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.
Interpretation
The unpredictability of economic trends makes it difficult to confidently predict wealth and taxation outcomes.
In this quote, Thomas Piketty highlights the historical unpredictability of income, wealth, and taxation. He suggests that those who claim to have definitive knowledge about future economic events may not grasp the complexities and surprises that history reveals, indicating that the past has shown us that certainty in economics is often an illusion.
In practice
During a debate on fiscal policies, one might quote this to emphasize the unpredictability of economic forecasting.
Contrary to a tenacious myth, France is not owned by California pension funds or the Bank of China, any more than the United States belongs to Japanese and German investors. The fear of getting into such a predicament is so strong today that fantasy often outstrips reality. The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one.
The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.
Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.
There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.
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.
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.
If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.
So Europe needs to be competitive and we also need to be competitive if we wish to remain an interesting economic partner for the United States. This has to be done on the basis of strength, of competitiveness.
No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.
I'm an entrepreneur trying to let the American people know that it's not immigrants that are causing economic problems, it is the fact that our economy is advancing in ways that is making human labor less and less essential.
We have designed a capitalist system wrong. We assume human beings are one-dimensional, all they do is make money, so we've created a money-centric world.
Capitalists seem uninterested in capitalism, even as eager entrepreneurs can't get financing. Businesses and investors sound like the Ancient Mariner, who complained, 'Water, water everywhere - nor any drop to drink.'
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