| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010947)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010947" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2207 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| the crash. (Yes, some of the strongest boom years in history came during the world |
| depression.) |
| This is not to question the need for national accounts. We could not manage without |
| them. But the genius of accountancy is in its reporting of cash flow items. |
| Depreciation, even its sophisticated form used in national accounts, is a makeshift |
| approximation better than nothing. I argue that it is obsoleted by our access to |
| market-valued capital appearing in the last few decades. |
| Mill's argument was that capital growth might be explained by productivity gain as |
| well as by thrift in deferred consumption. The way to test between them that I will |
| describe takes measurements of market-valued capital, its year-to-year change in |
| these, and consumption at the same time. I call it the simultaneous rates method. In |
| any year and country where consumption restraint explains growth, although the |
| data show none, rise in growth rate would equal current drop in consumption rate |
| (consumption/capital) while rate of return (output/capital) holds unchanged. When |
| productivity gain is the explanation, as the data confirm so far, it is consumption |
| rate that holds the same while growth rate and return rise equally. That's what I |
| test. Data in charts and tables for those four nations from 1870 through 2010, and |
| from Australia, Canada, Italy and Japan from 1970 through 2010, show that faster |
| capital growth coincides with higher consumption rates in the same year as often as |
| not. Less consumption has simply meant less output with no growth to show for it. |
| That is the sense in which growth is free. |
| These countries and periods are not cherry-picked to support Mill's idea. They are |
| all I have found. My source for national accounts including market-valued capital |
| was the website of Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman adjusting their data to |
| uniform accounting standards and measuring them in 2010 currency units. It also |
| collects recent and past research by other economists modeling what national |
| accounts, again including accounts of market-valued capital, would have shown in |
| years before they were founded in 1930 or so. Simon Kuznets, for example, who |
| Chapter 2: Fast Forward |
| 1/06/16 |
| 7 |
| HOUSE |
| _OVERSIGHT_010947 |
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