“If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.”

Source: An Essay on Marxian Economics (Second Edition) (1966), Chapter IV, The Long-Period Theory Of Employment, p. 34

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered." by Joan Robinson?
Joan Robinson photo
Joan Robinson 46
English economist 1903–1983

Related quotes

Anthony Giddens photo
Thomas Sowell photo

“No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.”

Ian Shapiro (1956) American political theorist

The State of Democratic Theory (2003), Chapter 5. Democracy and Distribution.

Vladimir Lenin photo

“Classes still remain, and will remain everywhere for years after the proletariat's conquest of power.”

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

Calvin Coolidge photo
Simon Kuznets photo
Alfred Denning, Baron Denning photo
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo
Simon Kuznets photo

“An invariable accompaniment of growth in developed countries is the shift away from agriculture, a process usually referred to as industrialization and urbanization. The income distribution of the total population, in the simplest model, may therefore be viewed as a combination of the income distributions of the rural and of the urban populations. What little we know of the structures of these two component income distributions reveals that: (a) the average per capita income of the rural population is usually lower than that of the urban;' (b) inequality in the percentage shares within the distribution for the rural population is somewhat narrower than in that for the urban population… Operating with this simple model, what conclusions do we reach? First, all other conditions being equal, the increasing weight of urban population means an increasing share for the more unequal of the two component distributions. Second, the relative difference in per capita income between the rural and urban populations does not necessarily drift downward in the process of economic growth: indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that it is stable at best, and tends to widen because per capita productivity in urban pursuits increases more rapidly than in agriculture. If this is so, inequality in the total income distribution should increase”

Simon Kuznets (1901–1985) economist

Source: "Economic growth and income inequality," 1955, p. 7 as cited in: Anthony Barnes Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, Vol. 1. Elsevier, 2000 p. 799

Related topics