Top 120 Thomas Piketty Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “The dynamics of the global distribution of capital are at once economic, political, and military. This was already the case in the colonial era, when the great powers of the day, Britain and France foremost among them, were quick to roll out the cannon to protect their investments. Clearly, the same will be true in the twenty-first century, in a tense new global political configuration whose contours are difficult to predict in advance.”

— Thomas Piketty

54. “The Revolution is the reason why French estate records are probably the richest in the world over the long run.”

— Thomas Piketty

55. “In 1980 there was no Internet or cell phone network, most people did not travel by air, most of the advanced medical technologies in common use today did not yet exist, and only a minority attended college. In the areas of communication, transportation, health, and education, the changes have been profound.”

— Thomas Piketty

56. “In 1800, slaves represented nearly 20 percent of the population of the United States: roughly 1 million slaves out of a total population of 5 million. In the South, where nearly all of the slaves were held,14 the proportion reached 40 percent: 1 million slaves and 1.5 million whites for a total population of 2.5 million. Not all whites owned slaves, and only a tiny minority owned as many as Jefferson: fortunes based on slavery were among the most concentrated of all.”

— Thomas Piketty

57. “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

58. “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

59. “In order to understand the dynamics of wage inequality, we must introduce other factors, such as the institutions and rules that govern the operation of the labor market in each society. To an even greater extent than other markets, the labor market is not a mathematical abstraction whose workings are entirely determined by natural and immutable mechanisms and implacable technological forces: it is a social construct based on specific rules and compromises.”

— Thomas Piketty

60. “The progressive tax is indispensable for making sure that everyone benefits from globalization, and the increasingly glaring absence of progressive taxation may ultimately undermine support for a globalized economy.”

— Thomas Piketty

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Many people believe that modern growth naturally favors labor over inheritance and competence over birth.”

— Thomas Piketty

64. “The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms.”

— Thomas Piketty

65. “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

66. “The Marikana tragedy calls to mind earlier instances of violence. At Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1, 1886, and then at Fourmies, in northern France, on May 1, 1891, police fired on workers striking for higher wages. Does this kind of violent clash between labor and capital belong to the past, or will it be an integral part of twenty-first-century history?”

— Thomas Piketty

67. “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

68. “None of the Asian countries that have moved closer to the developed countries of the West in recent years has benefited from large foreign investments, whether it be Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan and more recently China. In essence, all of these countries themselves financed the necessary investments in physical capital and, even more, in human capital, which the latest research holds to be the key to long-term growth.”

— Thomas Piketty

69. “Although precautionary saving in anticipation of short-term shocks does indeed exist in the real world, it is clearly not the primary explanation for the observed accumulation and distribution of wealth.”

— Thomas Piketty

70. “It is illusory, I believe, to think that the scholar and the citizen live in separate moral universes, the former concerned with means and the latter with ends. Although.”

— Thomas Piketty

71. “I merely want to stress the fact that the loss of stable monetary reference points in the twentieth century marks a significant rupture with previous centuries, not only in the realms of economics and politics but also in regard to social, cultural, and literary matters. It is surely no accident that money – at least in the form of specific amounts – virtually disappeared from literature after the shocks of 1914–1945.”

— Thomas Piketty

72. “Spending on education and health consumes 10–15 percent of national income in all the developed countries today.”

— Thomas Piketty

73. “Taxation is not only a way of requiring all citizens to contribute to the financing of public expenditures and projects and to distribute the tax burden as fairly as possible; it is also useful for establishing classifications and promoting knowledge as well as democratic transparency.”

— Thomas Piketty

74. “Once a fortune is established, the capital grows according to a dynamic of its own, and it can continue to grow at a rapid pace for decades simply because of its size.”

— Thomas Piketty

75. “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. If the purchasing power of wages increased fivefold in a century, it was because the improved skills of the workforce, coupled with technological progress, increased output per head fivefold. Over the long run, education and technology are the decisive determinants of wage levels.”

— Thomas Piketty

76. “For Ricardo, who published his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, the chief concern was the long-term evolution of land prices and land rents.”

— Thomas Piketty

77. “An 0.1 percent tax on capital would be more in the nature of a compulsory reporting law than a true tax. Everyone would be required to report ownership of capital assets to the world’s financial authorities in order to be recognized as the legal owner, with all the advantages and disadvantages thereof.”

— Thomas Piketty

78. “A society that grows at 1 percent per year, as the most advanced societies have done since the turn of the nineteenth century, is a society that undergoes deep and permanent change. This has important consequences for the structure of social inequalities and the dynamics of the wealth distribution.”

— Thomas Piketty

79. “If democracy is someday to regain control of capitalism, it must start by recognizing that the concrete institutions in which democracy and capitalism are embodied need to be reinvented again and again.”

— Thomas Piketty

80. “The social sciences collectively know too little to waste time on foolish disciplinary squabbles.”

— Thomas Piketty

81. “Everyone is political in his or her own way.”

— Thomas Piketty

82. “One should be wary, however, of the conventional wisdom that modern economic growth is a marvelous instrument for revealing individual talents and aptitudes. There is some truth in this view, but since the early nineteenth century it has all too often been used to justify inequalities of all sorts, no matter how great their magnitude and no matter what their real causes may be, while at the same time gracing the winners in the new industrial economy with every imaginable virtue.”

— Thomas Piketty

83. “In the top centile, by contrast, financial and business assets clearly predominate over real estate. In particular, shares of stock or partnerships constitute nearly the totality of the largest fortunes. Between 2 and 5 million euros, the share of real estate is less than one-third; above 5 million euros, it falls below 20 percent; above 10 million euros, it is less than 10 percent and wealth consists primarily of stock.”

— Thomas Piketty

84. “Lacking tax revenues, Greece has therefore been obliged to sell public assets, often at fire-sale prices, to buyers of Greek or other European nationalities, who evidently would rather take advantage of such an opportunity than pay taxes to the Greek government.”

— Thomas Piketty

85. “A society that grows at 1 percent per year, as the most advanced societies have done since the turn of the nineteenth century, is a society that undergoes deep and permanent change.”

— Thomas Piketty

86. “There is every reason to believe that the largest fortunes are often those that are best indexed and most diversified over the long run, while smaller fortunes – typically checking or savings accounts – are the most seriously affected by inflation.”

— Thomas Piketty

87. “The only continent not in equilibrium is Africa, where a substantial share of capital is owned by foreigners.”

— Thomas Piketty

88. “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

89. “By comparing various available sources, it is possible to estimate that the upper decile’s share slightly exceeded 50 percent of US national income on the eve of the financial crisis of 2008 and then again in the early 2010s.”

— Thomas Piketty

90. “The way one tries to measure inequality is never neutral.”

— Thomas Piketty

91. “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

92. “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

93. “In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, money was everywhere, not only as an abstract force but above all as a palpable, concrete magnitude. Writers frequently described the income and wealth of their characters in francs or pounds, not to overwhelm us with numbers but because these quantities established a character’s social status in the mind of the reader. Everyone knew what standard of living these numbers represented.”

— Thomas Piketty

94. “The advantage of owning things is that one can continue to consume and accumulate without having to work, or at any rate continue to consume and accumulate more than one could produce on one’s own.”

— Thomas Piketty

95. “The general evolution is clear: bubbles aside, what we are witnessing is a strong comeback of private capital in the rich countries since 1970, or, to put it another way, the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism.”

— Thomas Piketty

96. “The European and international authorities have never taken steps to implement the necessary laws and regulations, however.”

— Thomas Piketty

97. “The most striking fact of the day was the misery of the industrial proletariat. Despite the growth of the economy, or perhaps in part because of it, and because, as well, of the vast rural exodus owing to both population growth and increasing agricultural productivity, workers crowded into urban slums.”

— Thomas Piketty

98. “Progress in medicine together with improved living conditions has therefore, it is argued, totally transformed the very essence of capital.”

— Thomas Piketty

99. “All signs are that the Scandinavian countries, where wage inequality is more moderate than elsewhere, owe this result in large part to the fact that their educational system is relatively egalitarian and inclusive.”

— Thomas Piketty

100. “It consists rather in financing public services and replacement incomes that are more or less equal for everyone, especially in the areas of health, education, and pensions.”

— Thomas Piketty