Professor Blumin on Age and Inequality

Extract

In his essay in this issue, Stuart Blumin attempts to sort out the debate between Edward Pessen and me. Professor Blumin begins: “Gallman advances the view that inequality between generations—the association between age and wealth—does explain nearly all of the very striking differences in personal fortune that Pessen and others have discovered.” This is not the view I had intended to advance and is certainly not a view I hold. Many factors bore on the wealth distribution of the United States in the “age of the common man.” The age structure of population surely did not account for “nearly all” of the observed wealth differences. (See, for example, my treatment of this subject— based on manuscript census data for 1860—in Davis et al., 1972: 31-32. This discussion treats the influences on wealth holding of age, sex, nativity, color, occupation, and inheritance.) How Professor Blumin came to misunderstand me so badly I cannot say, but I suspect he was misled by my ill-advised comparison of the results drawn from my model with the actual distribution of wealth in 1860 (Gallman, 1978:198).