Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

To sum up these changes, it is useful to take today’s world as a reference point. The current per capita national income in Britain and France is on the order of 30,000 euros per year, and national capital is about 6 times national income, or roughly 180,000 euros per head. In both countries, farmland is virtually worthless today (a few thousand euros per person at most), and national capital is broadly speaking divided into two nearly equal parts: on average, each citizen has about 90,000 euros in housing (for his or her own use or for rental to others) and about 90,000 euros worth of other domestic capital (primarily in the form of capital invested in firms by way of financial instruments).