Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

To be frank, I know virtually nothing about exactly how Carlos Slim or Bill Gates became rich, and I am quite incapable of assessing their relative merits. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Bill Gates also profited from a virtual monopoly on operating systems (as have many other high-tech entrepreneurs in industries ranging from telecommunications to Facebook, whose fortunes were also built on monopoly rents). Furthermore, I believe that Gates’s contributions depended on the work of thousands of engineers and scientists doing basic research in electronics and computer science, without whom none of his innovations would have been possible. These people did not patent their scientific papers. In short, it seems unreasonable to draw such an extreme contrast between Gates and Slim without so much as a glance at the facts.