I’ve just finished a draft of a long review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, which argues that we’re on the road back to “patrimonial capitalism”, dominated by inherited wealth. It’s an amazing book; among other things, it does an awesome job of integrating economic growth, the factor distribution of income (between capital and labor), and the individual distribution of income into a common framework. (It’s all about r-g). One slight weakness of the book, however, is that Piketty’s grand framework doesn’t do too good a job of explaining the explosion of income inequality in the United States, which so far has been driven mainly by wage income rather than capital. Piketty does take this on; but it’s kind of a side journey from the central story.

No matter; it’s still a masterwork. But I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, and one thing that strikes me is the remarkable extent to which American conservatism in 2014 seems to be about defending and promoting patrimonial capitalism even though we aren’t there yet.

Think back to the Bush administration, whose main economic theme was the “ownership society“: in effect, the message was that you’re not really a full-fledged American, no matter how hard you work, unless you have a lot of assets. Think of Eric Cantor’s famous Labor Day tweet in which he used the occasion to celebrate business owners. More recently, Mike Konczal has pointed out that despite claims that the Tea Party somehow represents a rebellion against business domination of the GOP, the Tea Party agenda corresponds almost perfectly with Wall Street’s goals.

Oh, and let’s not forget the long crusade against the estate tax.

In short, the GOP is more and more a party that consistently, indeed reflexively, supports the interests of capital over those of labor. But why?

Well, one thing you might imagine would be that the party was responding to a change in society — aren’t more and more Americans asset owners, for example through their retirement accounts?

And the answer is no. In fact, the concentration of income from capital in a few hands has risen sharply. Tucked deep inside the CBO report on trends in the US distribution of income are data on the concentration of various types of income; here’s the one percent’s share of capital income:

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So what we’re seeing is that half the political spectrum now instinctively accords much more respect to capital than to labor, at a time when capital income is growing ever more concentrated in a few hands — and is surely on its way to being concentrated largely in the hands of people who inherited their wealth.

Curious, isn’t it?