Words matter. These are the best Thomas Piketty Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m not as pessimistic as what a number of people seem to believe.
I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen.
The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and ’20s.
Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons.
What I argue for is a progressive tax, a global tax, based on the taxation of private property.
I don’t pretend that I can predict the future value of the growth rate or rate of return.
I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.
Yeah, I am in favor of migration. But I am also in favor of education. But at the same time, I am in favor of progressive taxation. I think we need all of this. I think we don’t have to choose one.
Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they don’t even talk – sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends – about what they are doing.
We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.
The United States could transform its property tax system into a progressive tax on net worth without asking permission to the rest of the world.
I believe in the power of ideas, I believe in the power of books, but you have to give them time.
I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don’t want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.
I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized – certainly than French universities.
My premise is not to tax to destroy the wealth of the wealthy; it’s to increase the wealth of the bottom and the middle class.
‘Das Kapital,’ I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.
We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.
Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science.
I don’t live in the Cold War. Some people maybe still live in the Cold War, but this is their problem, not mine.
The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.
Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren’t sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth at levels that are compatible with democratic ideals.
Private property and the market system are good not only to promote innovation and to promote growth; private property and the market system are good for our personal freedom.
