if wealth is accumulated primarily for life-cycle reasons (saving for retirement, say), as Modigliani reasoned, then everyone would be expected to accumulate a stock of capital more or less proportional to his or her wage level in order to maintain approximately the same standard of living (or the same proportion thereof) after retirement. In that case, inequality of wealth would be a simple translation in time of inequality of income from labor and would as such have only limited importance, since the only real source of social inequality would be inequality with respect to labor.
