Thomas Piketty famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Growth #Income #Arbitrary
...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.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Passion #Discipline #Historical
I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Way #University #Organized
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

#People #Return #Different
The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Levels #Diffusion #Convergence
Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Wealth #Existence
I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Jobs #Political #Would Be
The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and 20s.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Country #Income #Taxation
We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Opposites #Democracy #Want
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.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Girlfriend #Outsiders #Impossible
Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Thinking #Influential #Difficult
Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Numbers #Interest #Wells
We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Dynamics #Littles #Information
At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Lying #Heart #Political
Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Issues #Important #Philosopher
There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Discipline #Political #Intellectual
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.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Strong #Reality #California
What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight?
-- Thomas Piketty

#Children #Eight #Innovation
Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Skills #Long #Favors
For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Long #Use #Scientific Method
Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of expertsâ€”and that is a very good thing.
-- Thomas Piketty

#Democracy #Republic #Experts

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