Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

To a large extent, we have gone from a society of rentiers to a society of managers, that is, from a society in which the top centile is dominated by rentiers (people who own enough capital to live on the annual income from their wealth) to a society in which the top of the income hierarchy, including to upper centile, consists mainly of highly paid individuals who live on income from labor. One might also say, more correctly (if less positively), that we have gone from a society of superrentiers to a less extreme form of rentier society, with a better balance between success through work and success through capital. It is important, however, to be clear that this major upheaval came about, in France at any rate, without any expansion of the wage hierarchy (which has been globally stable for a long time: the universe of individuals who are paid for their labor has never been as homogeneous as many people think); it was due entirely to the decrease in high incomes from capital.