Occupation: Economist Birth: May 7, 1971
The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculat….
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 ….
Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills..
Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence..
Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck..
When inequality gets to an extreme, it is completely useless for growth..
It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth..
We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite..
No hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest..
The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th cen….
We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information..
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 ta….
I don't think there is any serious evidence that we need to be paying people more than 100 times the average wage in order to get high-performing man….
For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immod….
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 dif….
What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a ….
Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite..
There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual wor….
Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off..
Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers..
At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution..