170 Quotes by Thomas Piketty

The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and 20s.

Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they dont even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.

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

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.

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.

I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.

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.

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

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