Concretely, what this means is that if the gap between the return on capital and the growth rate is as high as that observed in France in the nineteenth century, when the average rate of return was 5 percent a year and growth was roughly 1 percent, the model predicts that the cumulative dynamics of wealth accumulation will automatically give rise to an extremely high concentration of wealth, with typically around 90 percent of capital owned by the top decile and more than 50 percent by the top centile.
