The First Fundamental Law of Capitalism: α = r × β I can now present the first fundamental law of capitalism, which links the capital stock to the flow of income from capital. The capital/income ratio β is related in a simple way to the share of income from capital in national income, denoted α. The formula is α = r × β where r is the rate of return on capital. For example, if β = 600% and r = 5%, then α = r × β = 30%. In other words, if national wealth represents the equivalent of six years of national income, and if the rate of return on capital is 5 percent per year, then capital’s share in national income is 30 percent. The formula α = r × β is a pure accounting identity. It can be applied to all societies in all periods of history, by definition. Though tautological, it should nevertheless be regarded as the first fundamental law of capitalism, because it expresses a simple, transparent relationship among the three most important concepts for analyzing the capitalist system: the capital/income ratio, the share of capital in income, and the rate of return on capital.....private per capita wealth on the order of 180,000 euros, or six years of national income, does not mean that everyone owns that much capital. Many people have much less, while some own millions or tens of millions of euros’ worth of capital assets. Much of the population has very little accumulated wealth—significantly less than one year’s income: a few thousand euros in a bank account, the equivalent of a few weeks’ or months’ worth of wages. Some people even have negative wealth: in other words, the goods they own are worth less than the debts they owe. By contrast, others have considerable fortunes, ranging from ten to twenty times their annual income or even more. The capital/income ratio for the country as a whole tells us nothing about inequalities within the country. But β does measure the overall importance of capital in a society, so analyzing this ratio is a necessary first step in the study of inequality.

some individuals like some countries receive far more than 9,000 euros per year in income from capital, while others receive nothing while paying rent to their landlords and interest to their creditors. Considerable country-to-country variation also exists. In addition, measuring the share of income from capital is often difficult in both a conceptual and a practical sense, because there are some categories of income (such as nonwage self-employment income and entrepreneurial income) that are hard to break down into income from capital and income from labor. In some cases this can make comparison misleading. When such problems arise, the least imperfect method of measuring the capital share of income may be to apply a plausible average rate of return to the capital/income ratio. At this stage, the orders of magnitude given above (β = 600%, α = 30%, r = 5%) may be taken as typical. For the sake of concreteness, let us note, too, that the average rate of return on land in rural societies is typically on the order of 4–5 percent. In the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, the fact that land (like government bonds) yields roughly 5 percent of the amount of capital invested (or, equivalently, that the value of capital corresponds to roughly twenty years of annual rent) is so taken for granted that it often goes unmentioned. Contemporary readers were well aware that it took capital on the order of 1 million francs to produce an annual rent of 50,000 francs. For nineteenthcentury novelists and their readers, the relation between capital and annual rent was self-evident, and the two measuring scales were used interchangeably, as if rent and capital were synonymous, or perfect equivalents in two different languages.