Hi and thanks for visiting. This blog is from me, Steve Roth. I’ve been studying and writing about economics (with a strong progressive bent) since 2004. You can see altogether too many older posts at asymptosis.com. I’ve focused a lot on national accounts, and national accountants’ efforts over the last 90-odd years to sort out a coherent view and understanding of economies and economics — a view that’s widely misunderstood by economists, who receive no formal training in accounting.
That study led me to a focus on wealth (balance-sheet assets and net worth), which somewhat amazingly has only been tallied coherently by national accountants starting in the late 1990s or mid 2000s. Likewise: extreme and increasing wealth concentration in the U.S., which the national accounts have only made visible/legible and explicable in the years since 2019. These topics remain poorly understood and often ignored among economists. This blog is an effort to improve those understandings, and give due attention to a subject that Adam Smith thought was important enough to write a whole book about.
Questions, comments, criticisms, and disagreements are enthusiastically welcomed.
For those who are so inclined, below are a few more formal and fastidious writings. They’re all accompanied by downloadable open-access spreadsheets/replication files that include all the data and derivations behind the papers, in a form that’s as transparent as possible for analytically-minded mortals.
Haig-Simons Income Accounts for U.S. Households, 1960-2021. Open-access data series of comprehensive or Total household income (with full replication file), including accrued holding gains. With prototype distributional breakdowns of income and spending, by income quintile.
Why the Flow of Funds Don’t Explain the Flow of Funds: Sectoral Balances, Balance Sheets, and the Accumulation Fallacy. Going beyond the incomplete, closed-loop, balance-to-zero accounting paradigm.
How Redistribution Makes America Richer. An empirical, “money view” model of spending, wealth concentration, and wealth accumulation.
