Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

The divergence between the various regions of the wealthy world is all the more striking because technological change has been the same more or less everywhere: in particular, the revolution in information technology has affected Japan, Germany, France, Sweden, and Denmark as much as the United States, Britain, and Canada. Similarly, economic growth—or, more precisely, growth in output per capita, which is to say, productivity growth—has been quite similar throughout the wealthy countries, with differences of a few tenths of a percentage point.21 In view of these facts, this quite large divergence in the way the income distribution has evolved in the various wealthy countries demands an explanation, which the theory of marginal productivity and of the race between technology and education does not seem capable of providing.