170 Quotes by Thomas Piketty

The way one tries to measure inequality is never neutral.

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.

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.

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

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

The most striking fact is no doubt that in all these societies, half of the population own virtually nothing: the poorest 50 percent invariably own less than 10 percent of national wealth, and generally less than 5 percent.

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.

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

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.