Thomas Piketty Quotes

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

We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.

It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.

When inequality gets to an extreme, it is completely useless for growth.

Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck.

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

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

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

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

I don't think there is any serious evidence that we need to be paying people more than 100 times the average wage in order to get high-performing managers.

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

I certainly agree that capital is not a one-dimensional object, and that the return on capital takes very different forms for different assets or different people.

I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.

The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.

The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and 20s.

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

I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.

We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.

Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.

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

It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries.

The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.

We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics...

They (economists) 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.

Protectionism does not produce wealth, and free trade and economic openness are ultimately in everyone’s interest

Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.

Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.

All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.