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Thomas Piketty

Monday 2nd of March 2026

Income inequality US inequality may now be so sharp, and the political process so tightly captured by top earners, that necessary reforms will not happpen — much like in Europe before the first world war. Thomas Piketty, Financial Times, March 29-30, 2014 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Justice It is time to understand that the logic of remdial justice and universalist justice are complementary and have to move forward in concert, the one supporting the other. Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality © 2022 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He was able to get elected on an ideology where you don’t redistribute between the rich and the poor but rather you protect Americans, especially white male Ameri- cans, against anybody who looks foreign. The risk is that neoliberalism is replaced by this form of neo-nationalism in order to avoid redistribution. Donald Trump portrayed by Thomas Piketty, New York Times, April 1, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Taxes In sum, all the data at our disposal today  suggest that virtually confiscatory tax rates have been an immense historical success.  They have made it possible to greatly reduce the divergences of fortunes and incomes, while at the same time improving the situation of the middle and lower classes, developing the welfare state, and stimulating better economic and social performance overall. Historically, it is the battle for equality and education that has made economic development and human progress possible, and not the veneration of property, stability, and inequality. Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality All wealth is collective by nature in the sense that it relies on the work of hundreds, thousands, millions of engineers, technicians, the accumulation of knowledge.  Then, private property is a social construction that we invent in order to organize economic and social relations. It’s a very useful social invention as long as you keep under control how much you can accumlate, how much power you can concentrate, etc. But none of these assets are their  assets. They are a product of a collective process. No one invented anything by himself or herself. Thomas Piketty, New York Times, April 1, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality If we now examine the development of the distribution [of property since the end of the eighteenth century] as a whole, we see that the reduction in inequalities took place mainly to the benefit of what  may be called the patrimonial middle class, that is, the 40 percent between the poorest 50 percent and the richest 10 percent. Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality © 2022 Kwiple.com
 
Wealth inequality We have an institutional setup where you accumulate wealth by using public infrastructure, public education, the health system, and then once you have  accumulated the wealth, you push a button and you transfer it somewhere else. Remember the ProPublica study before the summer of 2021 where they looked at billionaires in the U.S.? They pay almost zero federal income tax, as compared with their wealth.  If you pay no tax, it's easier to accumulate more wealth, and that's what continues. Thomas Piketty, New York Times, April 1, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com