In the abstract, several explanations are possible. The lower British inheritance flow might be due to the fact that a larger share of private wealth is held in pension funds and is therefore not transmissible to descendants. This can only be a small part of the explanation, however, because pension funds account for only 15–20 percent of the British private capital stock. Furthermore, it is by no means certain that life-cycle wealth is supplanting transmissible wealth: logically speaking, the two types of wealth should be added together, so that a country that relies more on pension funds to finance its retirements should be able to accumulate a larger total stock of private wealth and perhaps to invest part of this in other countries.61
It is also possible that the lower inheritance flow in Britain is due to different psychological attitudes toward savings and familial gifts and bequests. Before reaching that conclusion, however, it is important to note that the difference observed in 2000–2010 can be explained entirely by a lower level of gift giving in Britain, where gifts have remained stable at about 10 percent of the total amount of inheritances since 1970–1980, whereas gift giving in France and Germany increased to 60–80 percent of the total. Given the difficulty of recording gifts and correcting for different national practices, the gap seems somewhat suspect, and it cannot be ruled out that it is due, at least in part, to an underestimation of gift giving in Britain. In the current state of the data, it is unfortunately impossible to say with certainty whether the smaller rebound of inheritance flows in Britain reflects an actual difference in behavior (Britons with means consume more of their wealth and pass on less to their children than their French and German counterparts) or a purely statistical bias. (If we applied the same gift/inheritance ratio that we observe in France and Germany, the British inheritance flow in 2000–2010 would be on the order of 15 percent of national income, as in France.)
The available inheritance sources for the United States pose even more difficult problems. The federal estate tax, created in 1916, has never applied to more than a small minority of estates (generally less than 2 percent), and the requirements for declaring gifts are also fairly limited, so that the statistical data derived from this tax leave much to be desired. It is unfortunately impossible to make up for this lack by relying on other sources. In particular, bequests and gifts are notoriously underestimated in surveys conducted by national statistical bureaus. This leaves major gaps in our knowledge, which all too many studies based on such surveys forget. In France, for example, we find that gifts and bequests declared in the surveys represent barely half the flow observed in the fiscal data (which is only a lower bound on the actual flow, since exempt assets such as life insurance contracts are omitted). Clearly, the individuals surveyed tend to forget to declare what they actually received and to present the history of their fortunes in the most favorable light (which is in itself an interesting fact about how inheritance is seen in modern society).62 In many countries, including the United States, it is unfortunately impossible to compare the survey data with fiscal records. But there is no reason to believe that the underestimation by survey participants is any smaller than in France, especially since the public perception of inherited wealth is at least as negative in the United States.
In any case, the unreliability of the US sources makes it very difficult to study the historical evolution of inheritance flows in the United States with any precision. This partly explains the intensity of the controversy that erupted in the 1980s over two diametrically opposed economic theories: Modigliani’s life-cycle theory, and with it the idea that inherited wealth accounts for only 20–30 percent of total US capital, and the Kotlikoff-Summers thesis, according to which inherited wealth accounts for 70–80 percent of total capital. I was a young student when I discovered this work in the 1990s, and the controversy stunned me: how could such a dramatic disagreement exist among serious economists? Note, first of all, that both sides in the dispute relied on rather poor quality data from the late 1960s and early 1970s. If we reexamine their estimates in light of the data available today, it seems that the truth lies somewhere between the two positions but significantly closer to Kotlikoff-Summers than Modigliani: inherited wealth probably accounted for at least 50–60 percent of total private capital in the United States in 1970–1980.63 More generally, if one tries to estimate for the United States the evolution of the share of inherited wealth over the course of the twentieth century, as we did for France in Figure 11.7 (on the basis of much more complete data), it seems that the U-shaped curve was less pronounced in the United States and that the share of inherited wealth was somewhat smaller than in France at both the turn of the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first (and slightly larger in 1950–1970). The main reason for this is the higher rate of demographic growth in the United States, which implies a smaller capital/income ratio (β effect) and a less pronounced aging of wealth (m and μ effects). The difference should not be exaggerated, however: inheritance also plays an important role in the United States. Above all, it once again bears emphasizing that this difference between Europe and the United States has little to do a priori with eternal cultural differences: it seems to be explained mainly by differences in demographic structure and population growth. If population growth in the United States someday decreases, as long-term forecasts suggest it will, then inherited wealth will probably rebound as strongly there as in Europe.
As for the poor and emerging countries, we unfortunately lack reliable historical sources concerning inherited wealth and its evolution. It seems plausible that if demographic and economic growth ultimately decrease, as they are likely to do this century, then inherited wealth will acquire as much importance in most countries as it has had in low-growth countries throughout history. In countries that experience negative demographic growth, inherited wealth could even take on hitherto unprecedented importance. It is important to point out, however, that this will take time. With the rate of growth currently observed in emergent countries such as China, it seems clear that inheritance flows are for the time being quite limited. For working-age Chinese, who are currently experiencing income growth of 5–10 percent a year, wealth in the vast majority of cases comes primarily from savings and not from grandparents, whose income was many times smaller. The global rebound of inherited wealth will no doubt be an important feature of the twenty-first century, but for some decades to come it will affect mainly Europe and to a lesser degree the United States.
{TWELVE}
Global Inequality of Wealth in the Twenty-First Century
I have thus far adopted a too narrowly national point of view concerning the dynamics of wealth inequality. To be sure, the crucial role of foreign assets owned by citizens of Britain and France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been mentioned several times, but more needs to be said, because the question of international inequality of wealth concerns the future above all. Hence I turn now to the dynamics of wealth inequality at the global level and to the principal forces at work today. Is there a danger that the forces of financial globalization will lead to an even greater concentration of capital in the future than ever before? Has this not perhaps already happened?
To begin my examination of this question, I will look first at individual fortunes: Will the share of capital owned by the people listed by magazines as “the richest in the world” increase in the twenty-first century? Then I will ask about inequalities between countries: Will today’s wealthy countries end up owned by petroleum exporting states or China or perhaps by their own billionaires? But before doing either of these things, I must discuss a hitherto neglected force, which will play an essential role in the analysis: unequal returns on capital.
The Inequality of Returns on Capital
Many economic models assume that the return on capital is the same for all owners, no matter how large or small their fortunes. This is far from certain, however: it is perfectly possible that wealthier people obtain higher average returns than less wealthy people. There a
re several reasons why this might be the case. The most obvious one is that a person with 10 million euros rather than 100,000, or 1 billion euros rather than 10 million, has greater means to employ wealth management consultants and financial advisors. If such intermediaries make it possible to identify better investments, on average, there may be “economies of scale” in portfolio management that give rise to higher average returns on larger portfolios. A second reason is that it is easier for an investor to take risks, and to be patient, if she has substantial reserves than if she owns next to nothing. For both of these reasons—and all signs are that the first is more important in practice than the second—it is quite plausible to think that if the average return on capital is 4 percent, wealthier people might get as much as 6 or 7 percent, whereas less wealthy individuals might have to make do with as little as 2 or 3 percent. Indeed, I will show in a moment that around the world, the largest fortunes (including inherited ones) have grown at very high rates in recent decades (on the order of 6–7 percent a year)—significantly higher than the average growth rate of wealth.
It is easy to see that such a mechanism can automatically lead to a radical divergence in the distribution of capital. If the fortunes of the top decile or top centile of the global wealth hierarchy grow faster for structural reasons than the fortunes of the lower deciles, then inequality of wealth will of course tend to increase without limit. This inegalitarian process may take on unprecedented proportions in the new global economy. In view of the law of compound interest discussed in Chapter 1, it is also clear that this mechanism can account for very rapid divergence, so that if there is nothing to counteract it, very large fortunes can attain extreme levels within a few decades. Thus unequal returns on capital are a force for divergence that significantly amplifies and aggravates the effects of the inequality r > g. Indeed, the difference r − g can be high for large fortunes without necessarily being high for the economy as a whole.
In strict logic, the only “natural” countervailing force (where by “natural” I mean not involving government intervention) is once again growth. If the global growth rate is high, the relative growth rate of very large fortunes will remain moderate—not much higher than the average growth rate of income and wealth. Concretely, if the global growth rate is 3.5 percent a year, as was the case between 1990 and 2012 and may continue to be the case until 2030, the largest fortunes will still grow more rapidly than the rest but less spectacularly so than if the global growth rate were only 1 or 2 percent. Furthermore, today’s global growth rate includes a large demographic component, and wealthy people from emerging economies are rapidly joining the ranks of the wealthiest people in the world. This gives the impression that the ranks of the wealthiest are changing rapidly, while leading many people in the wealthy countries to feel an oppressive and growing sense that they are falling behind. The resulting anxiety sometimes outweighs all other concerns. Yet in the long run, if and when the poor countries have caught up with the rich ones and global growth slows, the inequality of returns on capital should be of far greater concern. In the long run, unequal wealth within nations is surely more worrisome than unequal wealth between nations.
I will begin to tackle the question of unequal returns on capital by looking at international wealth rankings. Then I will look at the returns obtained by the endowments of major US universities. This might seem like anecdotal evidence, but it will enable us to analyze in a clear and dispassionate way unequal returns as a function of portfolio size. I will then examine the returns on sovereign wealth funds, in particular those of the petroleum exporting countries and China, and this will bring the discussion back to the question of inequalities of wealth between countries.
The Evolution of Global Wealth Rankings
Economists as a general rule do not have much respect for the wealth rankings published by magazines such as Forbes in the United States and other weeklies in many countries around the world. Indeed, such rankings suffer from important biases and serious methodological problems (to put it mildly). But at least they exist, and in their way they respond to a legitimate and pressing social demand for information about a major issue of the day: the global distribution of wealth and its evolution over time. Economists should take note. It is important, moreover, to recognize that we suffer from a serious lack of reliable information about the global dynamics of wealth. National governments and statistical agencies cannot begin to keep up with the globalization of capital, and the tools they use, such as household surveys confined to a single country, are insufficient for analyzing how things are evolving in the twenty-first century. The magazines’ wealth rankings can and must be improved by comparison with government statistics, tax records, and bank data, but it would be absurd and counterproductive to ignore the magazine rankings altogether, especially since these supplementary sources are at present very poorly coordinated at the global level. I will therefore examine what useful information can be derived from these league tables of wealth.
The oldest and most systematic ranking of large fortunes is the global list of billionaires that Forbes has published since 1987. Every year, the magazine’s journalists try to compile from all kinds of sources a complete list of everyone in the world whose net worth exceeds a billion dollars. The list was led by a Japanese billionaire from 1987 to 1995, then an American one from 1995 to 2009, and finally a Mexican since 2010. According to Forbes, the planet was home to just over 140 billionaires in 1987 but counts more than 1,400 today (2013), an increase by a factor of 10 (see Figure 12.1). In view of inflation and global economic growth since 1987, however, these spectacular numbers, repeated every year by media around the world, are difficult to interpret. If we look at the numbers in relation to the global population and total private wealth, we obtain the following results, which make somewhat more sense. The planet boasted barely 5 billionaires per 100 million adults in 1987 and 30 in 2013. Billionaires owned just 0.4 percent of global private wealth in 1987 but more than 1.5 percent in 2013, which is above the previous record attained in 2008, on the eve of the global financial crisis and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (see Figure 12.2).1 This is an obscure way of presenting the data, however: there is nothing really surprising about the fact that a group containing 6 times as many people as a proportion of the population should own 4 times as great a proportion of the world’s wealth.
FIGURE 12.1. The world’s billionaires according to Forbes, 1987–2013
Between 1987 and 2013, the number of $ billionaires rose according to Forbes from 140 to 1,400, and their total wealth rose from 300 to 5,400 billion dollars.
Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c.
The only way to make sense of these wealth rankings is to examine the evolution of the amount of wealth owned by a fixed percentage of the world’s population, say the richest twenty-millionth of the adult population of the planet: roughly 150 people out of 3 billion adults in the late 1980s and 225 people out of 4.5 billion in the early 2010s. We then find that the average wealth of this group has increased from just over $1.5 billion in 1987 to nearly $15 billion in 2013, for an average growth rate of 6.4 percent above inflation.2 If we now consider the one-hundred-millionth wealthiest part of the world’s population, or about 30 people out of 3 billion in the late 1980s and 45 out of 4.5 billion in the early 2010s, we find that their average wealth increased from just over $3 billion to almost $35 billion, for an even higher growth rate of 6.8 percent above inflation. For the sake of comparison, average global wealth per capita increased by 2.1 percent a year, and average global income by 1.4 percent a year, as indicated in Table 12.1.3
FIGURE 12.2. Billionaires as a fraction of global population and wealth, 1987–2013
Between 1987 and 2013, the number of billionaires per 100 million adults rose from five to thirty, and their share in aggregate private wealth rose from 0.4 percent to 1.5 percent.
Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c.
To sum up: since the 1980s, global wea
lth has increased on average a little faster than income (this is the upward trend in the capital/income ratio examined in Part Two), and the largest fortunes grew much more rapidly than average wealth. This is the new fact that the Forbes rankings help us bring to light, assuming that they are reliable.
Note that the precise conclusions depend quite heavily on the years chosen for consideration. For example, if we look at the period 1990–2010 instead of 1987–2013, the real rate of growth of the largest fortunes drops to 4 percent a year instead of 6 or 7.4 This is because 1990 marked a peak in global stock and real estate prices, while 2010 was a fairly low point for both (see Figure 12.2). Nevertheless, no matter what years we choose, the structural rate of growth of the largest fortunes seems always to be greater than the average growth of the average fortune (roughly at least twice as great). If we look at the evolution of the shares of the various millionths of large fortunes in global wealth, we find increases by more than a factor of 3 in less than thirty years (see Figure 12.3). To be sure, the amounts remain relatively small when expressed as a proportion of global wealth, but the rate of divergence is nevertheless spectacular. If such an evolution were to continue indefinitely, the share of these extremely tiny groups could reach quite substantial levels by the end of the twenty-first century.5
FIGURE 12.3. The share of top wealth fractiles in world wealth, 1987–2013
Capital in the Twenty-First Century Page 50