Capital in the Twenty-First Century
By Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer
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About this ebook
A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade.”
—Paul Krugman, New York Times
“The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat.”
—The Economist
“Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years.”
—Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post
“Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book…In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“A sweeping account of rising inequality…Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.”
—John Cassidy, New Yorker
“Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years.”
—Timothy Shenk, The Nation
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Reviews for Capital in the Twenty-First Century
423 ratings31 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting views backed with science Is always an good read.
This is not a light book to read. In some parts I revisited more than once during my first read through. I listened to from beginning to endit 3 times. It is solid research explaining how or economic system works. I great read. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is almost 600 pages plus notes. I cannot say that I read it verbatim but did do enough to feel comfortable reviewing it. The basic premise is that capital grows faster than gross domestic product and income and this inevitably leads to a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of those who have capital. This is what is driving the ever increasing inequality gap in the developed countries. Piketty asserts that without some structural changes in taxes etc. we will end up being even more unequal in the future. He gathers data indicating that this has been a problem since the industrial revolution with a break during 1914-1945(2 world wars and the depression) when there was a major destruction of capital. The led to a more egalitarian society, but that changed in 1980 with tax law changes that assisted the wealthy. The book is a challenge and maybe you want to read articles about it to get the gist of it, but if you have the time and inclination, it will certainly add to your economic education.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kind of depressing in that the only way out of the hole that Piketty digs is to enforce a global, democratic progressive wealth tax. The one shinning thing is that Piketty's imagination is limited and the world is infinite in its capacity to change.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I know, I know. I actually read Bowling Alone in its entirety too, and had a similar reaction: you can get a pretty good understanding of his thesis from a good review, and it’s not clear that the details add enough to be worth the full read unless you’re in the field. And why should they? I’m not the first to observe that this is a weird hit, heavy on lists and numbers tracking wealth over the centuries and carefully qualified to make sure we never forget that all the numbers are just estimates that probably undercount just how wealthy the wealthiest 1% in the West are and have been since records have been kept. (The partial exception is the post-WWI and WWII eras when so much wealth at the top had been destroyed that they didn’t get much more than half of total wealth.) Piketty contends that there are various structural reasons that wealth from capital—from owning land, machines, and intellectual property—produces greater pretax returns than labor does in almost all historical circumstances, and therefore the rich will get richer in the absence of aggressively progressive taxation. Or, he occasionally suggests, violent revolution, another way that societies have eventually said “enough!” to overconcentration of wealth. Even though anything that can’t go on forever won’t, he suggests, the richest can soak up so much of a society’s wealth for so long that the rest of us are immiserated, and the existence of a “middle class” is a historical anomaly produced by the great destruction of capital in the world wars—including the destruction involved in decolonization—as well as progressive taxation; now that both of those are over, the ideology of meritocracy is inducing us to ignore massively increasing inequality, now greater in the US than in most other countries and than it has been since records were kept. The twist, such as it is, is that it’s now possible to generate huge fortunes not just from returns on capital but also from what we would call “labor”—athletes and actors, though, generally can’t rise to the highest levels of wealth, though financiers can. The use of novels such as Jane Austen’s to examine what wealth meant in previous periods is fun, but it isn’t exactly a peppy read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a brilliant macroeconomics book. But it's still a book about macroeconomics so that bar is fairly low.Piketty compiles data on capital and income going back decades and for a few countries a few hundred years. What he finds is a trend of growing inequality in both wealth accumulation and income. That inequality was interrupted by WWI and WWII.Obviously, WWI and WWII were a massive destruction of human life. They also eradicated an enormous amount of accumulated capital and dramatically reduced a large inequality that had developed in the early part of the twentieth century.In the twenty-first century, the inequality is growing. Piketty has the data to show it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In its measured tone and patient accumulation of detail leading to a revolutionary conclusion, as well as in the elegant simplicity of its central idea, this reminds me of nothing so much as Darwin's Origin of Species. And it's a surprisingly easy read for such a monumental work too.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Clearly an economists or one of a similar ilks wet dream, but for me way too much like reading a math book. May need to try again in small chunks.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What's not to like about an economics book that has 52 references to Balzac, except that it only has 12 references to Solow.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book deserves all the attention it has received, and also deserves the time and mental energy that a careful reading entails. First, the book deals a massive blow to the theory of free-market capitalism that has become a core belief of the capitalist elite, and of much of the economics profession. Secondly, it provides a straightforward theory of how capitalism really works. And thirdly, it proposes solutions to the rising inequality that stems from that process. Those solutions don't look politically possible now, but as the author emphasizes, economic developments have political consequences. Moreover, the point isn't really the precise remedies that Piketty proposes, but the fact that he opens the discussion.The idea of free market capitalism, over the past half century, has grown from a collection of theories espoused by Adam Smith et al into an economic and political ideology, reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and supported by the economic elite whose interests it has served. The idea that capitalism ultimately benefits all participants -- that "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- is a powerful one that has been accepted by many people whose boats remain unlifted. Much of that reflects that, in the US and Europe, almost everyone between 50 and 70 did grow up in a world where the tide did rise, and most boats rose with it, with income inequality falling drastically compared to pre-war levels. That improvement is very widely assumed to be the result of a capitalist economic system. This is the central "fact" that Piketty demolishes, showing that the 1945-75 period (the thirty glorious years, for the French) reflected economic recovery from the war and political decisions that levelled income distribution. Rather than the thirty glorious years being the base state, Piketty argues, they were an aberration from the underlying pattern of capitalism, which is that income inequality -- and far more important, wealth inequality -- tends to grow strongly over time. Most of the book is about the data that he uses to arrive at this conclusion, data that were NOT easy to obtain. Indeed, Piketty's achievement in constructing his data base is just as important as his conclusion. Heretofore, we have been discussing inequality almost exclusively as an income phenomenon: what Piketty brings into the discussion is the question of wealth. Not only does he bring it in, he makes it possible to measure it. (Note: most of the reasonable criticism of Piketty so far -- I don't think that yelling Markist! is reasonable criticism -- has focussed on the data. Piketty, in the book, warns over and over of possible data weaknesses, and has made his data available on line. There will be problems, there are always problems with data. But disagreeing with a few data assumptions does not invalidate the argument). Based on this data, Piketty arrives at his central argument -- that when the rate of return on capital (very broadly defined) exceeds the growth of national income, when r is greater than g, wealth will become more concentrated. In the 50's and 60's, when economies were speeding ahead at 3-5% based on recovery from the war (and from the Depression) and when inflation was low, r was not necessarily greater than g. Since then, however, growth in the advanced countries has slowed sharply, while the return on capital has remained at 5% or better. The result is an increasing concentration of wealth, and Piketty sees no reason why this should change (The US has a special aspect which Piketty examines -- the dramatic increase in income inequality, as high-end wages have soared relative to average wages. This is of interest, but the key point remain r>gTo deal with this, Piketty proposes an international, progressive tax on wealth. That looks improbable at present, but, as he notes, a meaningful income tax looked pretty improbable a century ago. I don't think, however, that Piketty's proposed solution is critical -- what matters is the discussion he has brought to the fore. The essential point is that the state (really a group of states( is the only entity that can offset the concentration of wealth implicit in modern capitalism. Destroying capitalism doesn't work: consider the Soviet Union. But its benefits can be spread more widely by political means (taxes) while leaving the economic motor in place. Ultrahigh taxes, remember, do not seem to have deadened entrepreneurship from 1950 to 1975. This is not light reading, though it is remarkably free of economic jargon (as a former economist, I am an expert on that topic). But it is well worth the time and effort it demands. It is already playing a major role in the discussion on inequality and its political ramifications, and has certainly changed my thinking on the subject. This is a very major work.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow. My three semesters of college Economics were wasted.
Politicians worldwide should read and implementing his recommendations. Otherwise the endless cycles of boom and bust that plagued the 19th and early 20th centuries will plague this century. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piketty gives a very convincing overview of the distribution of capital over the past few hunderd years. This book is mainly based on the records of France and England, but he makes it plausable that the same holds for all other countries. The book is well documented and the buildup is very logical. He uses a lot of word to make his point, but this is done in a clear language so the message is clear. His recommendations I found less convincing. I had expected a more solid advice for politics.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A very interesting book and wonderfully thought provoking. Piketty has gathered an an amazing mass of data on income and wealth across time and countries. He shows that wealth was highly concentrated in Europe before WW1 and is now becoming almost as highly concentrated. While his research and data are without fault, his analysis and remedies are much more debatable. A couple of thoughts:- his main point is that the top 1% own too much and this is bad. He leads you to believe that the top 1% is stable and self perpetuating - the kids of the current 1% inherit and join the 1%. But, and this is a big but, he has no data to support this. If there is churn in the 1% - rags to riches to rags in three generations - then many of his concerns are much less valid.- he uses the French Revolution as background noise - "when the situation is intolerable, the people will rise" sort of thing. But while the top 1% now may have similar percentages of the wealth as then, and the bottom 50% may have almost none of the wealth, the situation of the bottom 50% is vastly different now from 1789. The ordinary person now has access to food, health care and education. They have opportunities that were not available to the peasants in France. I may think it ridiculous that some bozo is a multi billionaire, but I can't see me being moved to revolutionary fervour by it.- his "one big idea" for addressing the problem of an over-concentration of wealth is a progressive tax on capital. Fine idea. Can we start tomorrow? But, as he points out, with the mobility of most capital, this tax can only work with almost universal sharing of banking and financial information. Yeah, right! And, in fact, if such a tax was introduced without universal information sharing, the people who would end up paying most of it would be owners of real estate - the new propertied middle class as he calls them. The ultra rich wouldn't be paying too much in such a tax. As he pointed out in his analysis of the rate of return for the different university endowments, the more money you have, the more money you can make. And, while he didn't say this, it is equally true - the less tax you will pay.Read June 2015
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5There's a reason everybody's talking about this book. My economic background is a couple of undergraduate courses (micro- and macroeconomics) and my own reading of Marx, Smith, and Krugman. I found Piketty both readable and compelling. His arguments are evidence-based, not ideologically bound, though certainly "liberal" in their conclusions -- a case I suspect of reality's famously liberal bias ;) I'd like to think conservatives and libertarians could read it, and would argue it on its merits, and I'm certainly open to reading those criticisms -- hoping (against hope) I'll find them as clear, cogent, and similarly supported by verifiable data.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything a non-expert needs to know is in the first chapter, but what a chapter!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Piketty proves that not income, but wealth - capital - leads to a growing inequality. It's not what you make with hard work and frugality, but what you inherit - when money starts to make so much money that you don't have to work anymore, you can buy politicians, you can dictate the have-nots to slave for you. It's the ultimate oligarchy we don't want in a meritocracy.The book - although written by a French economist - focuses largely on the situation in the US, but that will eventually grow out around the world. The value of the book is not so much that you have to agree with the solutions, but that it provides you with facts that gives you a possibility to make up your own mind about wealth and wealth redistribution and the future of our society - for better or for worse.Well worth your reading time.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It was almost as interesting to read the numerous reviews and debates about his book as it was to read the book itself. Very interesting background of how capital influences our economy.
While I do not agree much with Picketty's politics, I found the data illuminating. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Big. Dense. Brilliant. Magisterial. Worrisome. Infuriating.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5There's a lot of good data here, and some excellent recommendations, but....
Like a lot of economics books, this one is pretty dry. The first 300 pages tend to belabor the obvious, repeating the same information, and displaying it in redundant charts, and then reaching startling conclusions such as that wealth increases when saving increase. I understand that the author is trying to ensure a basic understanding, so that everyone reading the book can follow his later arguments, but I have to think this could have been done with better style in half as many words. This is an interesting book, though. It has the unique ability of putting you to sleep because of the painful amount of dull detail and of keeping you awake because of the frightening story it conveys.
So what's the big take away from this book? Well, essentially I think it's that capitalism has taken over democracy. Money makes money faster than labor does. The political policies put in place in the last half century favor wealth-holders over wage-earners. The rich are getting richer and workers are getting nowhere. Things used to be different. Regulations and taxation between the end of WWII through the late 1970s mitigated the worst abuses of runaway capitalism. This has changed since, though, and the new situation is unsustainable. It would be a good idea to try to change things to ensure that the wealth of nations isn't so disproportionately distributed to the wealthy in those nations before the whole thing falls apart. There are a lot of bad ways to do this, but the least bad would be a progressive tax on wealth. I wish I could say there was a remote chance of this happening, but I can't, at least not until worse options have been tried and allowed to fail. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everyone who has any interest in the direction our world is taking in terms of economic inequality should read this book. In some sections the macroeconomics gets a little technical, but overall Piketty makes the concepts understandable. Some of the things you will learn from this book are that all the developed nations of the world are nearly as inegalitarian now as countries like France and Great Britain were in the 19th century. You will learn that the US is currently the most inegalitarian developed country in the world (even though we believe ourselves to be one of the most egalitarian). You will learn that capital ownership has essentially always been inegalitarian and that the top 1% alone absorbed nearly 60 percent of the total increase of US national income from 1977 to 2007.
Piketty also thoroughly analyzes the rise of the "super managers," and the astronomically high wages they have been able to demand and gives convincing reasons why this phenomenon has occurred and why it is especially prominent in the US. Lastly, Piketty suggests ways governments could address these problems, including progressive taxation and taxation of capital.
Before reading this book I knew there was a large degree if wealth inequality in the US, but I had no idea the scale of the situation and that the US is currently the worst offender in this area. I hope more people read this and realize the truth. Piketty uses impeccable data and tight reasoning to get the truth across. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm very glad I attempted to dip into this book. It gave me new concepts to chew on, broadened my thinking.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5People who read this book tend to either love it (5 stars) or feel like it is Marxism revisited and totally bash this book. I'm in the middle on this one. I love that this book has gotten so much attention and has had a meteoric rise to the bestseller list. And even more, I love the conversations everyone is having about this book. But I have a few criticisms. First, the book is incredibly disorganized. I slogged through the entire book, in both audio and print, and I found it difficult to follow. First he will introduce a concept like the inequality of return on investment for the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy. And then he jumps to something totally off topic. Simple, easy to follow points, would much better serve his cause. But my biggest complaint is that I don't know if I completely agree with his solution. Yes, I definitely think that the wealth divide, and especially it's rapid growth is a serious problem. But, we need to look at the reasons behind the problem. Just saying that we should put a tax on capital will reduce the wealth at the top, but I think there are bigger issues on why not everyone has the same opportunity to become wealthy. Although Piketty does touch on issues like the cost of college education and healthcare, maybe the solution shouldn't just be to have a heavy tax on the wealthy, but how the money could be used to help give the people at the bottom of the economic pile a boost up. Free child care, better education, health care - the issues are much bigger than just taxing the wealthy. Another complaint about this book, is it feels like a rant against the wealthy. To bash people like Bill Gates does not promote his cause. But, very glad about the conversations that this has started.
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- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Flawed book, the author is cherry-picking data to prove his socialist viewpoint.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I remember being in a book shop in San Francisco when “Capital in the 21st Century” was first published in 2014. It couldn’t have been more timely, following on the heels of Occupy Wall Street and the proposed Buffet Rule. Wealth inequality was the talk of the town.Written by French economist Thomas Picketty, it’s a book that maps wealth inequality over the past few centuries. Some have said that these early decades of the 21st century feel like the return of the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons, and the numbers support these claims.One of the core aspects of Picketty’s exploration surrounds a study of wealth inequality in contrast to the growth rate. The growth rate of the economy for much of history has hovered near zero. It picked up during the Industrial Revolution, and maxed out somewhere around 1.6% in the 20th century. This growth rate has been unsustainable, resulting in likely-irreparable social and ecological harm, and it would be foolish to expect anything of the sort for growth in the 21st century.To my surprise, I learned that the highest known wealth inequality thus far could be found in Europe around 1910, where the top 10% had 90% of the capital, and the top 1% had 50%. Even in the United States today, the numbers stand somewhere around 70% for the top 10%, and 35% for the top 1%. That said, Picketty predicts that, if things don’t change, we’ll be seeing record-setting highs as soon as 2030.Why is this happening? There are numerous factors—from the ratio of the rate of return on capital to the growth rate, to population growth, to taxation.One interesting factor demonstrated by college endowments: the more capital you have, the faster it grows. These differences quickly expand, as growth is logarithmic. College endowments managing less than a $100m see annualized returns around 6%. Colleges managing endowments over $10b see returns of 10% per year—almost twice as much! This pattern carries over to other sorts of private wealth as well.Another fallacy the book dispells: that inflation hurts the wealthy. The vast majority of wealth is held in assets other than cash, which means that inflation is built in to their price. Who holds the most cash as a percentage of their wealth? The working and middle classes. These are the groups hurt most by inflation.The most striking piece of history I learned was about tax rates. Did you know that, between 1930 and 1980, the average top tax rate in the US was 80%! By comparison, it is 37% today—less than half of what it had been. Even more strikingly, it reached 98% in the UK for extended periods of time (which was a factor in the Beatles’ move to the US).Inheritance taxes were also much higher than they are today, as well as capital gains. What’s especially notable about this period of high taxes was the it’s also the highest growth period in history. Some small government hawks argue that low taxes encourage economic growth, but these data don’t support such a claim.The more I learn about taxes, the more I realize that they’re like sleep; it’s about a balance rather than extremes. Some private-property fundamentalists would argue that taxes represent unfair seizure. Those whom are more socially-minded might recognize that money is a commons, and has no value from the perspective of the individual; it’s a collectively held believe. Taxes are necessary for the maintenance of the health of a currency, just as sleep is necessary to maintain the health of a person. Mary Mellor further explores this concept of public money in her 2015 title, Debt or Democracy.In the United States today we actually have a regressive (as opposed to progressive) tax; the wealthiest citizens don’t pay the highest tax.All of Picketty’s research leads up to the conclusion that, even if income, property, capital gains, sales, and inheritance taxes were raised, it still wouldn’t be enough; we need a tax on capital.This is a brilliant idea, and leaves me wondering what kind of activism has sprung up to pursue this aim. I fear that, in the current political climate, such a goal will be exceedingly challenging to achieve. The actual implementation of this tax would take a lot of care—as much capital is of limited liquidity—and would replace the property tax.This book does not explore the social and environmental dynamics of this subject, which are important and extensive. Even if it doesn’t bring about a tax revolution, this book reminds us of the bizarre nature of our times, and that the financial returns of the 20th century are the outlier rather than the norm.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Solid. The book can easily be encapsulated as: If the rate of growth on Capital exceeds the rate of income growth, then it doesn't matter how hard you work, the rich will continue to get richer. The only way to counter-act this is through taxation.The entirety of the book is in showing what this means, why it's true, and deals with many objections. Memorable, insightful, original. And like other top selling books, will probably have no impact on what people do. 5 stars oc
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In explaining complex ideas, the basic structure of what, so what, now what works well. I found this book unbalanced: a lot of "what" -- very well researched and presented -- but light on the implications and solutions. Mr. Piketty calls for a wealth tax to end income inequality without clearing explaining why we should care about such inequality. His book resonates, however, because people want and explanation for growing wealth concentration and generally perceive it as unfair.In my opinion, capital concentration is not inherently bad; it is the impacts of such concentration that I worry about. These impacts include the possibility of undue political influence, a sub-optimal allocation of resources and "growth" without job creation or real productivity gains. A tax on capital is not the only way to attack these kinds of problems. And a key question is whether we want to focus on reducing the wealth of the 1% or helping the other 99% of the population. If capital were more highly taxed, what should/could governments do with the extra revenue: offset other taxes, initiate new or expanded social programs, and/or pay down national debt? In talking about the 1% of the population who control much of the world's capital, Mr. Piketty ignores any discussion of gender equity or wealth held by members of minority communities within nations. He also largely ignores China/India and how their growth could affect wealth distribution.What I liked about this book is the author's idea that economists must partner with historians and other social scientists to really make a contribution to our understanding of the world's problems and potential solutions. I also liked his measured tone. And, I appreciate that he has invigorated discussion on an important issue.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is required reading for anyone interested in the underlying structure of monetary policy. Piketty was unabashedly conservative, favoring tax structures that inhibit the natural tendency of capital to breed more capital thus concentrating wealth. Even if your economic ideals are different, this book's hard look at historical records is instructive.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Surprisingly easy read. Tax the rich!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After nearly 600 pages of charts, graphs, tables, arguments, and counterarguments, Thomas Piketty states his conclusions simply. Wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. He expresses this in the equation r>g and identifies this as the central contradiction of capitalism.“This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.”His recommended solution is stated simply: “The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital.” Ideally this would be a global tax on capital, requiring all nations to cooperate in sharing banking data, and working to assess and collect this tax. The argument and evidence are bulletproof; the remedy is hard to argue with, yet harder to put into place. “The difficulty is that this solution, the progressive tax on capital, requires a high level of international cooperation and regional political integration. It is not within the reach of the nation-states in which earlier social compromises were hammered out.”He makes other recommendations regarding the role of government in establishing a social state, progressive income tax, and public debt. This book provides a modern checkup on capitalism. Identifying a systematic disequilibrium provides insight into an important cause of income inequality. Blaming imperfect competition, lazy workers, or government policy only distracts us from solving the real problem. The World Top Incomes Database was built to provide “the most comprehensive set of historical series on income inequality available so far” to use as source data for this book. The extensive set of figures and tables used in the book are freely available on the book’s official web site. Thomas Piketty’s careful use of representative data serves as a model for other economists to follow. He shows us how to progress beyond cunning use of anecdotes or reciting economic ideology. Only careful use of representative data provides the insights we need to improve our economies and well-being. The arguments made in this book are clear, complete, and representative. The evidence used to support arguments and explore counterarguments is unprecedented. He entertains us with stories from the period novels of Jane Austin and Honoré de Balzac. The translation from the original French-language publication is so skillfully done it seems invisible.
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It was a long and at times very difficult read. For one, don't get the eBook if you're using an old eBook reader like me. The facts he uses to back his theories are all in literally hundreds of graphs. On my old Kindle these were impossible to read as I found myself running to Piketty's website to get a look at the data. The first half of the book is basically an attempt to set his theories on a foundation of historical data. Some of it very interesting but a lot of it very dry. This part of the book at times was a very slow read as I found myself nodding off far too often and having to go back and read what I thought I read but slept through. The second half of the book is when it all starts to come together for Piketty. Unfortunately for us the picture he paints is pretty bleak for 99.99% of all humans. It isn't a case of your children not having a brighter future than you, but that you too have a dimmer future if you live long enough. Piketty's point is the world only taxes labor and barely touches non-labor income. The rich get richer, the rest of us suffer. His solution is to tax capital income no matter where it comes from. Because only labor is really taxed those don't work not only skip on taxes but get all the services for free that the rest of us pay for (e.g. roads, security, innovation, etc). To really drive it home, the great, great grandchildren of the person who came up with the idea that made billions will never work but still be a drain on society. Is there a reason why someone who never met their great, great grandfather should take a free ride on all the things a society provides while those struggling to make ends meet cover for them? Good Point. I think his study on college endowments as an example of how money can grow if you have more of it was very good.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What was it Bilbo Baggins said about economics books? "I understand less than half of them less than half as well as I'd like, and I like less than half of the ones I understand less than half as well as they deserve." That hobbit spoke a deep truth, and while I wait in vain for the economics book that helps me understand it better by carefully restructuring all the parts where concepts like "national capital stock" and "individual average capital" both get reduced to "capital" in different ratios and then further to mathematical expressions (you have to be so gentle with the conceptual jargon and with the math when trying to reach people like me) and/or helps me like it better by revealing that something about our present economic system actually makes sense and things are gonna get better, or that there's a feasible alternative, let me dig into the econ book I got rather than the one I'd wish for: this celebrated volume, perhaps the most-read book of original economics research written in my lifetime.Probably you're familiar with the basic argument. First, 1) the period from WWI to the 1970s, where capital stock was greatly decreased by shocks like the wars and the depression, as well as the relatively egalitarian policies that followed, and where economic growth and wage income increased faster than invested wealth or property values, was a historical outlier, and that we are now returning to something more like the nineteenth century in terms of the concentration of wealth and its impact on society. (This book's central topic, to be clear, is "Inequality," which easily could have been the title.)With reams of data, magnificently processed, packaged, and summarized, Piketty makes this case, leaving us with his theoretical contribution: 2) the central inequality r > g, or rate of return on capital is greater than economic growth. It certainly is not empirically demonstrated that this is feature of capitalism per se, as Piketty purports, rather than a historical accident, but I do not see this as a flaw; seemingly the only way we could demonstrate it, especially in light of Piketty's laudable commitment to empirical evidence and not just conceptual or mathematical theory, would be to have a whole lot more centuries under capitalism to see what kinds of things happen (spare us that!). And what we do know is that it is happening, regardless of whether it must happen, and that rules that protect large fortunes and the fact that the more you have to invest, the better your return are the cause. Piketty demonstrates all this with data and arguments that seem cogent to a bilbo like me, and spices it up with the constant references to the novels of Balzac, Austen, Henry James and others that he uses to depict the kinds of socioeconomic structures he's talking about. Citing Balzac of course proves nothing, but it certainly helps us envision the kind of situation--a return, since all things being equal slower growth increases the power of wealth in a society--to oligarchy and "patrimonial capitalism"--that he's projecting, and it's one of the joys of this book.Said joy makes Capital (let's call it Le Capital, please, though Piketty doesn't create or work within a parallel set of assumptions about how economics works as Marx did--one cool thing about this book is how--as far as this B.B. can see--it makes sense entirely within the assumptions of classical economics) as much a work of economic history as a theoretical contribution or a comment on policy; and as such, of course, can inform the way we understand the past and even read its literature--did you know inflation was essentially zero throughout the nineteenth century? That's how they could get away with shillings and ha'pennies. And guineas were 1.05 pounds, and were a kind of parallel unit of pay that you used at fancy restaurants and to pay for certain professional services in order to say "I'm a rich asshole"--a kind of tipping, in a sense, though also a rich asshole tax. But speaking of rich asshole taxes..., he does make one central policy recommendation, to avoid the mild dystopia r > g takes us to: 3) a progressive annual global tax on capital (starting at perhaps 0.1% on capital of $100,000 and moving to say 10% on the largest fortunes of over $1 billion, though the precise numbers are obviously secondary to the concept), combined with greatly increased income taxes at the high end. The intent would be to keep inequality under control and stop it increasing (without necessarily touching social mobility, though I know for me a society where I know my place and it's making 5/7 of what the doctor or lawyer or CEO makes is far preferable to the one where the doctor makes 15 times what I do and the CEO 300 times and increasing all the time, and my main concern is how to rocket up the social ladder and join them and sneer downward), not to remove it entirely.This is the game-changer, and as such it is the part that has come in for controversy and criticism. But looking at the criticisms (conveniently summarized in many places online), sorry, they're a poor lot: there are critiques of the assumption that inequality matters and assertions that what's important is that absolute wealth keeps growing (without even getting into the large literature on the socially and psychologically corrosive effects of inequality, we've seen the material effects of growing inequality based on r > g in places like the real estate bubbles that are popping up all over these days: what does it matter if my dollar income keeps increasing if the price of necessities like shelter increases multiple times faster? (This also leaves aside the fact that absolute incomes are not increasing, so how much inequality would matter if they were is a moot point and the argument a red herring). Then there are basic libertarian critiques of government and redistribution, which have little to do with Piketty specifically, and you probably already know where you stand on those (yes, if you think the free market distributes income fairly and rewards people according to their deserts, you will probably not be in favour of redistribution downward, no surprise there). Then there is the major countervailing force that Piketty acknowledges, the decreasing rate of return on capital, but as long as it still remains higher than economic growth all this means is that an upper limit on equality will be set--and if you like the way society is now, that limit might be low enough for you, but it isn't for me. Then there are the tech bros who say innovation will spur growth that will overcome either a) inequality, by spurring economic growth (but we've seen how that has worked so far) or b) the deleterious social effects of inequality, by freeing us from labour robots singularity something something, but that kind of positivism is half religion and half venal self-justification and has been taken apart definitively (I think) by Evgeny Morozov. Then there are arguments like that of Acemoglu and Robinson that r > g is not an iron law but merely a matter of policies and happenstance--but, shrug, if so, all the more reason we can use policies to fix it. Their comment may be meaningful for economists engaging with this as a work of theory, but not for the rest of us wondering how to fix the problem.And the rest of the critiques seem largely to follow this mode: his concepts could use tweaking, or he is too mathy and insufficiently theoretical, or feminist economics will flip your whole conception of what economics is about Thomas Piketty. Or here are some errors in the data that don't affect the outcome. Everybody seems to be piling on, but what nobody seems to disagree with except from some ideology-first right-wing perspectives is that a tax like Piketty's would reduce inequality and concentration of capital. And though he himself acknowledges that it would be politically impossible, for those of us who see such effects as a self-evident good, it still acts as a kind of beacon: not a "general strike for our times," given the top-down nature of the proposal and the lack of a whole worldview and engagedness and structure of action and empowerment that the general strike would have implied, but something in that direction: a benchmark against which we can evaluate policy changes and their effects and an inspiration to dream big.
Book preview
Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Piketty
Introduction
Social distinctions can be based only on common utility.
—Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, article 1, 1789
The distribution of wealth is one of today’s most widely discussed and controversial issues. But what do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century? What do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?
These are the questions I attempt to answer in this book. Let me say at once that the answers contained herein are imperfect and incomplete. But they are based on much more extensive historical and comparative data than were available to previous researchers, data covering three centuries and more than twenty countries, as well as on a new theoretical framework that affords a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have made it possible to avoid the Marxist apocalypse but have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality—or in any case not as much as one might have imagined in the optimistic decades following World War II. 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. There are nevertheless ways democracy can regain control over capitalism and ensure that the general interest takes precedence over private interests, while preserving economic openness and avoiding protectionist and nationalist reactions. The policy recommendations I propose later in the book tend in this direction. They are based on lessons derived from historical experience, of which what follows is essentially a narrative.
A Debate without Data?
Intellectual and political debate about the distribution of wealth has long been based on an abundance of prejudice and a paucity of fact.
To be sure, it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the intuitive knowledge that everyone acquires about contemporary wealth and income levels, even in the absence of any theoretical framework or statistical analysis. Film and literature, nineteenth-century novels especially, are full of detailed information about the relative wealth and living standards of different social groups, and especially about the deep structure of inequality, the way it is justified, and its impact on individual lives. Indeed, the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac paint striking portraits of the distribution of wealth in Britain and France between 1790 and 1830. Both novelists were intimately acquainted with the hierarchy of wealth in their respective societies. They grasped the hidden contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women, including their marital strategies and personal hopes and disappointments. These and other novelists depicted the effects of inequality with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match.
Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers. It is of interest to everyone, and that is a good thing. The concrete, physical reality of inequality is visible to the naked eye and naturally inspires sharp but contradictory political judgments. Peasant and noble, worker and factory owner, waiter and banker: each has his or her own unique vantage point and sees important aspects of how other people live and what relations of power and domination exist between social groups, and these observations shape each person’s judgment of what is and is not just. Hence there will always be a fundamentally subjective and psychological dimension to inequality, which inevitably gives rise to political conflict that no purportedly scientific analysis can alleviate. Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts—and that is a very good thing.
Nevertheless, the distribution question also deserves to be studied in a systematic and methodical fashion. Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see everything and its opposite. Some people believe that inequality is always increasing and that the world is by definition always becoming more unjust. Others believe that inequality is naturally decreasing, or that harmony comes about automatically, and that in any case nothing should be done that might risk disturbing this happy equilibrium. Given this dialogue of the deaf, in which each camp justifies its own intellectual laziness by pointing to the laziness of the other, there is a role for research that is at least systematic and methodical if not fully scientific. Expert analysis will never put an end to the violent political conflict that inequality inevitably instigates. Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to redefine the terms of debate, unmask certain preconceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it—a signal privilege).
There is no escaping the fact, however, that social science research on the distribution of wealth was for a long time based on a relatively limited set of firmly established facts together with a wide variety of purely theoretical speculations. Before turning in greater detail to the sources I tried to assemble in preparation for writing this book, I want to give a quick historical overview of previous thinking about these issues.
Malthus, Young, and the French Revolution
When classical political economy was born in England and France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the issue of distribution was already one of the key questions. Everyone realized that radical transformations were under way, precipitated by sustained demographic growth—a previously unknown phenomenon—coupled with a rural exodus and the advent of the Industrial Revolution. How would these upheavals affect the distribution of wealth, the social structure, and the political equilibrium of European society?
For Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 published his Essay on the Principle of Population, there could be no doubt: the primary threat was overpopulation.¹ Although his sources were thin, he made the best he could of them. One particularly important influence was the travel diary published by Arthur Young, an English agronomist who traveled extensively in France, from Calais to the Pyrenees and from Brittany to Franche-Comté, in 1787–1788, on the eve of the Revolution. Young wrote of the poverty of the French countryside.
His vivid essay was by no means totally inaccurate. France at that time was by far the most populous country in Europe and therefore an ideal place to observe. The kingdom could already boast of a population of 20 million in 1700, compared to only 8 million for Great Britain (and 5 million for England alone). The French population increased steadily throughout the eighteenth century, from the end of Louis XIV’s reign to the demise of Louis XVI, and by 1780 was close to 30 million. There is every reason to believe that this unprecedentedly rapid population growth contributed to a stagnation of agricultural wages and an increase in land rents in the decades prior to the explosion of 1789. Although this demographic shift was not the sole cause of the French Revolution, it clearly contributed to the growing unpopularity of the aristocracy and the existing political regime.
Nevertheless, Young’s account, published in 1792, also bears the traces of nationalist prejudice and misleading comparison. The great agronomist found the inns in which he stayed thoroughly disagreeable and disliked the manners of the women who waited on him. Although many of his observations were banal and anecdotal, he believed he could derive universal consequences from them. He was mainly worried that the mass poverty he witnessed would lead to political upheaval. In particular, he was convinced that only the English political system, with separate houses of Parliament for aristocrats and commoners and veto power for the nobility, could allow for harmonious and peaceful development led by responsible people. He was convinced that France was headed for ruin when it decided in 1789–1790 to allow both aristocrats and commoners to sit in a single legislative body. It is no exaggeration to say that his whole account was overdetermined by his fear of revolution in France. Whenever one speaks about the distribution of wealth, politics is never very far behind, and it is difficult for anyone to escape contemporary class prejudices and interests.
When Reverend Malthus published his famous Essay in 1798, he reached conclusions even more radical than Young’s. Like his compatriot, he was very afraid of the new political ideas emanating from France, and to reassure himself that there would be no comparable upheaval in Great Britain he argued that all welfare assistance to the poor must be halted at once and that reproduction by the poor should be severely scrutinized lest the world succumb to overpopulation leading to chaos and misery. It is impossible to understand Malthus’s exaggeratedly somber predictions without recognizing the way fear gripped much of the European elite in the 1790s.
Ricardo: The Principle of Scarcity
In retrospect, it is obviously easy to make fun of these prophecies of doom. It is important to realize, however, that the economic and social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were objectively quite impressive, not to say traumatic, for those who witnessed them. Indeed, most contemporary observers—and not only Malthus and Young—shared relatively dark or even apocalyptic views of the long-run evolution of the distribution of wealth and class structure of society. This was true in particular of David Ricardo and Karl Marx, who were surely the two most influential economists of the nineteenth century and who both believed that a small social group—landowners for Ricardo, industrial capitalists for Marx—would inevitably claim a steadily increasing share of output and income.²
For Ricardo, who published his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, the chief concern was the long-term evolution of land prices and land rents. Like Malthus, he had virtually no genuine statistics at his disposal. He nevertheless had intimate knowledge of the capitalism of his time. Born into a family of Jewish financiers with Portuguese roots, he also seems to have had fewer political prejudices than Malthus, Young, or Smith. He was influenced by the Malthusian model but pushed the argument farther. He was above all interested in the following logical paradox. Once both population and output begin to grow steadily, land tends to become increasingly scarce relative to other goods. The law of supply and demand then implies that the price of land will rise continuously, as will the rents paid to landlords. The landlords will therefore claim a growing share of national income, as the share available to the rest of the population decreases, thus upsetting the social equilibrium. For Ricardo, the only logically and politically acceptable answer was to impose a steadily increasing tax on land rents.
This somber prediction proved wrong: land rents did remain high for an extended period, but in the end the value of farm land inexorably declined relative to other forms of wealth as the share of agriculture in national income decreased. Writing in the 1810s, Ricardo had no way of anticipating the importance of technological progress or industrial growth in the years ahead. Like Malthus and Young, he could not imagine that humankind would ever be totally freed from the alimentary imperative.
His insight into the price of land is nevertheless interesting: the scarcity principle
on which he relied meant that certain prices might rise to very high levels over many decades. This could well be enough to destabilize entire societies. The price system plays a key role in coordinating the activities of millions of individuals—indeed, today, billions of individuals in the new global economy. The problem is that the price system knows neither limits nor morality.
It would be a serious mistake to neglect the importance of the scarcity principle for understanding the global distribution of wealth in the twenty-first century. To convince oneself of this, it is enough to replace the price of farmland in Ricardo’s model by the price of urban real estate in major world capitals, or, alternatively, by the price of oil. In both cases, if the trend over the period 1970–2010 is extrapolated to the period 2010–2050 or 2010–2100, the result is economic, social, and political disequilibria of considerable magnitude, not only between but within countries—disequilibria that inevitably call to mind the Ricardian apocalypse.
To be sure, there exists in principle a quite simple economic mechanism that should restore equilibrium to the process: the mechanism of supply and demand. If the supply of any good is insufficient, and its price is too high, then demand for that good should decrease, which should lead to a decline in its price. In other words, if real estate and oil prices rise, then people should move to the country or take to traveling about by bicycle (or both). Never mind that such adjustments might be unpleasant or complicated; they might also take decades, during which landlords and oil well owners might well accumulate claims on the rest of the population so extensive that they could easily come to own everything that can be owned, including rural real estate and bicycles, once and for all.³ As always, the worst is never certain to arrive. It is much too soon to warn readers that by 2050 they may be paying rent to the emir of Qatar. I will consider the matter in due course, and my answer will be more nuanced, albeit only moderately reassuring. But it is important for now to understand that the interplay of supply and demand in no way rules out the possibility of a large and lasting divergence in the distribution of wealth linked to extreme changes in certain relative prices. This is the principal implication of Ricardo’s scarcity principle. But nothing obliges us to roll the dice.
Marx: The Principle of Infinite Accumulation
By the time Marx published the first volume of Capital in 1867, exactly one-half century after the publication of Ricardo’s Principles, economic and social realities had changed profoundly: the question was no longer whether farmers could feed a growing population or land prices would rise sky high but rather how to understand the dynamics of industrial capitalism, now in full blossom.
The most striking fact of the day was the misery of the industrial proletariat. Despite the growth of the economy, or perhaps in part because of it, and because, as well, of the vast rural exodus owing to both population growth and increasing agricultural productivity, workers crowded into urban slums. The working day was long, and wages were very low. A new urban misery emerged, more visible, more shocking, and in some respects even more extreme than the rural misery of the Old Regime. Germinal, Oliver Twist, and Les Misérables did not spring from the imaginations of their authors, any more than did laws limiting child labor in factories to children older than eight (in France in 1841) or ten in the mines (in Britain in 1842). Dr. Villermé’s Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures, published in France in 1840 (leading to the passage of a timid new child labor law in 1841), described the same sordid reality as The Condition of the Working Class in England, which Friedrich Engels published in 1845.⁴
In fact, all the historical data at our disposal today indicate that it was not until the second half—or even the final third—of the nineteenth century that a significant rise in the purchasing power of wages occurred. From the first to the sixth decade of the nineteenth century, workers’ wages stagnated at very low levels—close or even inferior to the levels of the eighteenth and previous centuries. This long phase of wage stagnation, which we observe in Britain as well as France, stands out all the more because economic growth was accelerating in this period. The capital share of national income—industrial profits, land rents, and building rents—insofar as can be estimated with the imperfect sources available today, increased considerably in both countries in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁵ It would decrease slightly in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as wages partly caught up with growth. The data we have assembled nevertheless reveal no structural decrease in inequality prior to World War I. What we see in the period 1870–1914 is at best a stabilization of inequality at an extremely high level, and in certain respects an endless inegalitarian spiral, marked in particular by increasing concentration of wealth. It is quite difficult to say where this trajectory would have led without the major economic and political shocks initiated by the war. With the aid of historical analysis and a little perspective, we can now see those shocks as the only forces since the Industrial Revolution powerful enough to reduce inequality.
In any case, capital prospered in the 1840s and industrial profits grew, while labor incomes stagnated. This was obvious to everyone, even though in those days aggregate national statistics did not yet exist. It was in this context that the first communist and socialist movements developed. The central argument was simple: 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? The bankruptcy of the existing economic and political system seemed obvious. People therefore wondered about its long-term evolution: What could one say about it?
This was the task Marx set himself. In 1848, on the eve of the spring of nations
(that is, the revolutions that broke out across Europe that spring), he published The Communist Manifesto, a short, hard-hitting text whose first chapter began with the famous words A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.
⁶ The text ended with the equally famous prediction of revolution: The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Over the next two decades, Marx labored over the voluminous treatise that would justify this conclusion and propose the first scientific analysis of capitalism and its collapse. This work would remain unfinished: the first volume of Capital was published in 1867, but Marx died in 1883 without having completed the two subsequent volumes. His friend Engels published them posthumously after piecing together a text from the sometimes obscure fragments of manuscript Marx had left behind.
Like Ricardo, Marx based his work on an analysis of the internal logical contradictions of the capitalist system. He therefore sought to distinguish himself from both bourgeois economists (who saw the market as a self-regulated system, that is, a system capable of achieving equilibrium on its own without major deviations, in accordance with Adam Smith’s image of the invisible hand
and Jean-Baptiste Say’s law
that production creates its own demand), and utopian socialists and Proudhonians, who in Marx’s view were content to denounce the misery of the working class without proposing a truly scientific analysis of the economic processes responsible for it.⁷ In short, Marx took the Ricardian model of the price of capital and the principle of scarcity as the basis of a more thorough analysis of the dynamics of capitalism in a world where capital was primarily industrial (machinery, plants, etc.) rather than landed property, so that in principle there was no limit to the amount of capital that could be accumulated. In fact, his principal conclusion was what one might call the principle of infinite accumulation,
that is, the inexorable tendency for capital to accumulate and become concentrated in ever fewer hands, with no natural limit to the process. This is the basis of Marx’s prediction of an apocalyptic end to capitalism: either the rate of return on capital would steadily diminish (thereby killing the engine of accumulation and leading to violent conflict among capitalists), or capital’s share of national income would increase indefinitely (which sooner or later would unite the workers in revolt). In either case, no stable socioeconomic or political equilibrium was possible.
Marx’s dark prophecy came no closer to being realized than Ricardo’s. In the last third of the nineteenth century, wages finally began to increase: the improvement in the purchasing power of workers spread everywhere, and this changed the situation radically, even if extreme inequalities persisted and in some respects continued to increase until World War I. The communist revolution did indeed take place, but in the most backward country in Europe, Russia, where the Industrial Revolution had scarcely begun, whereas the most advanced European countries explored other, social democratic avenues—fortunately for their citizens. Like his predecessors, Marx totally neglected the possibility of durable technological progress and steadily increasing productivity, which is a force that can to some extent serve as a counterweight to the process of accumulation and concentration of private capital. He no doubt lacked the statistical data needed to refine his predictions. He probably suffered as well from having decided on his conclusions in 1848, before embarking on the research needed to justify them. Marx evidently wrote in great political fervor, which at times led him to issue hasty pronouncements from which it was difficult to escape. That is why economic theory needs to be rooted in historical sources that are as complete as possible, and in this respect Marx did not exploit all the possibilities available to him.⁸ What is more, he devoted little thought to the question of how a society in which private capital had been totally abolished would be organized politically and economically—a complex issue if ever there was one, as shown by the tragic totalitarian experiments undertaken in states where private capital was abolished.
Despite these limitations, Marx’s analysis remains relevant in several respects. First, he began with an important question (concerning the unprecedented concentration of wealth during the Industrial Revolution) and tried to answer it with the means at his disposal: economists today would do well to take inspiration from his example. Even more important, the principle of infinite accumulation that Marx proposed contains a key insight, as valid for the study of the twenty-first century as it was for the nineteenth and in some respects more worrisome than Ricardo’s principle of scarcity. If the rates of population and productivity growth are relatively low, then accumulated wealth naturally takes on considerable importance, especially if it grows to extreme proportions and becomes socially destabilizing. In other words, low growth cannot adequately counterbalance the Marxist principle of infinite accumulation: the resulting equilibrium is not as apocalyptic as the one predicted by Marx but is nevertheless quite disturbing. Accumulation ends at a finite level, but that level may be high enough to be destabilizing. In particular, the very high level of private wealth that has been attained since the 1980s and 1990s in the wealthy countries of Europe and in Japan, measured in years of national income, directly reflects the Marxian logic.
From Marx to Kuznets, or Apocalypse to Fairy Tale
Turning from the nineteenth-century analyses of Ricardo and Marx to the twentieth-century analyses of Simon Kuznets, we might say that economists’ no doubt overly developed taste for apocalyptic predictions gave way to a similarly excessive fondness for fairy tales, or at any rate happy endings. According to Kuznets’s theory, income inequality would automatically decrease in advanced phases of capitalist development, regardless of economic policy choices or other differences between countries, until eventually it stabilized at an acceptable level. Proposed in 1955, this was really a theory of the magical postwar years referred to in France as the Trente Glorieuses,
the thirty glorious years from 1945 to 1975.⁹ For Kuznets, it was enough to be patient, and before long growth would benefit everyone. The philosophy of the moment was summed up in a single sentence: Growth is a rising tide that lifts all boats.
A similar optimism can also be seen in Robert Solow’s 1956 analysis of the conditions necessary for an economy to achieve a balanced growth path,
that is, a growth trajectory along which all variables—output, incomes, profits, wages, capital, asset prices, and so on—would progress at the same pace, so that every social group would benefit from growth to the same degree, with no major deviations from the norm.¹⁰ Kuznets’s position was thus diametrically opposed to the Ricardian and Marxist idea of an inegalitarian spiral and antithetical to the apocalyptic predictions of the nineteenth century.
In order to properly convey the considerable influence that Kuznets’s theory enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s and to a certain extent still enjoys today, it is important to emphasize that it was the first theory of this sort to rely on a formidable statistical apparatus. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, in fact, that the first historical series of income distribution statistics became available with the publication in 1953 of Kuznets’s monumental Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings. Kuznets’s series dealt with only one country (the United States) over a period of thirty-five years (1913–1948). It was nevertheless a major contribution, which drew on two sources of data totally unavailable to nineteenth-century authors: US federal income tax returns (which did not exist before the creation of the income tax in 1913) and Kuznets’s own estimates of US national income from a few years earlier. This was the very first attempt to measure social inequality on such an ambitious scale.¹¹
It is important to realize that without these two complementary and indispensable datasets, it is simply impossible to measure inequality in the income distribution or to gauge its evolution over time. To be sure, the first attempts to estimate national income in Britain and France date back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and there would be many more such attempts over the course of the nineteenth century. But these were isolated estimates. It was not until the twentieth century, in the years between the two world wars, that the first yearly series of national income data were developed by economists such as Kuznets and John W. Kendrick in the United States, Arthur Bowley and Colin Clark in Britain, and L. Dugé de Bernonville in France. This type of data allows us to measure a country’s total income. In order to gauge the share of high incomes in national income, we also need statements of income. Such information became available when many countries adopted a progressive income tax around the time of World War I (1913 in the United States, 1914 in France, 1909 in Britain, 1922 in India, 1932 in Argentina).¹²
It is crucial to recognize that even where there is no income tax, there are still all sorts of statistics concerning whatever tax basis exists at a given point in time (for example, the distribution of the number of doors and windows by département in nineteenth-century France, which is not without interest), but these data tell us nothing about incomes. What is more, before the requirement to declare one’s income to the tax authorities was enacted in law, people were often unaware of the amount of their own income. The same is true of the corporate tax and wealth tax. Taxation is not only a way of requiring all citizens to contribute to the financing of public expenditures and projects and to distribute the tax burden as fairly as possible; it is also useful for establishing classifications and promoting knowledge as well as democratic transparency.
In any event, the data that Kuznets collected allowed him to calculate the evolution of the share of each decile, as well as of the upper centiles, of the income hierarchy in total US national income. What did he find? He noted a sharp reduction in income inequality in the United States between 1913 and 1948. More specifically, at the beginning of this period, the upper decile of the income distribution (that is, the top 10 percent of US earners) claimed 45–50 percent of annual national income. By the late 1940s, the share of the top decile had decreased to roughly 30–35 percent of national income. This decrease of nearly 10 percentage points was considerable: for example, it was equal to half the income of the poorest 50 percent of Americans.¹³ The reduction of inequality was clear and incontrovertible. This was news of considerable importance, and it had an enormous impact on economic debate in the postwar era in both universities and international organizations.
Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, and many others had been talking about inequalities for decades without citing any sources whatsoever or any methods for comparing one era with another or deciding between competing hypotheses. Now, for the first time, objective data were available. Although the information was not perfect, it had the merit of existing. What is more, the work of compilation was extremely well documented: the weighty volume that Kuznets published in 1953 revealed his sources and methods in the most minute detail, so that every calculation could be reproduced. And besides that, Kuznets was the bearer of good news: inequality was shrinking.
The Kuznets Curve: Good News in the Midst of the Cold War
In fact, Kuznets himself was well aware that the compression of high US incomes between 1913 and 1948 was largely accidental. It stemmed in large part from multiple shocks triggered by the Great Depression and World War II and had little to do with any natural or automatic process. In his 1953 work, he analyzed his series in detail and warned readers not to make hasty generalizations. But in December 1954, at the Detroit meeting of the American Economic Association, of which he was president, he offered a far more optimistic interpretation of his results than he had given in 1953. It was this lecture, published in 1955 under the title Economic Growth and Income Inequality,
that gave rise to the theory of the Kuznets curve.
According to this theory, inequality everywhere can be expected to follow a bell curve.
In other words, it should first increase and then decrease over the course of industrialization and economic development. According to Kuznets, a first phase of naturally increasing inequality associated with the early stages of industrialization, which in the United States meant, broadly speaking, the nineteenth century, would be followed by a phase of sharply decreasing inequality, which in the United States allegedly began in the first half of the twentieth century.
Kuznets’s 1955 paper is enlightening. After reminding readers of all the reasons for interpreting the data cautiously and noting the obvious importance of exogenous shocks in the recent reduction of inequality in the United States, Kuznets suggests, almost innocently in passing, that the internal logic of economic development might also yield the same result, quite apart from any policy intervention or external shock. The idea was that inequalities increase in the early phases of industrialization, because only a minority is prepared to benefit from the new wealth that industrialization brings. Later, in more advanced phases of development, inequality automatically decreases as a larger and larger fraction of the population partakes of the fruits of economic growth.¹⁴
The advanced phase
of industrial development is supposed to have begun toward the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century in the industrialized countries, and the reduction of inequality observed in the United States between 1913 and 1948 could therefore be portrayed as one instance of a more general phenomenon, which should theoretically reproduce itself everywhere, including underdeveloped countries then mired in postcolonial poverty. The data Kuznets had presented in his 1953 book suddenly became a powerful political weapon.¹⁵ He was well aware of the highly speculative nature of his theorizing.¹⁶ Nevertheless, by presenting such an optimistic theory in the context of a presidential address
to the main professional association of US economists, an audience that was inclined to believe and disseminate the good news delivered by their prestigious leader, he knew that he would wield considerable influence: thus the Kuznets curve
was born. In order to make sure that everyone understood what was at stake, he took care to remind his listeners that the intent of his optimistic predictions was quite simply to maintain the underdeveloped countries within the orbit of the free world.
¹⁷ In large part, then, the theory of the Kuznets curve was a product of the Cold War.
To avoid any misunderstanding, let me say that Kuznets’s work in establishing the first US national accounts data and the first historical series of inequality measures was of the utmost importance, and it is clear from reading his books (as opposed to his papers) that he shared the true scientific ethic. In addition, the high growth rates observed in all the developed countries in the post–World War II period were a phenomenon of great significance, as was the still more significant fact that all social groups shared in the fruits of growth. It is quite understandable that the Trente Glorieuses fostered a certain degree of optimism and that the apocalyptic predictions of the nineteenth century concerning the distribution of wealth forfeited some of their popularity.
Nevertheless, the magical Kuznets curve theory was formulated in large part for the wrong reasons, and its empirical underpinnings were extremely fragile. The sharp reduction in income inequality that we observe in almost all the rich countries between 1914 and 1945 was due above all to the world wars and the violent economic and political shocks they entailed (especially for people with large fortunes). It had little to do with the tranquil process of intersectoral mobility described by Kuznets.
Putting the Distributional Question Back at the Heart of Economic Analysis
The question is important, and not just for historical reasons. Since the 1970s, income inequality has increased significantly in the rich countries, especially the United States, where the concentration of income in the first decade of the twenty-first century regained—indeed, slightly exceeded—the level attained in the second decade of the previous century. It is therefore crucial to understand clearly why and how inequality decreased in the interim. To be sure, the very rapid growth of poor and emerging countries, especially China, may well prove to be a potent force for reducing inequalities at the global level, just as the growth of the rich countries did during the period 1945–1975. But this process has generated deep anxiety in the emerging countries and even deeper anxiety in the rich countries. Furthermore, the impressive disequilibria observed in recent decades in the financial, oil, and real estate markets have naturally aroused doubts as to the inevitability of the balanced growth path
described by Solow and Kuznets, according to whom all key economic variables are supposed to move at the same pace. Will the world in 2050 or 2100 be owned by traders, top managers, and the superrich, or will it belong to the oil-producing countries or the Bank of China? Or perhaps it will be owned by the tax havens in which many of these actors will have sought refuge. It would be absurd not to raise the question of who will own what and simply to assume from the outset that growth is naturally balanced
in the long run.
In a way, we are in the same position at the beginning of the twenty-first century as our forebears were in the early nineteenth century: we are witnessing impressive changes in economies around the world, and it is very difficult to know how extensive they will turn out to be or what the global distribution of wealth, both within and between countries, will look like several decades from now. The economists of the nineteenth century deserve immense credit for placing the distributional question at the heart of economic analysis and for seeking to study long-term trends. Their answers were not always satisfactory, but at least they were asking the right questions. There is no fundamental reason why we should believe that growth is automatically balanced. It is long since past the time when we should have put the question of inequality back at the center of economic analysis and begun asking questions first raised in the nineteenth century. For far too long, economists have neglected the distribution of wealth, partly because of Kuznets’s optimistic conclusions and partly because of the profession’s undue enthusiasm for simplistic mathematical models based on so-called representative agents.¹⁸ If the question of inequality is again to become central, we must begin by gathering as extensive as possible a set of historical data for the purpose of understanding past and present trends. For it is by patiently establishing facts and patterns and then comparing different countries that we can hope to identify the mechanisms at work and gain a clearer idea of the future.
The Sources Used in This Book
This book is based on sources of two main types, which together make it possible to study the historical dynamics of wealth distribution: sources dealing with the inequality and distribution of income, and sources dealing with the distribution of wealth and the relation of wealth to income.
To begin with income: in large part, my work has simply broadened the spatial and temporal limits of Kuznets’s innovative and pioneering work on the evolution of income inequality in the United States between 1913 and 1948. In this way I have been able to put Kuznets’s findings (which are quite accurate) into a wider perspective and thus radically challenge his optimistic view of the relation between economic development and the distribution of wealth. Oddly, no one has ever systematically pursued Kuznets’s work, no doubt in part because the historical and statistical study of tax records falls into a sort of academic no-man’s-land, too historical for economists and too economistic for historians. That is a pity, because the dynamics of income inequality can only be studied in a long-run perspective, which is possible only if one makes use of tax records.¹⁹
I began by extending Kuznets’s methods to France, and I published the results of that study in a book that appeared in 2001.²⁰ I then joined forces with several colleagues—Anthony Atkinson and Emmanuel Saez foremost among them—and with their help was able to expand the coverage to a much wider range of countries. Anthony Atkinson looked at Great Britain and a number of other countries, and together we edited two volumes that appeared in 2007 and 2010, in which we reported the results for some twenty countries throughout the world.²¹ Together with Emmanuel Saez, I extended Kuznets’s series for the United States by half a century.²² Saez himself looked at a number of other key countries, such as Canada and Japan. Many other investigators contributed to this joint effort: in particular, Facundo Alvaredo studied Argentina, Spain, and Portugal; Fabien Dell looked at Germany and Switzerland; and Abhijit Banerjeee and I investigated the Indian case. With the help of Nancy Qian I was able to work on China. And so on.²³
In each case, we tried to use the same types of sources, the same methods, and the same concepts. Deciles and centiles of high incomes were estimated from tax data based on stated incomes (corrected in various ways to ensure temporal and geographic homogeneity of data and concepts). National income and average income were derived from national accounts, which in some cases had to be fleshed out or extended. Broadly speaking, our data series begin in each country when an income tax was established (generally between 1910 and 1920 but in some countries, such as Japan and Germany, as early as the 1880s and in other countries somewhat later). These series are regularly updated and at this writing extend to the early 2010s.
Ultimately, the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world, is the largest historical database available concerning the evolution of income inequality; it is the primary source of data for this book.²⁴
The book’s second most important source of data, on which I will actually draw first, concerns wealth, including both the distribution of wealth and its relation to income. Wealth also generates income and is therefore important on the income study side of things as well. Indeed, income consists of two components: income from labor (wages, salaries, bonuses, earnings from nonwage labor, and other remuneration statutorily classified as labor related) and income from capital (rent, dividends, interest, profits, capital gains, royalties, and other income derived from the mere fact of owning capital in the form of land, real estate, financial instruments, industrial equipment, etc., again regardless of its precise legal classification). The WTID contains a great deal of information about the evolution of income from capital over the course of the twentieth century. It is nevertheless essential to complete this information by looking at sources directly concerned with wealth. Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.²⁵
In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.²⁶ This approach was introduced by Robert Lampman in 1962 to study changes in the inequality of wealth in the United States from 1922 to 1956. Later, in 1978, Anthony Atkinson and Alan Harrison studied the British case from 1923 to 1972.²⁷ These results were recently updated and extended to other countries such as France and Sweden. Unfortunately, data are available for fewer countries than in the case of income inequality. In a few cases, however, estate tax data extend back much further in time, often to the beginning of the nineteenth century, because estate taxes predate income taxes. In particular, I have compiled data collected by the French government at various times and, together with Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, have put together a huge collection of individual estate tax returns, with which it has been possible to establish homogeneous series of data on the concentration of wealth in France since the Revolution.²⁸ This will allow us to see the shocks due to World War I in a much broader context than the series dealing with income inequality (which unfortunately date back only as far as 1910 or so). The work of Jesper Roine and Daniel Waldenström on Swedish historical sources is also instructive.²⁹
The data on wealth and inheritance also enable us to study changes in the relative importance of inherited wealth and savings in the constitution of fortunes and the dynamics of wealth inequality. This work is fairly complete in the case of France, where the very rich historical sources offer a unique vantage point from which to observe changing inheritance patterns over the long run.³⁰ To one degree or another, my colleagues and I have extended this work to other countries, especially Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. These materials play a crucial role in this study, because the significance of inequalities of wealth differs depending on whether those inequalities derive from inherited wealth or savings. In this book, I focus not only on the level of inequality as such but to an even greater extent on the structure of inequality, that is, on the origins of disparities in income and wealth between social groups and on the various systems of economic, social, moral, and political justification that have been invoked to defend or condemn those disparities. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it.
Last but not least, we can also use data that allow us to measure the total stock of national wealth (including land, other real estate, and industrial and financial capital) over a very long period of time. We can measure this wealth for each country in terms of the number of years of national income required to amass it. This type of global study of the capital / income ratio has its limits. It is always preferable to analyze wealth inequality at the individual level as well, and to gauge the relative importance of inheritance and saving in capital formation. Nevertheless, the capital / income approach can give us an overview of the importance of capital to the society as a whole. Moreover, in some cases (especially Britain and France) it is possible to collect and compare estimates for different periods and thus push the analysis back to the early eighteenth century, which allows us to view the Industrial Revolution in relation to the history of capital. For this I will rely on historical data Gabriel Zucman and I recently collected.³¹ Broadly speaking, this research is merely an extension and generalization of Raymond Goldsmith’s work on national balance sheets in the 1970s.³²
Compared with previous works, one reason why this book stands out is that I have made an effort to collect as complete and consistent a set of historical sources as possible in order to study the dynamics of income and wealth distribution over the long run. To that end, I had two advantages over previous authors. First, this work benefits, naturally enough, from a longer historical perspective than its predecessors had (and some long-term changes did not emerge clearly until data for the 2000s became available, largely owing to the fact that certain shocks due to the world wars persisted for a very long time). Second, advances in computer technology have made it much easier to collect and process large amounts of historical data.
Although I have no wish to exaggerate the role of technology in the history of ideas, the purely technical issues are worth a moment’s reflection. Objectively speaking, it was far more difficult to deal with large volumes of historical data in Kuznets’s time than it is today. This was true to a large extent as recently as the 1980s. In the 1970s, when Alice Hanson Jones collected US estate inventories from the colonial era and Adeline Daumard worked on French estate records from the nineteenth century,³³ they worked mainly by hand, using index cards. When we reread their remarkable work today, or look at François Siminad’s work on the evolution of wages in the nineteenth century or Ernest Labrousse’s work on the history of prices and incomes in the eighteenth century or Jean Bouvier and François Furet’s work on the variability of profits in the nineteenth century, it is clear that these scholars had to overcome major material difficulties in order to compile and process their data.³⁴ In many cases, the technical difficulties absorbed much of their energy, taking precedence over analysis and interpretation, especially since the technical problems imposed strict limits on their ability to make international and temporal comparisons. It is much easier to study the history of the distribution of wealth today than in the past. This book is heavily indebted to recent improvements in the technology of research.³⁵
The Major Results of This Study
What are the major conclusions to which these novel historical sources have led me? The first is that one should be wary of any economic determinism in regard to inequalities of wealth and income. The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of inequality that took place in most developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. Similarly, the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to the political shifts of the past several decades, especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.
The second conclusion, which is the heart of the book, is that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveal powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence and divergence. Furthermore, there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.
Consider first the mechanisms pushing toward convergence, that is, toward reduction and compression of inequalities. The main forces for convergence are the diffusion of knowledge and investment in training and skills. The law of supply and demand, as well as the mobility of capital and labor, which is a variant of that law, may always tend toward convergence as well, but the influence of this economic law is less powerful than the diffusion of knowledge and skill and is frequently ambiguous or contradictory in its implications. Knowledge and skill diffusion is the key to overall productivity growth as well as the reduction of inequality both within and between countries. We see this at present in the advances made by a number of previously poor countries, led by China. These emergent economies are now in the process of catching up with the advanced ones. By adopting the modes of production of the rich countries and acquiring skills comparable to those found elsewhere, the less developed countries have leapt forward in productivity and increased their national incomes. The technological convergence process may be abetted by open borders for trade, but it is fundamentally a process of the diffusion and sharing of knowledge—the public good par excellence—rather than a market mechanism.
From a strictly theoretical standpoint, other forces pushing toward greater equality might exist. One might, for example, assume that production technologies tend over time to require greater skills on the part of workers, so that labor’s share of income will rise as capital’s share falls: one might call this the rising human capital hypothesis.
In other words, the progress of technological rationality is supposed to lead automatically to the triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat-cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism. Inequalities would thus become more meritocratic and less static (though not necessarily smaller): economic rationality would then in some sense automatically give rise to democratic rationality.
Another optimistic belief, which is current at the moment, is the idea that class warfare
will automatically give way, owing to the recent increase in life expectancy, to generational warfare
(which is less divisive because everyone is first young and then old). Put differently, this inescapable biological fact is supposed to imply that the accumulation and distribution of wealth no longer presage an inevitable clash between dynasties of rentiers and dynasties owning nothing but their labor power. The governing logic is rather one of saving over the life cycle: people accumulate wealth when young in order to provide for their old age. Progress in medicine together with improved living conditions has therefore, it is argued, totally transformed the very essence of capital.
Unfortunately, these two optimistic beliefs (the human capital hypothesis and the substitution of generational conflict for class warfare) are largely illusory. Transformations of this sort are both logically possible and to some extent real, but their influence is far less consequential than one might imagine. There is little evidence that labor’s share in national income has increased significantly in a very long time: nonhuman
capital seems almost as indispensable in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth or nineteenth, and there is no reason why it may not become even more so. Now as in the past, moreover, inequalities of wealth exist primarily within age cohorts, and inherited wealth comes close to being as decisive at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was in the age of Balzac’s Père Goriot. Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.
Forces of Convergence, Forces of Divergence
The crucial fact is that no matter how potent a force the diffusion of knowledge and skills may be, especially in promoting convergence between countries, it can nevertheless be thwarted and overwhelmed by powerful forces pushing in the opposite direction, toward greater inequality. It is obvious that lack of adequate investment in training can exclude entire social groups from the benefits of economic growth. Growth can harm some groups while benefiting others (witness the recent displacement of workers in the more advanced economies by workers in China). In short, the principal force for convergence—the diffusion of knowledge—is only partly natural and spontaneous. It also depends in large part on educational policies, access to training and to the acquisition of appropriate skills, and associated institutions.
I will pay particular attention in this study to certain worrisome forces of divergence—particularly worrisome in that they can exist even in a world where there is adequate investment in skills and where all the conditions of market efficiency
(as economists understand that term) appear to be satisfied. What are these forces of divergence? First, top earners can quickly separate themselves from the rest by a wide margin (although the problem to date remains relatively localized). More important, there is a set of forces of divergence associated with the process of accumulation and concentration of wealth when growth is weak and the return on capital is high. This second process is potentially more destabilizing than the first, and it no doubt represents the principal threat to an equal distribution of wealth over the long run.
To cut straight to the heart of the matter: in Figures I.1 and I.2 I show two basic patterns that I will try to explain in what follows. Each graph represents the importance of one of these divergent processes. Both graphs depict U-shaped curves,
that is, a period of decreasing inequality followed by one of increasing inequality. One might assume that the realities the two graphs represent are similar. In fact they are not. The phenomena underlying the various curves are quite different and involve distinct economic, social, and political processes. Furthermore, the curve in Figure I.1 represents income inequality in the United States, while the curves in Figure I.2 depict the capital / income ratio in several European countries (Japan, though not shown, is similar). It is not out of the question that the two forces of divergence will ultimately come together in the twenty-first century. This has already happened to some extent and may yet become a global phenomenon, which could lead to levels of inequality never before seen, as well as to a radically new structure of inequality. Thus far, however, these striking patterns reflect two distinct underlying phenomena.
FIGURE I.1. Income inequality in the United States, 1910–2010
The top decile share in US national income dropped from 45–50 percent in the 1910s–1920s to less than 35 percent in the 1950s (this is the fall documented by Kuznets); it then rose from less than 35 percent in the 1970s to 45–50 percent in the 2000s–2010s.
Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c.
The US curve, shown in Figure I.1, indicates the share of the upper decile of the income hierarchy in US national income from 1910 to 2010. It is nothing more than an extension of the historical series Kuznets established for the period 1913–1948. The top decile claimed as much as 45–50 percent of national income in the 1910s–1920s before dropping to 30–35 percent by the end of the 1940s. Inequality then stabilized at that level from 1950 to 1970. We subsequently see a rapid rise in inequality in the 1980s, until by 2000 we have returned to a level on the order of 45–50 percent of national income. The magnitude of the change is impressive. It is natural to ask how far such a trend might continue.
FIGURE I.2. The capital / income ratio in Europe, 1870–2010
Aggregate private wealth was worth about six to seven years of national income in Europe in 1910, between two and three years in 1950, and between four and six years in 2010.
Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c.
I will show that this spectacular increase in inequality largely reflects an unprecedented explosion of very elevated incomes from labor, a veritable separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the population. One possible explanation of this is that the skills and productivity of these top managers rose suddenly in relation to those of other workers. Another explanation, which to me seems more plausible and turns out to be much more consistent with the evidence, is that these top managers by and large have the power to set their own remuneration, in some cases without limit and in many cases without any clear relation to their individual productivity, which in any case is very difficult to estimate in a large organization. This phenomenon is seen mainly in the United States and to a lesser degree in Britain, and it may be possible to explain it in terms of the history of social and fiscal norms in those two countries over the past century. The tendency is less marked in other wealthy countries (such as Japan, Germany, France, and other continental European states), but the trend is in the same direction. To expect that the phenomenon will attain the same proportions elsewhere as it has done in the United States would be risky until we have subjected it to a full analysis—which unfortunately is not that simple, given the limits of the available data.
The Fundamental Force for Divergence: r > g
The second pattern, represented in Figure I.2, reflects a divergence mechanism that is in some ways simpler and more transparent and no doubt exerts greater influence on the long-run evolution of the wealth distribution. Figure I.2 shows the total value of private wealth (in real estate, financial assets, and professional capital, net of debt) in Britain, France and Germany, expressed in years of national income, for the period 1870–2010. Note, first of all, the very high level of private wealth in Europe in the late nineteenth century: the total amount of private wealth hovered around six or seven years of national income, which is a lot. It then fell sharply in response to the shocks of the period 1914–1945: the capital / income ratio decreased to just 2 or 3. We then observe a steady rise from 1950 on, a rise so sharp that private fortunes in the early twenty-first century seem to be on the verge of returning to five or six years of national income in both Britain and France. (Private wealth in Germany, which started at a lower level, remains lower, but the upward trend is just as clear.)
This U-shaped curve
reflects an absolutely crucial transformation,