16
minimum of assessed wealth,while all the income receivers
with lower wealth are not included in the data.If we try
to fill in these missing data in our imagination,assuming
fairly low levels of wealth for these people, we could
easily conceive that also the regression of wealth on
income would become linear.The inclusion of wealth below
the tax limit which is presumably the lower and the more
frequent the lower the income would reduce the mean wealth
in all income classes but it would reduce it the more the
lower the income. In other words the mean wealth in the
lower income classes as shown by the data very strongly
overstates the real mean wealth,and this the more the
lower the wealth.
There is no proof,of course,that some curvilinearity would
not remain even if full wealth data were
available,although it would be surprising that the two
regression lines should be so different in character.
The cross classification of wealth and income,available
for the Netherlands and Sweden, will now be discussed in
the light of the theory contained in equation (8). It
would be too much to expect a verification: For one thing
the estimate of the Pareto coefficient for income is
always more or less arbitrary because it depends on the
range of income classes included when fitting a straight