Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/172

158 appear in the income tax returns. Assuming that each of these tax payers owned a $10,000 house, which. is improbable, the total of such real estate would be $4,370,000,000. Over-estimation here may in part offset neglect of the capital used in private business. On the face of things therefore, the property belonging to income tax payers aggregated about 68 billion dollars. Making comparison with the physical wealth of 1916 estimated at 268.4 billion dollars for the internal and 0.3 billion dollars for the external it appears that 1.7 per cent of the population owned about 25 per cent of the total wealth. I am inclined to put this as the minimum limit and say that the class specified owned at least that proportion of the national wealth.

By the first method of analysis there has been established the maximum limit of 46 per cent. The truth is probably somewhere between these extremes, but much nearer to the lower than to the higher. A fair guess might be something like 30 per cent.

Attention should be drawn here to the distinction between physical or tangible wealth and capitalized wealth, which includes also the intangible. A good illustration of the latter is the value of a newspaper, which may be rated at a high figure without there being much physical property associated with it. The difference between the market value of corporate securities and the physical property owned by the company is ascribable to intangible wealth, which may be a reflection of organization and experience, maybe of good will, maybe of patent rights. If the aggregate market value of a stock be less than the cost or reproduction value of the physical property the chances are that the usefulness of a portion of the latter has disappeared and