follows directly from the expanding rate at which fortunes increase. If the annual addition to property was saved by the poor, then the poor would become richer and fortunes would tend to equalize instead of separate. Belative equality would then be a stable instead of an unstable state. The richer a man became the stronger the tendency to return to moderate prosperity. Such a state would be similar to all the faculties of man, such as thinking, walking, eating and so on. Any departure from the normal in these things is non- cumulative and sets up a tendency to return to the normal or healthy. And so it is with labor which produces all wealth, but not so it appears with the getting of wealth.

8 Pro rated from the figures for the period 1904-1912. Census Bulletin '< Estimated Valuation of National Wealth/' pp. 15. The figures include every form of wealth down to dealer's stocks in hand, and household and i>er8onal effects — ^and exclude only such extremely transient wealth as value added to food by house wife, and personal services which are consumed as fast as pro- duced.

• Persons gainfully employed includes only such as receive money for services and excludes a large class, for the most part of women whose services in house work while not translated into money value, is nevertheless exceedingly productive. The wealth created by this class is entirely consumed almost as soon as produced and since it does not enter into the circle of exchanges, it would be very difficult to estimate.

7 Obtained by dividing the difference of the figures for national wealth of 1912 and 1910, that is, the increase in wealth in the two years, by 2, and by the mean population for the period.

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