The article examines long-run trends in the distribution of wealth. It shows that in the period from the late 1930s to the late 1970s there was an equalizing of the distribution on a striking and unprecedented scale, but that this was not subsequently sustained. For marketable net wealth the...

The central theme of this paper is the process of structural change which occurred during the twentieth century in the leading industrial nations. The massive scale of the changes in all these countries is first illustrated by reference to the reallocation of the labour force between...