Top 100 Thomas Piketty Quotes
#1. In countries where income from labor is most equally distributed, such as the Scandinavian countries between 1970 and 1990, the top 10 percent of earners receive about 20 percent of total wages and the bottom 50 percent about 35 percent.
Thomas Piketty
#2. 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.
Thomas Piketty
#3. the upper classes instinctively abandoned idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned.
Thomas Piketty
#4. I don't live in the Cold War. Some people maybe still live in the Cold War, but this is their problem, not mine.
Thomas Piketty
#5. a very substantial and growing inequality of capital income since 1980 accounts for about one-third of the increase in income inequality in the United States - a far from negligible amount.
Thomas Piketty
#6. When inequality gets to an extreme, it is completely useless for growth.
Thomas Piketty
#7. Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck.
Thomas Piketty
#8. In 1860, the average price of a male slave of prime working age was roughly $2,000, whereas the average wage of a free farm laborer was on the order of $200.
Thomas Piketty
#9. one would expect to see a flow of investments in Africa from other countries, especially China and other Asian nations.
Thomas Piketty
#10. There is a fundamentalist belief by capitalists that capital will save the world, and it just isn't so.
Thomas Piketty
#11. no mathematical formula or econometric estimate can tell us exactly what tax rate ought to be applied to what level of income. Only collective deliberation and democratic experimentation can do that.
Thomas Piketty
#12. Private property and the market system are good not only to promote innovation and to promote growth; private property and the market system are good for our personal freedom.
Thomas Piketty
#13. Progress in medicine together with improved living conditions has therefore, it is argued, totally transformed the very essence of capital.
Thomas Piketty
#14. (which did not exist before the creation of the income tax in 1913)
Thomas Piketty
#15. can we imagine political institutions that might regulate today's global patrimonial capitalism justly as well as efficiently?
Thomas Piketty
#16. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.
Thomas Piketty
#17. Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence.
Thomas Piketty
#18. For individuals whose only capital is a small balance in a checking account, the return is negative, because such balances yield no interest and are eaten away by inflation. Savings accounts often yield little more than the inflation rate.
Thomas Piketty
#19. Yeah, I am in favor of migration. But I am also in favor of education. But at the same time, I am in favor of progressive taxation. I think we need all of this. I think we don't have to choose one.
Thomas Piketty
#20. When it comes to decreasing inequalities of wealth for good or reducing unusually high levels of public debt, a progressive tax on capital is generally a better tool than inflation.
Thomas Piketty
#21. wealth in the rich countries is currently divided into two approximately equal (or comparable) parts: real estate and financial assets.
Thomas Piketty
#22. The most striking fact is no doubt that in all these societies, half of the population own virtually nothing: the poorest 50 percent invariably own less than 10 percent of national wealth, and generally less than 5 percent.
Thomas Piketty
#23. Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite.
Thomas Piketty
#24. One way to have broader access to wealth is to reduce the tax on the large group and increase the tax on the very top so concentration of wealth doesn't get to extreme levels.
Thomas Piketty
#25. political democracies that do not democratize their economic systems are inherently unstable.
Thomas Piketty
#26. Capitalism and market forces are very powerful in producing wealth and innovation. But we need to ensure that these forces act in the common interest.
Thomas Piketty
#27. No hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest.
Thomas Piketty
#28. The only continent not in equilibrium is Africa, where a substantial share of capital is owned by foreigners.
Thomas Piketty
#29. Income inequality increased quite sharply in the United States during the 1920s, however, peaking on the eve of the 1929 crash with more than 50 percent of national income going to the top decile -
Thomas Piketty
#30. Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons.
Thomas Piketty
#31. It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.
Thomas Piketty
#32. 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.
Thomas Piketty
#33. The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.
Thomas Piketty
#34. In all human societies, health and education have an intrinsic value: the ability to enjoy years of good health, like the ability to acquire knowledge and culture, is one of the fundamental purposes of civilization.
Thomas Piketty
#35. Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don't know very much in economics.
Thomas Piketty
#36. The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation.
Thomas Piketty
#37. 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.
Thomas Piketty
#38. The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and '20s.
Thomas Piketty
#39. Among the members of these upper income groups are US academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely. This is a very comprehensible human reaction.
Thomas Piketty
#40. 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
#41. Housing is the favorite investment of the middle class and moderately well-to-do, but true wealth always consists primarily of financial and business assets.
Thomas Piketty
#42. The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.
Thomas Piketty
#43. What I argue for is a progressive tax, a global tax, based on the taxation of private property.
Thomas Piketty
#44. There is no escaping the fact, however, that social science research on the distribution of wealth was for a long time based on a relatively limited set of firmly established facts together with a wide variety of purely theoretical speculations.
Thomas Piketty
#45. The only way to overcome these contradictions is for the countries of the Eurozone (or at any rate those who are willing) to pool their public debts.
Thomas Piketty
#46. Economic growth is quite simply incapable of satisfying this democratic and meritocratic hope, which must create specific institutions for the purpose and not rely solely on market forces or technological progress.
Thomas Piketty
#47. 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
#48. the higher returns of the largest endowments are not due primarily to greater risk taking but to a more sophisticated investment strategy that consistently produces better results.
Thomas Piketty
#49. A tax on capital would promote the general interest over private interests while preserving economic openness and the forces of competition.
Thomas Piketty
#50. All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.
Thomas Piketty
#51. I'm not as pessimistic as what a number of people seem to believe.
Thomas Piketty
#52. the income of nonwage workers is "mixed," because it combines income from labor with income from capital. This is also referred to as "entrepreneurial income.
Thomas Piketty
#53. in wartime, economic activity decreases, inflation increases, and real wages and purchasing power begin to fall. Wages at the bottom of the wage scale generally rise, however, and are somewhat more generously protected from inflation than those at the top.
Thomas Piketty
#54. Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.
Thomas Piketty
#55. Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.
Thomas Piketty
#56. As long as the incomes of the various classes of contemporary society remain beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, there can be no hope of producing a useful economic and social history.
Thomas Piketty
#57. When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.
Thomas Piketty
#58. When you are an entrepreneur, you have founded your own firm, it is so easy to find that you exist - you are the main shareholder of your company; it is very easy to look at the stock market position of your company to know how rich you are.
Thomas Piketty
#59. monopsony" rather than monopoly), in which case the owner of capital can impose a rate of return greater than the marginal productivity of his capital.
Thomas Piketty
#60. In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.
Thomas Piketty
#61. The bad news (or good news, depending on your point of view) is that things have always been like this.
Thomas Piketty
#62. I believe in the power of ideas, I believe in the power of books, but you have to give them time.
Thomas Piketty
#63. At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution.
Thomas Piketty
#64. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.
Thomas Piketty
#65. We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.
Thomas Piketty
#66. 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
#67. I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don't want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.
Thomas Piketty
#68. Modern redistribution is built around a logic of rights and a principle of equal access to a certain number of goods deemed to be fundamental.
Thomas Piketty
#69. Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science.
Thomas Piketty
#70. 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.
Thomas Piketty
#71. (autarky does not encourage technological transfer).
Thomas Piketty
#72. In the United States, the most recent survey by the Federal Reserve, which covers the same years, indicates that the top decile own 72 percent of America's wealth, while the bottom half claim just 2 percent.
Thomas Piketty
#73. The United States could transform its property tax system into a progressive tax on net worth without asking permission to the rest of the world.
Thomas Piketty
#74. 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.
Thomas Piketty
#76. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it.
Thomas Piketty
#77. I don't pretend that I can predict the future value of the growth rate or rate of return.
Thomas Piketty
#78. the return on capital increases with the size of the initial endowment,
Thomas Piketty
#79. I think inequality is fine, as long as it is in the common interest. The problem is when it gets so extreme, when it becomes excessive.
Thomas Piketty
#80. the future could hold in store a new world of inequality more extreme than any that preceded it.
Thomas Piketty
#81. You need some inequality to grow ... but extreme inequality is not only useless but can be harmful to growth because it reduces mobility and can lead to political capture of our democratic institutions.
Thomas Piketty
#83. I am afraid that if you don't find peaceful domestic solutions to our inequality and social problems, then it's always tempting to find other people responsible for our problems.
Thomas Piketty
#84. Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they don't even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.
Thomas Piketty
#85. When a country goes from a population of 3 million to a population of 300 million (to say nothing of the radical increase in territory owing to westward expansion in the nineteenth century), it is clearly no longer the same country.
Thomas Piketty
#86. I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen.
Thomas Piketty
#87. I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.
Thomas Piketty
#88. Although data on this are sparse, it also seems that US politicians of both parties are much wealthier than their European counterparts and in a totally different category from the average American, which might explain why they tend to confuse their own private interest with the general interest.
Thomas Piketty
#89. 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...
Thomas Piketty
#90. 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.
Thomas Piketty
#91. Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.
Thomas Piketty
#92. Taxation is neither good nor bad in itself. Everything depends on how taxes are collected and what they are used for.
Thomas Piketty
#93. Taxation is not a technical matter. It is preeminently a political and philosophical issue, perhaps the most important of all political issues.
Thomas Piketty
#94. 'Das Kapital,' I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.
Thomas Piketty
#95. We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.
Thomas Piketty
#96. Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts - and that is a very good thing.
Thomas Piketty
#97. In the long run, the best way to reduce inequalities with respect to labor as well as to increase the average productivity of the labor force and the overall growth of the economy is surely to invest in education.
Thomas Piketty
#98. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.
Thomas Piketty
#99. And in the most inegalitarian countries, such as the United States in the early 2010s (where, as will emerge later, income from labor is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere), the top decile gets 35 percent of the total, whereas the bottom half gets only 25 percent.
Thomas Piketty
#100. My premise is not to tax to destroy the wealth of the wealthy; it's to increase the wealth of the bottom and the middle class.
Thomas Piketty
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