Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

wealth in the United States became increasingly concentrated over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1910, capital inequality there was very high, though still markedly lower than in Europe: the top decile owned about 80 percent of total wealth and the top centile around 45 percent

The primary reason for the hyperconcentration of wealth in traditional agrarian societies and to a large extent in all societies prior to World War I (with the exception of the pioneer societies of the New World, which are for obvious reasons very special and not representative of the rest of the world or the long run) is that these were low-growth societies in which the rate of return on capital was markedly and durably higher than the rate of growth.

Consider a world of low growth, on the order of, say, 0.5–1 percent a year, which was the case everywhere before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rate of return on capital, which is generally on the order of 4 or 5 percent a year, is therefore much higher than the growth rate. Concretely, this means that wealth accumulated in the past is recapitalized much more quickly than the economy grows, even when there is no income from labor.

we can say that the annual growth rate from antiquity to the seventeenth century never exceeded 0.1–0.2 percent for long.

Under these assumptions, we find that the return on capital, net of taxes (and losses), fell to 1–1.5 percent in the period 1913–1950, which was less than the rate of growth. This novel situation continued in the period 1950–2012 owing to the exceptionally high growth rate. Ultimately, we find that in the twentieth century, both fiscal and nonfiscal shocks created a situation in which, for the first time in history, the net return on capital was less than the growth rate.

In practice, however, there appears never to have been a society in which the rate of return on capital fell naturally and persistently to less than 2–3 percent, and the mean return we generally see (averaging over all types of investments) is generally closer to 4–5 percent (before taxes).

According to this theory, the reason why the return on capital has been historically stable at 4–5 percent is ultimately psychological: since this rate of return reflects the average person’s impatience and attitude toward the future, it cannot vary much from this level.

In the standard economic model, based on the existence of a “perfect” market for capital (in which each owner of capital receives a return equal to the highest marginal productivity available in the economy, and everyone can borrow as much as he or she wants at that rate), the reason why the return on capital, r, is systematically and necessarily higher than the growth rate, g, is the following. If r were less than g, economic agents, realizing that their future income (and that of their descendants) will rise faster than the rate at which they can borrow, will feel infinitely wealthy and will therefore wish to borrow without limit in order to consume immediately (until r rises above g). In this extreme form, the mechanism is not entirely plausible, but it shows that r > g is true in the most standard of economic models and is even more likely to be true as capital markets become more efficient.

To my way of thinking, the inequality r > g should be analyzed as a historical reality dependent on a variety of mechanisms and not as an absolute logical necessity.

First, if the fortunes of wealthy individuals grow more rapidly than average income, the capital/income ratio will rise indefinitely, which in the long run should lead to a decrease in the rate of return on capital.

Indeed, once the rate of return on capital significantly and durably exceeds the growth rate, the dynamics of the accumulation and transmission of wealth automatically lead to a very highly concentrated distribution, and egalitarian sharing among siblings does not make much of a difference.

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.

and thus in a sense the failure of the French Revolution. Although the revolutionary assemblies established a universal tax (and in so doing provided us with a peerless instrument for measuring the distribution of wealth), the tax rate was so low (barely 1–2 percent on directly transmitted estates, no matter how large, throughout the nineteenth century) that it had no measurable impact on the difference between the rate of return on capital and the growth rate.

According to the theoretical model, if the return on capital is around 5 percent a year, the equilibrium concentration of capital will not decrease significantly unless the growth rate exceeds 1.5–2 percent or taxes on capital reduce the net return to below 3–3.5 percent, or both.

As noted, such an inegalitarian spiral cannot continue indefinitely: ultimately, there will be no place to invest the savings, and the global return on capital will fall, until an equilibrium distribution emerges. But that can take a very long time, and since the top centile’s share of Parisian wealth in 1913 already exceeded 70 percent, it is legitimate to ask how high the equilibrium level would have been had the shocks due to World War I not occurred.

What is more striking when one reads Pareto’s work with the benefit of hindsight is that he clearly had no evidence to support his theory of stability.

I come now to the essential question: Why has the inequality of wealth not returned to the level achieved in the Belle Époque, and can we be sure that this situation is permanent and irreversible?

The detailed probate records collected from the archives show unambiguously that many rentiers in the interwar years did not reduce expenses sufficiently rapidly to compensate for the shocks to their fortunes and income during the war and in the decade that followed, so that they eventually had to eat into their capital to finance current expenditures. Hence they bequeathed to the next generation fortunes significantly smaller than those they had inherited, and the previous social equilibrium could no longer be sustained. The Parisian data are particularly eloquent on this point. For example, the

was not until 2000–2010 that total private wealth (in both real estate and financial assets), expressed in years of national income, regained roughly the level it had attained on the eve of World War I. This restoration of the capital/income ratio in the rich countries is in all probability a process that is still ongoing.

Note, too, that inequality of wealth began to rise again in 1970–1980. It is therefore possible that a catch-up process is still under way today, a process even slower than the revival of the capital/income ratio, and that the concentration of wealth will soon return to past heights.

In the first case, the top centile of the income hierarchy is very clearly dominated by top capital incomes: this is the society of rentiers familiar to nineteenth-century novelists. In the second case, top earned incomes (for a given distribution) roughly balance top capital incomes (we are now in a society of managers, or at any rate a more balanced society). Similarly, the emergence of a “patrimonial middle class” owning between a quarter and a third of national wealth rather than a tenth or a twentieth (scarcely more than the poorest half of society) represents a major social transformation. What structural

The most natural and important explanation is that governments in the twentieth century began taxing capital and its income at significant rates.

Using the theoretical models described above, one can show that an effective tax rate of 30 percent, if applied to all forms of capital, can by itself account for a very significant deconcentration of wealth (roughly equal to the decrease in the top centile’s share that we see in the historical data).

an increase in the tax on capital income from 0 to 30 percent (reducing the net return on capital from 5 to 3.5 percent) may well leave the total stock of capital unchanged over the long run for the simple reason that the decrease in the upper centile’s share of wealth is compensated by the rise of the middle class. This is precisely what happened in the twentieth century—although the lesson is sometimes forgotten today.

My analysis thus far has shown that two factors probably did play an important part, independent of changes in the tax system, and will continue to do so in the future. The first is the probable slight decrease in capital’s share of income and in the rate of return on capital over the long run, and the second is that the rate of growth, despite a likely slowing in the twenty-first century, will be greater than the extremely low rate observed throughout most of human history up to the eighteenth century.

Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present).

The inequality r > g in one sense implies that the past tends to devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labor, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved. Almost

But if growth ultimately slows more or less everywhere in the coming century, as the median demographic forecasts by the United Nations (corroborated by other economic forecasts) suggest it will, then inheritance will probably take on increased importance throughout the world.

nineteenth century, go to children, often in the context of a real estate investment, and they are given on average about ten years before the death of the donor (a gap that has remained relatively stable over time).

The essential point is that for a given structure of savings behavior, the cumulative process becomes more rapid and inegalitarian as the return on capital rises and the growth rate falls.

Theoretically, one can show that for a large class of savings behaviors, when growth is low compared to the return on capital, the increase in μ nearly exactly balances the decrease in the mortality rate

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the annual inheritance flow was 20–25 percent of national income, inherited wealth accounted for nearly all private wealth: somewhere between 80 and 90 percent, with an upward trend. Note, however, that in all societies, at all levels of wealth, a significant number of wealthy individuals, between 10 and 20 percent, accumulate fortunes during their lifetimes, having started with nothing. Nevertheless, inherited wealth accounts for the vast majority of cases.

When the inheritance flow is 20–25 percent of national income, as it was in the nineteenth century, then the amounts received each year as bequests and gifts are more than twice as large as the flow of new savings.

Nevertheless, the comparison with disposable income reflects today’s reality in a more concrete way and shows that inherited wealth already accounts for one-fifth of household monetary resources (available for saving, for example) and will soon account for a quarter or more.

we now do the same calculation for the generations born in 1910–1920, we find that they faced different life choices. The top 1 percent of inheritances afforded resources that were barely 5 times the lower class standard. The best paid 1 percent of jobs still afforded 10–12 times that standard (as a consequence of the fact that the top centile of the wage hierarchy was relatively stable at about 6–7 percent of total wages over a long period).29 For the first time in history, no doubt, one could live better by obtaining a job in the top centile rather than an inheritance in the top centile: study, work, and talent paid better than inheritance.

Concretely, these results also indicate that throughout this period, and for all the cohorts born between 1910 and 1960, the top centile of the income hierarchy consisted largely of people whose primary source of income was work. This was a major change, not only because it was a historical first (in France and most likely in all other European countries) but also because the top centile is an extremely important group in every society.

In all traditional societies (remember that the aristocracy represented 1–2 percent of the population in 1789), and in fact down to the Belle Époque (despite the hopes kindled by the French Revolution), this group was always dominated by inherited capital. The fact that this was not the case for the cohorts born in the first half of the twentieth century was therefore a major event, which fostered unprecedented faith in the irreversibility of social progress and the end of the old social order. To be sure, inequality was not eradicated in the three decades after World War II, but it was viewed primarily from the optimistic angle of wage inequalities.

To be sure, there were significant differences between blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, and managers, and these disparities tended to grow wider in France in the 1950s. But there was a fundamental unity to this society, in which everyone participated in the communion of labor and honored the meritocratic ideal. People believed that the arbitrary inequalities of inherited wealth were a thing of the past.

In order for the concentration effect to dominate the volume effect, the top centile of the inheritance hierarchy must by itself claim the lion’s share of inherited wealth.

Nevertheless, according to official indices, the average per capita purchasing power in Britain and France in 1800 was about one-tenth what it was in 2010. In other words, with 20 or 30 times the average income in 1800, a person would probably have lived no better than with 2 or 3 times the average income today. With 5–10 times the average income in 1800, one would have been in a situation somewhere between the minimum and average wage today.

This view of inequality deserves credit for not describing itself as meritocratic, if nothing else. In a sense, a minority was chosen to live on behalf of everyone else, but no one tried to pretend that this minority was more meritorious or virtuous than the rest. In this world, it was perfectly obvious, moreover, that without a fortune it was impossible to live a dignified life. Having a diploma or skill might allow a person to produce, and therefore to earn, 5 or 10 times more than the average, but not much more than that. Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom.45

The world to come may well combine the worst of two past worlds: both very large inequality of inherited wealth and very high wage inequalities justified in terms of merit and productivity (claims with very little factual basis, as noted). Meritocratic extremism can thus lead to a race between supermanagers and rentiers, to the detriment of those who are neither.

One of the main conclusions of her study was that in both countries, the “educated elite” placed primary emphasis on their personal merit and moral qualities, which they described using terms such as rigor, patience, work, effort, and so on (but also tolerance, kindness, etc.).49 The heroes and heroines in the novels of Austen and Balzac would never have seen the need to compare their personal qualities to those of their servants (who go unmentioned in their texts).

Inheritances of this magnitude do exist, as do considerably larger ones, but there are far fewer of them than in the nineteenth century, even though the total volume of wealth and inheritance has practically regained its previous high level.

The idea that unrestricted competition will put an end to inheritance and move toward a more meritocratic world is a dangerous illusion.

Note, in particular, that once a fortune passes a certain threshold, size effects due to economies of scale in the management of the portfolio and opportunities for risk are reinforced by the fact that nearly all the income on this capital can be plowed back into investment. An individual with this level of wealth can easily live magnificently on an amount equivalent to only a few tenths of percent of his capital each year, and he can therefore reinvest nearly all of his income.16 This is a basic but important economic mechanism, with dramatic consequences for the long-term dynamics of accumulation and distribution of wealth.

This is the main justification for a progressive annual tax on the largest fortunes worldwide. Such a tax is the only way of democratically controlling this potentially explosive process while preserving entrepreneurial dynamism and international economic openness. In Part Four we will examine this idea further, as well as its limitations.

Every fortune is partially justified yet potentially excessive.

As noted, a gap r − g of fairly modest size is all that it takes to arrive at an extremely inegalitarian distribution of wealth.

If this happens, it is likely that the Western countries would find it increasingly difficult to accept the idea of being owned in substantial part by the sovereign wealth funds of the oil states, and sooner or later this would trigger political reactions, such as restrictions on the purchase of real estate and industrial and financial assets by sovereign wealth funds or even partial or total expropriations. Such a reaction would neither be terribly smart politically nor especially effective economically, but it is the kind of response that is within the power of national governments, even of smaller states. Note,