Group Membership in Capital and Labour Earnings

This chapter provides evidence of how group biases aggregate in the process of financial accumulation and the way they affect economic exchange over time. What can we learn on group behaviour from the demographics of capital and labour earnings historically, regionally, nationally and across borders? At the national level, what can we learn from the interdependence of earning trends between groups on the social entitlement rules to financial flows? Being able to map out the rules of legitimacy that are context-specific is key to understanding the tacit rules of human interactions and financial accumulation. Looking at the most visible (data-wise) part of the market economy, the relationships between the historical trends of labour and capital earnings are investigated by gender, race, nationality and occupation for the US, UK and France. It shows that there a two-tier economic system where earnings go in the hands of a few dominant groups at the top of the income distribution, while leaving labour earners with stagnant real-wages.