Thomas Piketty Quotations

Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don't know very much in economics.

My premise is not to tax to destroy the wealth of the wealthy; it's to increase the wealth of the bottom and the middle class.

There is a fundamentalist belief by capitalists that capital will save the world, and it just isn't so.

You need some inequality to grow... but extreme inequality is not only useless but can be harmful to growth because it reduces mobility and can lead to political capture of our democratic institutions.

When you are an entrepreneur, you have founded your own firm, it is so easy to find that you exist - you are the main shareholder of your company; it is very easy to look at the stock market position of your company to know how rich you are.

I think inequality is fine, as long as it is in the common interest. The problem is when it gets so extreme, when it becomes excessive.

What I'm pushing for is an economic discipline that will be closer to other social sciences; in particular, we should be more pragmatic about the methods that we are using instead of pretending that we have our own scientific apparatus with very sophisticated mathematic models that distinguish us from sociologists and historians.

Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.

The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.

We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

I am afraid that if you don't find peaceful domestic solutions to our inequality and social problems, then it's always tempting to find other people responsible for our problems.

Capitalism and market forces are very powerful in producing wealth and innovation. But we need to ensure that these forces act in the common interest.

The United States could transform its property tax system into a progressive tax on net worth without asking permission to the rest of the world.

Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons.

Yeah, I am in favor of migration. But I am also in favor of education. But at the same time, I am in favor of progressive taxation. I think we need all of this. I think we don't have to choose one.

I believe in the power of ideas, I believe in the power of books, but you have to give them time.

I don't live in the Cold War. Some people maybe still live in the Cold War, but this is their problem, not mine.

What I argue for is a progressive tax, a global tax, based on the taxation of private property.

Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science.

Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren't sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth at levels that are compatible with democratic ideals.

Private property and the market system are good not only to promote innovation and to promote growth; private property and the market system are good for our personal freedom.

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.

'Das Kapital,' I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.

I don't pretend that I can predict the future value of the growth rate or rate of return.

One way to have broader access to wealth is to reduce the tax on the large group and increase the tax on the very top so concentration of wealth doesn't get to extreme levels.

I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don't want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.

I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen.

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

I'm not as pessimistic as what a number of people seem to believe.

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.

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?

Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts—and that is a very good thing.

The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America.

It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries.

The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.

Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite.

We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.

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.

Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.

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.

Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck.

At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution.

...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.

Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.

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

No hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest.

Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence.

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.