Piketty-Capital in the Twenty-First Century• Quote 1: “The distribution of wealth is one of today’s most

widely discussed and controversial issues. But what do we really know about it’s evolution over the long term?”

Wealth≠income• Part 1: Theoretical concepts• Part 2-3: Empirical findings&historical interpretation• Part 4: Predicion and policy advise

Quote 2• ”Capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and

unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based” (p. 1)

How much of total wealth owned by top-10%?• A) 20%• B) 30%• C) 40%• D) 50%• E) 60%• F) 70%• G) 80%• H) 90%

Causes/background• Economic• R>g

• Political (1975-heden)• GlobalisationBargaining power capital (‘race to the bottom’)• Weaker unions• End of Cold War• Saturized product markets• Trans-national governance• Deregulation (or: reregulation)

The power of discountingYear Labor income

(g=2%)Income from wealth(5%)

1975 100 100

1976 102 105

1977 104.04 110.25

1980 110.4 127.6

1990 134.6 207.9

2015 220.8 704

Quote 3• ”A gap r-g of fairly modest size is all that it takes to arrive at an

extremely inegalitarian distribution of wealth” (p. 451)

Quote 4• ”the average income of the parents of Harvard students is

currently about 450.000 (..) Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit” (p. 485)

Quote 5• ”The rich world is rich, but the governments of the rich world

are poor. Europe is the most extreme case: it has both the highest level of private wealth in the world and the greatest difficulty in resolving its public debt crisis” (p. 485)

Quote 6&7• ”in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens

contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions” (p. 423)

• “The top thousandth would then own 60% of global wealth, which is hard to imagine in the framework of existing political institutions unless there is a particulary effective system of repression or an extremely powerful apparatus of persuasion, or perhaps both” (p. 439)

On the road to patrimonial capitalism• Vautrin’s lesson in Balzac’s Pere Goriot (1835) to Rastignac

Final sentence Piketty• “Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of

the least well-off” (p. 577).