Paper · 1955 · intro level
Economic Growth and Income Inequality
Simon Kuznets
- Venue
- American Economic Review, 45(1), 1–28
- Link
- publisher / source page
~8,300 citations
Source: scispace/Semantic Scholar aggregation · verified 2026-07-20. Counts drift daily and differ by database; treat as a dated snapshot.
Contested finding
Treated as a starting hypothesis to test or rebut, not a settled law; Piketty's Capital is structured largely as a direct rebuttal.
In plain language
Proposed that inequality rises then falls as a country industrializes — the 'Kuznets curve' — based on very limited data Kuznets himself called mostly speculation.
Technical summary
Presidential address hypothesizing an inverted-U relationship between development level and income inequality, driven by sectoral shifts from low-variance agricultural to high-variance industrial income, followed by broad-based catch-up.
Key takeaways
- Became the default 50-year mental model for inequality despite Kuznets's own caveat that it was '5 percent empirical information and 95 percent speculation.'
- Named an AEA 'Top 20' AER paper of all time (2011 retrospective).
- The post-1970s re-rise of inequality in rich countries, after they'd supposedly cleared the downward slope, is the core empirical anomaly the rest of the field responds to.
Themes
Related works
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century — Thomas Piketty, 2014
- Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998 — Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2003