Best 32 quotes of Thomas Piketty on MyQuotes

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

Contrary to a tenacious myth, France is not owned by California pension funds or the Bank of China, any more than the United States belongs to Japanese and German investors. The fear of getting into such a predicament is so strong today that fantasy often outstrips reality. The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one.

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.

Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they dont even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America.

The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

If you have free trade and free circulation of capital and people but destroy the social state and all forms of progressive taxation, the temptations of defensive nationalism and identity politics will very likely grow stronger than ever in both Europe and the United States. Note, finally, that the less developed countries will be among the primary beneficiaries of a more just and transparent international tax system.

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

Inequalities at the bottom of the US wage distribution have closely followed the evolution of thee minimum wage: the gap between the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution and the overall average wage widened significantly in the 1980s, then narrowed in the 1990s, and finally increased again in the 2000s. Nevertheless, inequalities at the top of the distribution - for example, the share of total wages going to the top 10 percent -- increased steadily throughout this period. Clearly, the minimum wage has an impact at the bottom of the distribution but much less influence at the top, where other forces are at work.

Notwithstanding the extravagance of some of their characters, these nineteenth-century novelists describe a world in which inequality was to a certain extent necessary: if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival. This view of inequality deserves credit for not describing itself as meritocratic, if nothing else. In a sense, a minority was chosen to live on behalf of everyone else, but no one tried to pretend that this minority was more meritorious or virtuous than the rest. … Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the ground of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom.

Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a very crucial role in modern society, for a simple reason: in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions, and in order to overcome this contradiction it is vital to make sure that social inequalities derive from rational and universal principles rather than arbitrary contingencies. Inequalities must therefore be just and useful to all, at least in the realm of discourse and as far as possible in reality as well.

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...