Dear Alain,

I don't have any good answers for you, unfortunately, but I'd be very interested in what you learn. One possible missing link in your story is the 1921 NBER publication, led by Kuznets' mentor Wesley Mitchell, "Income in the United States: Its Amount and Distribution, 1909-1919" which also had some top % measures. I don't recall off the top of my head whether that volume cites prior work, but it might be worth a look.

Best!
Dan
PS You might be interested in this paper I just published which looks at the trajectory of the 1% after Kuznets. 

On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 10:15 AM Alain Alcouffe <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear colleagues,

In his Histoire économique de la propriété, (economic history of property) volume V, 1909, the economic historian, Viscount Georges d'Avenel (1855-1939) studied the evolution of wealth and income concentration in France using the Top 1% and even the Top ‰. D'Avenel's studies were done in the early 1890s but published a decade later. Pareto cites d'Avenel but there is no indication that d'Avenel knew of Pareto's (or Gini's) work. In the 1930s, Kuznets and the NBER also used the 1% to measure concentration without mentioning forerunners, but I do not know whether statisticians or economists used this tool to communicate their results about the distribution of income before 1909.

Thanks for any suggestion or sources.

Best Regards

A. Alcouffe




--
Dan Hirschman (he/him)
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Brown University