Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

To sum up: the reduction of inequality in France during the twentieth century is largely explained by the fall of the rentier and the collapse of very high incomes from capital. No generalized structural process of inequality compression (and particularly wage inequality compression) seems to have operated over the long run, contrary to the optimistic predictions of Kuznets’s theory. Herein lies a fundamental lesson about the historical dynamics of the distribution of wealth, no doubt the most important lesson the twentieth century has to teach. This is all the more true when we recognize that the factual picture is more or less the same in all developed countries, with minor variations.