Neoclassical theory throws light upon the long-run changes in distribution of income. It fails to take account of the short-run impact of business fluctuations, of inflation and deflation, of rapidly rising prices. This failure is an omission, though it is true that distributive shares do not fluctuate as much as employment, prices, and the state of business generally. This lagging in the behaviour of shares can be understood by remembering that they are determined by the quotient of the real remuneration of the factor and its productivity; both variables move, according to marginal productivity theory, in the same direction. Yet inflation and deflation do have a certain impact upon distribution: if purchasing power shrinks, profits are the first income category to suffer; next come wages, particularly through the effects of unemployment. In a depression, the recipients of fixed money incomes (such as interest and pensions) gain from lower prices. In an inflation the opposite happens.

The traditional inflationary sequence was that as prices rose, profits would increase, with wages lagging behind; this would tend to diminish the share of labour in the national income. Experience since World War II, however, has been different; in many countries wage levels tended to run ahead in the inflationary spiral and profits lagged behind, although most entrepreneurs eventually succeeded in shifting the burden of wage inflation onto the consumers. The result of the postwar inflation was a slight acceleration of the increase in the share of labour, while the shares of capital and land decreased faster than they would have in the absence of inflation. Profits as a whole held their own. The struggle among the various participants in the economic process no doubt added fuel to the inflationary fires.

Another dynamic influence is technological progress. The concept of the production function assumes a constant technology. But in reality the growth of production is much less the consequence of increased quantities of labour and capital than of improvements in their quality. This element in increased production is distributed in a way not fully explained by neoclassical theory. Part of the change in distribution that is caused by technological progress can be analyzed as resulting from changes in the elasticities of production. If goes up, technological change is said to be “capital-using,” and the share of capital will increase. This is what, in fact, may have happened; the change in technology has offset, though it has not neutralized, the decline in the share of capital caused by the employment of a higher amount of capital per worker. But another part of the fruits of technological progress is garnered by profit receivers, probably quite a substantial part. Businessmen who are quick innovators make high profits; in a rapidly changing society, profits tend to be high, a circumstance that is fortunate because profits are the mainspring of economic change. The high rate of growth experienced by the post-World War I Western world stemmed from this profit-innovation-profit nexus.

The neoclassical theory endeavours to explain the prices of productive factors and the distributive shares received by them. It does not come to grips with a third category of distribution, that of personal income, which is much more affected by institutional arrangements and by characteristics of the social structure. Profits in particular may be shared in various ways: they may accrue to stockholders, to workers, to management, or to the government; or they may be retained in the corporation. What happens depends on dividend policy, tax policy, and the existence of profit-sharing arrangements with workers. Neoclassical theory has little to say on these matters or on the fact that in present-day capitalist society the managers of big business are virtually in a position to fix their own personal incomes. Managers have so much power vis-à-vis the stockholders and their total share of profits is so relatively little that their ability to pay themselves high salaries is limited only by the conventions of the business world. These high incomes cannot be explained by the categories of the neoclassical theory, and they do not constitute an argument against the theory. They may well argue for changes in society’s institutions, but that is a matter on which the neoclassical theory of distribution does not pontificate. A great deal of change could occur in the legal and social order without any disturbance to the theory.

Analyses of economic distribution appear in David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817, reissued 1981), the classical subsistence theory of wages; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1886; originally published in German, 1867), also available in many later editions, treating the process of distribution as pure conflict; John Bates Clark, Distribution of Wealth (1899, reissued 1965), the classic work on marginal productivity theory whereby distribution is viewed as a harmonious process in which the factors of production receive as income what they contribute to the product; Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921, reprinted 1985), an analysis of profits viewed as a result of imperfect foresight and as a remuneration for risk-bearing; Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (1934, reprinted 1987; originally published in German, 1912), an analysis of economic development as a result of the innovations of entrepreneurs motivated by profit; Paul H. Douglas, The Theory of Wages (1934, reissued 1964), marginalist theory based on statistical research which sets forth the famous Cobb–Douglas function; K.J. Arrow et al., “Capital–Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 43:225–250 (1961), an econometric study explaining the falling share of capital in the national income by the elasticity of substitution; J.R. Hicks, The Theory of Wages, 2nd ed. (1963, reissued 1973), a sophisticated treatment of marginal productivity theory; and Nicholas Kaldor, “Alternative Theories of Distribution,” in his Essays on Value and Distribution, 2nd ed. (1980), a discussion of various theories from Ricardo to Keynes. Dan Usher, The Economic Prerequisite to Democracy (1981), suggests that democracy requires broad agreement on how an economic system will distribute wealth. Other works in this area are Alan S. Blinder, Toward an Economic Theory of Income Distribution (1974); and Ronald G. Ehrenberg and Robert S. Smith, Modern Labor Economics: Theory and Public Policy, 5th ed. (1994).