Capital Gains in Economic Theory and National Accounting

Steindl, Josef

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Document type:: Works

Collection:: Josef Steindl Collection

Title:: Capital Gains in Economic Theory and National Accounting: Alte Version

Author:: Steindl, Josef

Scope:: Typoskript, 15 Blätter, mit Anstreichungen und Anmerkungen

Year of publication:: ohne Datum

Language:: English

Note:: Eine längere Version des vorliegenden Textes wurde post mortem (1998) publiziert. Die in diesem Typoskript vorhandenen Texteile sind im Wesentlichen identisch mit dem publizierten Text (es fehlen Kapitel 9 und Teile von Kapitel 10).

Topic:: Economic history,economic theory,current developments

JEL Classification:: E22 [Investment, Capital, Intangible Capital, Capacity] E01 [Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth, Environmental Accounts]

Shelfmark:: S/M.22.6

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.48671/nls.js.AC14446150

1 CAPITAL GAINS IN ECONOMIC THEORY AND NATIONAL ACCOUNTING. I J OBfflTIES. / It is one of the peculiarities of our very peculiar subject that it takes very little notice of capital gains. The national accounts do not know them at all and economic theory has very little if anything to say about them. The reason? Well, the national accounts have two limitations which together prevent any consideration of the matter: They do not deal with assets, and they consider only the relations of flows taking place in one and the same year, not relations of flows in different years. ( This is inevitable because the system of identities refers to one given period ). If they did we should find that the gains of estate (yf-•tvw-!./ f *./ 1 speculators are paid out of the rents of home dwellers in later years, and it might then be possible to regard realised capital gains as a special kind of transfer incomes ( the rent or interest paid by the home dweller services a loan which bought the land and from which the speculator's gain was paid ).As it is, all the accounting identities must refer to one and the same period. On the other hand, as far as theory is concerned the prevalence of equilibrium ideas somehow deflects the interest from facts which from this point of view may appear abnormal or unessential. But if you consider how vastly the value of the urban land has increased in the course of modern capitalist history and is still increasing all the time you wonder at the oddness of our modern economics which manages practically to ignore the theoretical relevance of capital gains for the distribution of income in the long run and for the accumulation of credit instruments which finance them in the short run. The astonishment gets even greater if we think of the casino society in which we live and the hausse

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