Thomas Piketty > Quotes

“A society that grows at 1 percent per year, as the most advanced societies have done since the turn of the nineteenth century, is a society that undergoes deep and permanent change. This has important consequences for the structure of social inequalities and the dynamics of the wealth distribution.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“taxes consumed less than 10 percent of national income in all four countries during the nineteenth century and up to World War I. This reflects the fact that the state at that time had very little involvement in economic and social life.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“the population of the world grew at an average annual rate of barely 0.8 percent between 1700 and 2012. Over three centuries, however, this meant that the global population increased more than tenfold. A planet with about 600 million inhabitants in 1700 had more than 7 billion in 2012 (see Figure 2.1). If this pace were to continue for the next three centuries, the world’s population would exceed 70 billion in 2300.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“the force for divergence at the top of the wealth hierarchy would win out over the global forces of catch-up and convergence, so that the shares of the top decile and centile would increase significantly, with a large upward redistribution from the middle and upper-middle classes to the very rich. Such an impoverishment of the middle class would very likely trigger a violent political reaction. It is of course impossible at this stage to be certain that such a scenario is about to unfold.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“It is not out of the question that the two forces of divergence will ultimately come together in the twenty-first century. This has already happened to some extent and may yet become a global phenomenon, which could lead to levels of inequality never before seen, as well as to a radically new structure of inequality. Thus far, however, these striking patterns reflect two distinct underlying phenomena.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“skyrocketing executive pay is fairly well explained by the bargaining model (lower marginal tax rates encourage executives to negotiate harder for higher pay) and does not have much to do with a hypothetical increase in managerial productivity.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“A society that grows at 1 percent per year, as the most advanced societies have done since the turn of the nineteenth century, is a society that undergoes deep and permanent change.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“the question of what kind of fiscal and social state will emerge in the developing world is of the utmost importance for the future of the planet.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“Spending on education and health consumes 10–15 percent of national income in all the developed countries today.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“The ECB faces a unique set of problems. First, the ECB’s statutes are more restrictive than those of other central banks: the objective of keeping inflation low has absolute priority over the objectives of maintaining growth and full employment. This reflects the ideological context in which the ECB was conceived.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“For a fair proportion of Americans in the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution, these inequalities are of secondary importance for the very simple reason that they were born in a less wealthy country and see themselves as being on an upward trajectory.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“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, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“The most striking fact of the day was the misery of the industrial proletariat. Despite the growth of the economy, or perhaps in part because of it, and because, as well, of the vast rural exodus owing to both population growth and increasing agricultural productivity, workers crowded into urban slums.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“Since 1980, however, income inequality has exploded in the United States. The upper decile’s share increased from 30–35 percent of national income in the 1970s to 45–50 percent in the 2000s—an increase of 15 points of national income (see Figure 8.5). The shape of the curve is rather impressively steep, and it is natural to wonder how long such a rapid increase can continue: if change continues at the same pace, for example, the upper decile will be raking in 60 percent of national income by 2030.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“the New Deal, which created a large number of government jobs and social transfer programs, was a costly and useless sham. Saving capitalism did not require a welfare state or a tentacular government: the only thing necessary was a well-run Federal Reserve.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“modern redistribution does not consist in transferring income from the rich to the poor, at least not in so explicit a way.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“A progressive tax on capital is a more suitable instrument for responding to the challenges of the twenty-first century than a progressive income tax, which was designed for the twentieth century (although the two tools can play complementary roles in the future).”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“We find the same pattern in virtually every region of the world: the identity cleavage deepened and conflicts over boundaries intensified while the wealth cleavage weakened and criticism of wealth became muted.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

“Money tends to reproduce itself.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“tax is always more than just a tax: it is also a way of defining norms and categories and imposing a legal framework on economic activity.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“I want to be clear that at this stage I am not making a judgment about whether a society of this kind really deserves to be characterized as “hypermeritocratic.” It is hardly surprising that the winners in such a society would wish to describe the social hierarchy in this way, and sometimes they succeed in convincing some of the losers.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“The Marikana tragedy calls to mind earlier instances of violence. At Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1, 1886, and then at Fourmies, in northern France, on May 1, 1891, police fired on workers striking for higher wages. Does this kind of violent clash between labor and capital belong to the past, or will it be an integral part of twenty-first-century history?”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“A just society is one that allows all of its members access to the widest possible range of fundamental goods. Fundamental goods include education, health, the right to vote, and more generally to participate as fully as possible in the various forms of social, cultural, economic, civic, and political life. A just society organizes socioeconomic relations, property rights, and the distribution of income and wealth in such a way as to allow its least advantaged members to enjoy the highest possible life conditions. A just society in no way requires absolute uniformity or equality. To the extent that income and wealth inequalities are the result of different aspirations and distinct life choices or permit improvement of the standard of living and expansion of the opportunities available to the disadvantaged, they may be considered just. But this must be demonstrated, not assumed, and this argument cannot be invoked to justify any degree of inequality whatsoever, as it too often is.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

“The whole history of inequality regimes shows that what makes historical change possible is above all the existence of social and political mobilizations for change and concrete experimentation with alternative arrangements.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

“Conversely, younger people, in particular those born in the 1970s and 1980s, have already experienced (to a certain extent) the important role that inheritance will once again play in their lives and the lives of their relatives and friends. For this group, for example, whether or not a child receives gifts from parents can have a major impact in deciding who will own property and who will not, at what age, and how extensive that property will be—in any case, to a much greater extent than in the previous generation. Inheritance is playing a larger part in their lives, careers, and individual and family choices than it did with the baby boomers.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“When the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy (as it did through much of history until the nineteenth century and as is likely to be the case again in the twenty-first century), then it logically follows that inherited wealth grows faster than output and income. People with inherited wealth need save only a portion of their income from capital to see that capital grow more quickly than the economy as a whole. Under such conditions, it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels—levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“It is much too soon to warn readers that by 2050 they may be paying rent to the emir of Qatar. I will consider the matter in due course, and my answer will be more nuanced, albeit only moderately reassuring.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“It has become commonplace to say that the current capitalist system has no future, as it deepens inequalities and exhausts the planet. This is not false, except that in the absence of a clearly explained alternative, the current system still has many days ahead of it.”
― Thomas Piketty, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021