Top 120 Thomas Piketty Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

4. “Inequality in the ownership of capital brings the rich and poor within each country into conflict with one another far more than it pits one country against another.”

— Thomas Piketty

5. “Taxation is neither good nor bad in itself. Everything depends on how taxes are collected and what they are used for.”

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

10. “To put it bluntly, 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

11. “Knowledge and skill diffusion is the key to overall productivity growth as well as the reduction of inequality both within and between countries.”

— Thomas Piketty

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Thomas Piketty

15. “It’s important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.”

— Thomas Piketty

16. “The second conclusion, which is the heart of the book, is that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveal powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence and divergence. Furthermore, there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.”

— Thomas Piketty

17. “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.”

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

19. “Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts – and that is a very good thing.”

— Thomas Piketty

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

24. “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

25. “The egalitarian pioneer ideal has faded into oblivion, and the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century’s globalized economy.”

— Thomas Piketty

26. “Taxation is not a technical matter. It is preeminently a political and philosophical issue, perhaps the most important of all political issues.”

— Thomas Piketty

27. “The shocks of the period 1914–1945 played an essential role in the compression of inequality, and this compression was in no way a harmonious or spontaneous occurrence.”

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Thomas Piketty

32. “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

33. “Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century?”

— Thomas Piketty

34. “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

35. “There was no gradual, consensual, conflict-free evolution toward greater equality. In the twentieth century it was war, and not harmonious democratic or economic rationality, that erased the past and enabled society to begin anew with a clean slate. What.”

— Thomas Piketty

36. “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

37. “Many reports have recommended that national accounts be improved and “humanized” in this way, but little progress has been made to date.25 A useful step in this direction would be a breakdown indicating the poorest 50 percent, the middle 40 percent, and the richest 10 percent. In particular, such an approach would allow any observer to see just how much the growth of domestic output and national income is or is not reflected in the income actually received by these different social groups.”

— Thomas Piketty

38. “An average worker could afford slightly less than ten kilos of carrots per day at the turn of the twentieth century, while he could afford nearly sixty kilos per day at the turn of the twenty-first century.”

— Thomas Piketty

39. “With real assets, everything is different. The price of real estate, like the price of shares of stock or parts of a company or investments in a mutual fund, generally rises at least as rapidly as the consumer price index.”

— Thomas Piketty

40. “A person who owns substantial amounts of assets is more likely to reach the top of the income hierarchy.”

— Thomas Piketty

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

— Thomas Piketty

42. “Money tends to reproduce itself.”

— Thomas Piketty

43. “Over the long run, education and technology are the decisive determinants of wage levels.”

— Thomas Piketty

44. “In Africa, the outflow of capital has always exceeded the inflow of foreign aid by a wide margin.”

— Thomas Piketty

45. “The issue of unequal access to higher education is increasingly a subject of debate in the United States. Research has shown that the proportion of college degrees earned by children whose parents belong to the bottom two quartiles of the income hierarchy stagnated at 10–20 percent in 1970–2010, while it rose from 40 to 80 percent for children with parents in the top quartile.30 In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access.”

— Thomas Piketty

46. “To the extent that the world’s central banks limited the damage from the recession of 2008–2009, they helped to increase GDP and investment and therefore augmented the capital of the wealthy countries and of the world.”

— Thomas Piketty

47. “I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se – especially since social inequalities are not in themselves a problem as long as they are justified, that is, “founded only upon common utility,” as article 1 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen proclaims.”

— Thomas Piketty

48. “As I will show, private wealth accounts for nearly all of national wealth almost everywhere. This has not always been the case, however, so it is important to distinguish clearly between the two notions.”

— Thomas Piketty

49. “Like his predecessors, Marx totally neglected the possibility of durable technological progress and steadily increasing productivity, which is a force that can to some extent serve as a counterweight to the process of accumulation and concentration of private capital.”

— Thomas Piketty

50. “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