This basic arithmetic of rentiers and managers also helps us to understand why the top centiles of inherited wealth and earned income are almost balanced in France today: the concentration of wealth is about three times greater than the concentration of earned income (the top centile owns 20 percent of total wealth, while the top centile of earners claims 6–7 percent of total wages), so the concentration effect roughly balances the volume effect. We can also see why heirs were so clearly dominated by managers during the Trente Glorieuses (the 3:1 concentration effect was too small to balance the 10:1 mass effect). Apart from these situations, which are the result of extreme shocks and specific public policies (especially tax policies), however, the “natural” structure of inequality seems rather to favor a domination of rentiers over managers. In particular, when growth is low and the return on capital is distinctly greater than the growth rate, it is almost inevitable (at least in the most plausible dynamic models) that wealth will become so concentrated that top incomes from capital will predominate over top incomes from labor by a wide margin.35
The Classic Patrimonial Society: The World of Balzac and Austen
Nineteenth-century novelists obviously did not use the same categories we do to describe the social structures of their time, but they depicted the same deep structures: those of a society in which a truly comfortable life required the possession of a large fortune. It is striking to see how similar the inegalitarian structures, orders of magnitude, and amounts minutely specified by Balzac and Austen were on both sides of the English Channel, despite the differences in currency, literary style, and plot. As noted in Chapter 2, monetary markers were extremely stable in the inflation-free world described by both novelists, so that they were able to specify precisely how large an income (or fortune) one needed to rise above mediocrity and live with a minimum of elegance. For both writers, the material and psychological threshold was about 30 times the average income of the day. Below that level, a Balzacian or Austenian hero found it difficult to live a dignified life. It was quite possible to cross that threshold if one was among the wealthiest 1 percent (and even better if one approached the top 0.5 or even 0.1 percent) of French or British society in the nineteenth century. This was a well-defined and fairly numerous social group—a minority, to be sure, but a large enough minority to define the structure of society and sustain a novelistic universe.36 But it was totally out of reach for anyone content to practice a profession, no matter how well it paid: the best paid 1 percent of professions did not allow one to come anywhere near this standard of living (nor did the best paid 0.1 percent).37
In most of these novels, the financial, social, and psychological setting is established in the first few pages and occasionally alluded to thereafter, so that the reader will not forget everything that sets the characters of the novel apart from the rest of society: the monetary markers that shape their lives, their rivalries, their strategies, and their hopes. In Père Goriot, the old man’s fall from grace is conveyed at once by the fact that he has been obliged to make do with the filthiest room in the Vauquer boardinghouse and survive on the skimpiest of meals in order to reduce his annual expenditure to 500 francs (or roughly the average annual income at the time—abject poverty for Balzac).38 The old man sacrificed everything for his daughters, each of whom received a dowry of 500,000 francs, or an annual rent of 25,000 francs, about 50 times the average income: in Balzac’s novels, this is the basic unit of fortune, the symbol of true wealth and elegant living. The contrast between the two extremes of society is thus established at the outset. Nevertheless, Balzac does not forget that between abject poverty and true wealth all sorts of intermediate situations exist—some more mediocre than others. The small Rastignac estate near Angoulême yields barely 3,000 francs a year (or 6 times the average income). For Balzac, this is typical of the moneyless lesser nobility of the provinces. Eugène’s family can spare only 1,200 francs a year to pay for his law studies in the capital. In Vautrin’s lecture, the annual salary of 5,000 francs (or 10 times average income) that young Rastignac could potentially earn as a royal prosecutor after much effort and with great uncertainty is the very symbol of mediocrity—proof, if proof were needed, that study leads nowhere. Balzac depicts a society in which the minimum objective is to obtain 20–30 times the average income of the day, or even 50 times (as Delphine and Anastasie are able to do thanks to their dowries), or better yet, 100 times, thanks to the 50,000 francs in annual rent that Mademoiselle Victorine’s million will earn.
In César Birotteau, the audacious perfumer also covets a fortune of a million francs so that he can keep half for himself and his wife while using the other half as a dowry for his daughter, which is what he believes it will take for her to marry well and allow his future son-in-law to purchase the practice of the notary Roguin. His wife, who would prefer to return to the land, tries to convince him that they can retire on an annual rent of 2,000 francs and marry their daughter with only 8,000 francs of rent, but César will not hear of it: he does not want to wind up like his associate, Pillerault, who retired with just 5,000 francs of rent. To live well, he needs 20–30 times the average income. With only 5–10 times the average, one barely survives.
We find precisely the same orders of magnitude on the other side of the Channel. In Sense and Sensibility, the kernel of the plot (financial as well as psychological) is established in the first ten pages in the appalling dialogue between John Dashwood and his wife, Fanny. John has just inherited the vast Norland estate, which brings in 4,000 pounds a year, or more than 100 times the average income of the day (which was barely more than 30 pounds a year in 1800–1810).39 Norland is the quintessential example of a very large landed estate, the pinnacle of wealth in Jane Austen’s novels. With 2,000 pounds a year (or more than 60 times the average income), Colonel Brandon and his Delaford estate are well within expectations for a great landowner. In other novels we discover that 1,000 pounds a year is quite sufficient for an Austenian hero. By contrast, 600 pounds a year (20 times average income) is just enough to leave John Willoughby at the lower limit of a comfortable existence, and people wonder how the handsome and impetuous young man can live so large on so little. This is no doubt the reason why he soon abandons Marianne, distraught and inconsolable, for Miss Grey and her dowry of 50,000 pounds (2,500 pounds in annual rent, or 80 times average income), which is almost exactly the same size as Mademoiselle Victorine’s dowry of a million francs under prevailing exchange rates. As in Balzac, a dowry half that size, such as Delphine’s or Anastasie’s, is perfectly satisfactory. For example, Miss Morton, the only daughter of Lord Norton, has a capital of 30,000 pounds (1,500 pounds of rent, or 50 times average income), which makes her the ideal heiress and the quarry of every prospective mother-in-law, starting with Mrs. Ferrars, who has no difficulty imagining the girl married to her son Edward.40
From the opening pages, John Dashwood’s opulence is contrasted with the comparative poverty of his half-sisters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, who, along with their mother, must get by on 500 pounds a year (or 125 pounds apiece, barely four times the average per capita income), which is woefully inadequate for the girls to find suitable husbands. Mrs. Jennings, who revels in the social gossip of the Devonshire countryside, likes to remind them of this during the many balls, courtesy calls, and musical evenings that fill their days and frequently bring them into contact with young and attractive suitors, who unfortunately do not always tarry: “The smallness of your fortune may make him hang back.” As in Balzac’s novels, so too in Jane Austen’s: only a very modest life is possible with just 5 or 10 times the average income. Incomes close to or below the average of 30 pounds a year are not even mentioned, moreover: this, one suspects, is not much above the level of the servants, so there is no point in talking about it. When Edward Ferrars thinks of becoming a pastor and accepting the parish of Deliford with its living of 200 pounds a year (between 6 and 7 times the average), he is nearly taken for a saint. Even though he supplements his living with the
income from the small sum left him by his family as punishment for his mésalliance, and with the meager income that Elinor brings, the couple will not go very far, and “they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a year would supply them with the comforts of life.”41 This happy and virtuous outcome should not be allowed to hide the essence of the matter: by accepting the advice of the odious Fanny and refusing to aid his half-sisters or to share one iota of his immense fortune, despite the promises he made to his father on his deathbed, John Dashwood forces Elinor and Marianne to live mediocre and humiliating lives. Their fate is entirely sealed by the appalling dialogue at the beginning of the book.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the same type of inegalitarian financial arrangement could also be found in the United States. In Washington Square, a novel published by Henry James in 1881 and magnificently translated to the screen in William Wyler’s film The Heiress (1949), the plot revolves entirely around confusion as to the amount of a dowry. But arithmetic is merciless, and it is best not to make a mistake, as Catherine Sloper discovers when her fiancé flees on learning that her dowry will bring him only $10,000 a year in rent rather than the $30,000 he was counting on (or just 20 times the average US income of the time instead of 60). “You are too ugly,” her tyrannical, extremely rich, widower father tells her, in a manner reminiscent of Prince Bolkonsky with Princess Marie in War and Peace. Men can also find themselves in very fragile positions: in The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles shows us the downfall of an arrogant heir, George, who at one point has enjoyed an annual income of $60,000 (120 times the average) before falling victim in the early 1900s to the automobile revolution and ending up with a job that pays a below-average $350 a year.
Extreme Inequality of Wealth: A Condition of Civilization in a Poor Society?
Interestingly, nineteenth-century novelists were not content simply to describe precisely the income and wealth hierarchies that existed in their time. They often give a very concrete and intimate account of how people lived and what different levels of income meant in terms of the realities of everyday life. Sometimes this went along with a certain justification of extreme inequality of wealth, in the sense that one can read between the lines an argument that without such inequality it would have been impossible for a very small elite to concern themselves with something other than subsistence: extreme inequality is almost a condition of civilization.
In particular, Jane Austen minutely describes daily life in the early nineteenth century: she tells us what it cost to eat, to buy furniture and clothing, and to travel about. And indeed, in the absence of modern technology, everything is very costly and takes time and above all staff. Servants are needed to gather and prepare food (which cannot easily be preserved). Clothing costs money: even the most minimal fancy dress might cost several months’ or even years’ income. Travel was also expensive. It required horses, carriages, servants to take care of them, feed for the animals, and so on. The reader is made to see that life would have been objectively quite difficult for a person with only 3–5 times the average income, because it would then have been necessary to spend most of one’s time attending to the needs of daily life. If you wanted books or musical instruments or jewelry or ball gowns, then there was no choice but to have an income 20–30 times the average of the day.
In Part One I noted that it was difficult and simplistic to compare purchasing power over long periods of time because consumption patterns and prices change radically in so many dimensions that no single index can capture the reality. Nevertheless, according to official indices, the average per capita purchasing power in Britain and France in 1800 was about one-tenth what it was in 2010. In other words, with 20 or 30 times the average income in 1800, a person would probably have lived no better than with 2 or 3 times the average income today. With 5–10 times the average income in 1800, one would have been in a situation somewhere between the minimum and average wage today.
In any case, a Balzacian or Austenian character would have used the services of dozens of servants with no embarrassment. For the most part, we are not even told their names. At times both novelists mocked the pretensions and extravagant needs of their characters, as, for example, when Marianne, who imagines herself in an elegant marriage with Willoughby, explains with a blush that according to her calculations it is difficult to live with less than 2,000 pounds a year (more than 60 times the average income of the time): “I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands. A proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters, cannot be supported on less.”42 Elinor cannot refrain from pointing out to her sister that she is being extravagant. Similarly, Vautrin himself observed that it took an income of 25,000 francs (more than 50 times the average) to live with a minimum of dignity. In particular, he insists, with an abundance of detail, on the cost of clothing, servants, and travel. No one tells him that he is exaggerating, but Vautrin is so cynical that readers are in no doubt.43 One finds a similarly unembarrassed recital of needs, with a similar notion of how much it takes to live comfortably, in Arthur Young’s account of his travels.44
Notwithstanding the extravagance of some of their characters, these nineteenth-century novelists describe a world in which inequality was to a certain extent necessary: if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival. This view of inequality deserves credit for not describing itself as meritocratic, if nothing else. In a sense, a minority was chosen to live on behalf of everyone else, but no one tried to pretend that this minority was more meritorious or virtuous than the rest. In this world, it was perfectly obvious, moreover, that without a fortune it was impossible to live a dignified life. Having a diploma or skill might allow a person to produce, and therefore to earn, 5 or 10 times more than the average, but not much more than that. Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom.45
Meritocratic Extremism in Wealthy Societies
It is interesting, moreover, to note that the most ardent meritocratic beliefs are often invoked to justify very large wage inequalities, which are said to be more justified than inequalities due to inheritance. From the time of Napoleon to World War I, France has had a small number of very well paid and high-ranking civil servants (earning 50–100 times the average income of the day), starting with government ministers. This has always been justified—including by Napoleon himself, a scion of the minor Corsican nobility—by the idea that the most capable and talented individuals ought to be able to live on their salaries with as much dignity and elegance as the wealthiest heirs (a top-down response to Vautrin, as it were). As Adolphe Thiers remarked in the Chamber of Deputies in 1831: “prefects should be able to occupy a rank equal to the notable citizens in the départements they live in.”46 In 1881, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu explained that the state went too far by raising only the lowest salaries. He vigorously defended the high civil servants of his day, most of whom received little more than “15,000 to 20,000 francs a year”; these were “figures that might seem enormous to the common man” but actually “make it impossible to live with elegance or amass savings of any size.”47
The most worrisome aspect of this defense of meritocracy is that one finds the same type of argument in the wealthiest societies, where Jane Austen’s points about need and dignity make little sense. In the United States in recent years, one frequently has heard this type of justification for the stratospheric pay of supermanagers (50–100 times average income, if not more). Proponents of such high pay argued that without it, only the heirs of large fortunes would be able to achieve true wealth, which would be unfair. In the end, therefore, the millions or tens of millions of dollars a year paid to supermanagers contribute to greater social justice.48 This kind of argument could well lay the groundwork
for greater and more violent inequality in the future. The world to come may well combine the worst of two past worlds: both very large inequality of inherited wealth and very high wage inequalities justified in terms of merit and productivity (claims with very little factual basis, as noted). Meritocratic extremism can thus lead to a race between supermanagers and rentiers, to the detriment of those who are neither.
It also bears emphasizing that the role of meritocratic beliefs in justifying inequality in modern societies is evident not only at the top of hierarchy but lower down as well, as an explanation for the disparity between the lower and middle classes. In the late 1980s, Michèle Lamont conducted several hundred in-depth interviews with representatives of the “upper middle class” in the United States and France, not only in large cities such as New York and Paris but also in smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Clermont-Ferrand. She asked about their careers, how they saw their social identity and place in society, and what differentiated them from other social groups and categories. One of the main conclusions of her study was that in both countries, the “educated elite” placed primary emphasis on their personal merit and moral qualities, which they described using terms such as rigor, patience, work, effort, and so on (but also tolerance, kindness, etc.).49 The heroes and heroines in the novels of Austen and Balzac would never have seen the need to compare their personal qualities to those of their servants (who go unmentioned in their texts).
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