Thomas Piketty

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

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

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

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

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

— 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

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

— Thomas Piketty

I can now present the first fundamental law of capitalism, which links the capital stock to the flow of income from capital. The capital/income ratio β is related in a simple way to the share of income from capital in national income, denoted α. The formula is

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

Let it be said at once: Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this.

— Thomas Piketty

Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them.

— Thomas Piketty

The tragedy is that Trump’s program will only strengthen the trend towards inequality.

— Thomas Piketty

There should be no more signing of international agreements that reduce customs duties and other commercial barriers without including quantified and binding measures to combat fiscal and climate dumping in those same treaties.

— Thomas Piketty

A balanced treaty between Canada and Europe, aimed at promoting a partnership for fair and sustainable development, should begin by specifying the emission targets of each signatory and the practical commitments to achieve these.

— Thomas Piketty

It is time to change the political discourse on globalization: trade is a good thing, but fair and sustainable development also demands public services, infrastructure, health and education systems. In turn, these themselves demand fair taxation systems. If we fail to deliver these, Trumpism will prevail.

— Thomas Piketty

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

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

— Thomas Piketty