The Personal Distribution of Income

Steindl, Josef

Bibliographic data

Works

Document type:: Works

Collection:: Josef Steindl Collection

Title:: The Personal Distribution of Income

Author:: Steindl, Josef

Scope:: Typoskript, 14 Seiten, mit handschriftlichen Anmerkungen

Year of publication:: 1990

Source material date:: [vermutlich um 1990]

Language:: English

Related work:: Steindl, Josef: The Personal Distribution of Income. In: Steindl, Josef: Economic Papers 1941-88. London: Macmillan, 1990, S. 356-371

Topic:: Stochastic processes and size distribution

Shelfmark:: S/M.52.10

Access:: Free access

13 of wealth and income. This could be used then to understand and interpret the empirical joint distributions of income and wealth. For this purpose one would no doubt require data which are more conveniently arranged than the published material used above, and for this reason alone it would go beyond the modest scope of this paper. Footnotes. 1 The difficulties arising from the discrete representation of a continuous income variable (Cramer,1969,p.62)in the matrix need not concern us here.They do not exist since we relate the classes of the matrix to rank in a hierarchy. 2 Champernowne apparently did not know Yule's paper. It was Simon's merit to have brought it to the attention of economists.Unfortunately he used it in a form which obscured its essence which is the interplay of two exponential,or geometrical,distributions resulting from two stochastic processes. 3 Champernowne was, of course, aware of these facts,as his thesis of 1937 shows (Champernowne 1973).His formalised model of 1953 is,however,not well suited to reflect all the economic factors so well stated in 1937. 4 As far as the other factors,in other words,the explanations of earned income, are concerned, I can only vaguely indicate the direction in which I think a theory might be developped. The high earned incomes concern e- / managers,professional people artists and sportsmen. In most cases these people can be ranked in a hierarchy which in the case of managers depends on the scope of their activity,i.e. on the size of the firm,while in the case of the artists and sportsmen what matters is the size of the audience which they serve. The modern media have created ever larger audiences and accordingly greater incomes. A relevant theory of the high earned incomes (and the Pareto distribution is relevant only for them) will have to start from this concept of hierarchies pertaining to scope which gives another interpretation of Champernowne's matrix which,in his own presentation, is more adapted to income formation in a burocratic hierarchy. V /c- l

Works

Cite and reuse

Works

Image

Image fragment

Citation links

Citation recommendation