Nevertheless, it is a fact that wealth inequality has decreased over the long run. However, this profound transformation has not benefited the “lower classes” (the bottom 50 percent), whose share remains quite limited. The benefits have gone almost exclusively to what I have called the “patrimonial (or property-owning) middle class,”* by which I mean the 40 percent in the middle of the distribution, between the poorest 50 percent and the wealthiest 10 percent, whose share of total wealth was less than 15 percent in the nineteenth century and stands at about 40 percent today (Fig. 4.2). The
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PATRIMONIAL MIDDLE CLASSS
Nevertheless, it is a fact that wealth inequality has decreased over the long run. However, this profound transformation has not benefited the “lower classes” (the bottom 50 percent), whose share remains quite limited. The benefits have gone almost exclusively to what I have called the “patrimonial (or property-owning) middle class,”* by which I mean the 40 percent in the middle of the distribution, between the poorest 50 percent and the wealthiest 10 percent, whose share of total wealth was less than 15 percent in the nineteenth century and stands at about 40 percent today (Fig. 4.2). The emergence of this “middle class” of owners, who individually are not very rich but collectively over the course of the twentieth century acquired wealth greater than that owned by the top centile (with a concomitant decrease in the top centile’s share), was a social, economic, and political transformation of fundamental importance.
