170 Quotes by Thomas Piketty

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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