170 Quotes by Thomas Piketty

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.