affected by inflation. To be sure, one could argue that the transition from virtually zero inflation in the nineteenth century to 2 percent inflation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries led to a slight decrease in the pure return on capital, in the sense that it is easier to be a rentier in a regime of zero inflation (where wealth accumulated in the past runs no risk of being whittled away by rising prices), whereas today’s investor must spend more time reallocating her wealth among different asset categories
