On Capital: an essay on inequality, capital and value theory

Mauricio De Rosa ()
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Mauricio De Rosa: Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economía

No 22-08, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON

Abstract: Capital is back at the center of the empirical distributional research agenda. New estimates of wealth accumulation, distribution and inheritance, fully consistent with national accounts' definitions and deeply rooted in standard neoclassical growth models, are now available. This provides the new inequality literature with clearut insights and empirical firepower. But while the empirical flank is increasingly well protected, the theoretical one is exposed. I revisit the debates on the underlying theory of capital and document its drawbacks, highlighting that it is particularly ill-equipped for inequality analysis and that its central problem is the theory of value. Does this mean that we should to start anew? I argue on the contrary, showing that under a one-good model assumption, there is accounting correspondence with the labor theory of value, which gives room for reinterpretation of most available estimates. Moreover, it is possible to establish clear accounting links between famous drivers of the economic system such as r>g and Marx's falling rate of profits. However, even under this accounting correspondence, taking distance from the scarcity theory of value has relevant implications for the inequality narrative, insofar it forces us to abandon the merit-inheritance discussion to include the role of exploitation. Keywords: prenatal visits, weeks of gestation, premature births, vital statistics, household surveys, validation.

Keywords: capital theory; history of economic thought; wealth inequality; national accounts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B24 D31 D46 E01 E13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-pke
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulr:wpaper:dt-08-22

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