MPIfG Workshop on Political Economy of Wealth Inequality

How politics and institutions have shaped the historical evolution of wealth inequality was the main theme of a workshop held at the MPIfG on May 28 and 29 this year. Twenty-five historians, economists, and sociologists attended “The Political Economy of Wealth Inequality in Historical Perspective,” which was organized by Jens Beckert (MPIfG) and Alexander Nützenadel (HU Berlin) within the Arbeitskreis Moderne Sozialgeschichte. With the availability of new historical datasets from tax records, inheritance and property registers, corporate balance sheets, and financial archives, researchers have been able to reconstruct the long-term dynamics of income and wealth distribution with unprecedented precision. Yet the political and institutional dimensions of inequality continue to be understudied in historical research. The workshop therefore aimed to address this gap by exploring how state structures, regime change, and distributional conflict have shaped inequality over time, linking statistical reconstruction with institutional and political analysis. Five panels discussed institutions, elites, and wealth inequality; status, gender, and social closure; inequality after the neoliberal turn; taxation, welfare, and wealth; and segregation, race, and urban inequality. Central to all was the question of how statistical evaluation of long-term wealth data can inform our understanding of politics and society.