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Title: Reexamining the Distribution of Wealth in 1870

Citation Type: Book, Section

Publication Year: 2008

ISBN: 9780203928134

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Abstract: The marked rise in income inequality in the United States over the past two decades has prompted a renewed interest in the history of both income and wealth distribution. Several recent studies have sought to construct consistent measures of inequality across most of the twentieth century.1 Evidence about either income or wealth distribution before the twentieth century is quite limited, but it is important to be able to place twentieth century trends in a broader context. The federal censuses of 1850, 1860 and 1870 offer a rare glimpse of patterns of property ownership in the United States during the nineteenth century. In 1850 census enumerators gathered information on the value of real property and in 1860 and 1870 they collected data on the value of both real and personal property holdings of every individual. These mid-century data offer a snapshot of wealth holding prior to the late nineteenth-century acceleration of industrialization. In this chapter we make use of data from the 1870 census contained in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to examine the distribution of wealth at a relatively disaggregated level.

Url: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203928134/chapters/10.4324%2F9780203928134-16

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Authors: Rosenbloom, Joshua, L; Stutes, Gregory, W

Editors: Rosenbloom, Joshua, L

Pages: 146-169

Volume Title: Quantitative Economic History: The Good of Counting

Publisher: Routledge

Publisher Location: London

Volume: 40

Edition:

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

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