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When inequality gets to an extreme, it is completely useless for growth.

Thomas Piketty

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Thomas Piketty
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: May 7
Economist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Clichy-la-Garenne
Growth
Inequality
Extreme
Extremes
Useless
Completely
Gets

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Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.
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For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.
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Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they dont even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.
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Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.
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It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries.
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I certainly agree that capital is not a one-dimensional object, and that the return on capital takes very different forms for different assets or different people.
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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.
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Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck.
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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.
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Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.
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The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America.
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The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.
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I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.
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Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite.
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It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.
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At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution.
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The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.
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We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.
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What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight?
Thomas Piketty