Thomas Piketty - Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013)

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What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight?

Thomas Piketty
Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.

Thomas Piketty
Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite.

Thomas Piketty
No hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest.

Thomas Piketty
At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution.

Thomas Piketty
Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence.

Thomas Piketty
Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.

Thomas Piketty
The overall importance of capital today, as noted, is not very different from what it was in the eighteenth century. Only its form has changed: capital was once mainly land but is now industrial, financial, and real estate. We also know that the concentration of wealth remains high, although it is noticeably less extreme than it was a century ago. The poorest half of the population still owns nothing, but there is now a patrimonial middle class that owns between a middle and a third of total wealth, and the wealthiest ten percent now own only-two thirds of what there is to own rather than nine-tenths.

Thomas Piketty
The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.

Thomas Piketty
Capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market.

Thomas Piketty
National income is defined as the sum of all income available to the residents of a given country in a given year, regardless of the legal classification of that income.

Thomas Piketty
Modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have made it possible to avoid the Marxist apocalypse but have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality—or in any case not as much as one might have imagined in the optimistic decades following World War II.

Thomas Piketty
Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.

Thomas Piketty
Broadly speaking, the rise of the supermanager is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon.

Thomas Piketty
There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

Thomas Piketty
When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

Thomas Piketty
Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts—and that is a very good thing.

Thomas Piketty
The distribution of wealth is one of today's most widely discussed and controversial issues. But what do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century? What do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?

Thomas Piketty
To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics.

Thomas Piketty
Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.

Thomas Piketty
For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

Thomas Piketty