Piketty Income Quotes & Sayings

What is most frightening about Vautrin's lecture is that his brisk portrait of Restoration society contains such precise figures. As I will soon show, the structure of the income and wealth hierarchies in nineteenth-century France was such that the standard of living the wealthiest French people could attain greatly exceeded that to which one could aspire on the basis of income from labor alone. Under such conditions, why work? And why behave morally at all? Since social inequality was in itself immoral and unjustified, why not be thoroughly immoral and appropriate capital by whatever means are available? The — Thomas Piketty

no mathematical formula or econometric estimate can tell us exactly what tax rate ought to be applied to what level of income. Only collective deliberation and democratic experimentation can do that. — Thomas Piketty

The cat is an obligate carnivore and it is in its nature that it must eat meat. This is corroborated by the fact that cat's senses are made for "a crepuscular and predatory niche". They are hunters, carnivores that show no developmental predisposition for herbivore lifestyle based on the current knowledge of their ancestral and genetic development. — Leviak B. Kelly

I went to Hollywood to test for Martha Ivers and I thought I was going to play the part that Van Heflin played.But they wanted me to play the part of Barbara Stanwyck's husband, so I played that. Then when I finished the movie, I went back to Broadway and did another flop. — Kirk Douglas

a very substantial and growing inequality of capital income since 1980 accounts for about one-third of the increase in income inequality in the United States - a far from negligible amount. — Thomas Piketty

(which did not exist before the creation of the income tax in 1913) — Thomas Piketty

We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal; this somehow 'excuses' what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money. — Julie Burchill

By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2 percent of the US income hierarchy.32 Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.33 — Thomas Piketty

The sharp reduction in income inequality that we observe in almost all the rich countries between 1914 and 1945 was due above all to the world wars and the violent economic and political shocks they entailed (especially for people with large fortunes). It had little to do with the tranquil process of intersectoral mobility described by Kuznets. — Thomas Piketty

To be sure, the cost of managing capital and of "formal" financial intermediation (that is, the investment advice and portfolio management services provided by a bank or official financial institution or real estate agency or managing partner) is obviously taken into account and deducted from the income on capital in calculating the average rate of return (as presented here). But this is not the case with "informal" financial intermediation: every investor spends time - in some cases a lot of time - managing his own portfolio and affairs and determining which investments are likely to be the most profitable. This effort can in certain cases be compared to genuine entrepreneurial labor or to a form of business activity. — Thomas Piketty

Inequalities at the bottom of the US wage distribution have closely followed the evolution of thee minimum wage: the gap between the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution and the overall average wage widened significantly in the 1980s, then narrowed in the 1990s, and finally increased again in the 2000s. Nevertheless, inequalities at the top of the distribution - for example, the share of total wages going to the top 10 percent -- increased steadily throughout this period. Clearly, the minimum wage has an impact at the bottom of the distribution but much less influence at the top, where other forces are at work. — Thomas Piketty

When the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy (as it did through much of history until the nineteenth century and as is likely to be the case again in the twenty-first century), then it logically follows that inherited wealth grows faster than output and income. People — Thomas Piketty

the income of nonwage workers is "mixed," because it combines income from labor with income from capital. This is also referred to as "entrepreneurial income. — Thomas Piketty

Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a very crucial role in modern society, for a simple reason: in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions, and in order to overcome this contradiction it is vital to make sure that social inequalities derive from rational and universal principles rather than arbitrary contingencies. Inequalities must therefore be just and useful to all, at least in the realm of discourse and as far as possible in reality as well. — Thomas Piketty

All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent. — Thomas Piketty

There is also the idea, widespread among economists, that modern economic growth depends largely on the rise of "human capital." At first glance, this would seem to imply that labor should claim a growing share of national income. And one does indeed find that there may be a tendency for labor's share to increase over the very long run, but the gains are relatively modest: — Thomas Piketty

In countries where income from labor is most equally distributed, such as the Scandinavian countries between 1970 and 1990, the top 10 percent of earners receive about 20 percent of total wages and the bottom 50 percent about 35 percent. — Thomas Piketty

Income inequality increased quite sharply in the United States during the 1920s, however, peaking on the eve of the 1929 crash with more than 50 percent of national income going to the top decile - — Thomas Piketty

Among the members of these upper income groups are US academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely. This is a very comprehensible human reaction. — Thomas Piketty

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. — Thomas Piketty

Democracy is the most demanding of all forms of government in terms of the energy, imagination, and public spirit required of the individual. — George C. Marshall

showed that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease. Qualification levels shifted upward: a high school diploma now represents what a grade school certificate used to mean, a college degree what a high school diploma used to stand for, and so on. — Thomas Piketty

Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. Before him lay his shadow, which was the body of his Soul, and behind him hung the moon in the honey-coloured air. — Oscar Wilde

And in the most inegalitarian countries, such as the United States in the early 2010s (where, as will emerge later, income from labor is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere), the top decile gets 35 percent of the total, whereas the bottom half gets only 25 percent. — Thomas Piketty

Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere. — Thomas Piketty

The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and '20s. — Thomas Piketty

the decrease in the top marginal income tax rate led to an explosion of very high incomes, which then increased the political influence of the beneficiaries of the change in the tax laws, who had an interest in keeping top tax rates low or even decreasing them further and who could use their windfall to finance political parties, pressure groups, and think tanks. — Thomas Piketty

taxes consumed less than 10 percent of national income in all four countries during the nineteenth century and up to World War I. This reflects the fact that the state at that time had very little involvement in economic and social life. — Thomas Piketty

When we stop noticing small things, we are no longer truly alive. — Neel Burton

In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth. — Thomas Piketty

In contrast to what many people in Britain and the United States believe, the true figures on growth (as best one can judge from official national accounts data) show that Britain and the United States have not grown any more rapidly since 1980 than Germany, France, Japan, Denmark, or Sweden. In other words, the reduction of top marginal income tax rates and the rise of top incomes do not seem to have stimulated productivity (contrary to the predictions of supply-side theory) or at any rate did not stimulate productivity enough to be statistically detectable at the macro level. — Thomas Piketty

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. — Thomas Piketty