Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

To be sure, one can easily imagine scenarios much more unbalanced than the central scenario. Nevertheless, the forces of divergence are much less obvious than in the case of the sovereign wealth funds, whose growth depends on windfalls totally disproportionate to the needs of the populations benefiting from them (especially where those populations are tiny). This leads to endless accumulation, which the inequality r > g transforms into a permanent divergence in the global capital distribution. To sum up, petroleum rents might well enable the oil states to buy the rest of the planet (or much of it) and to live on the rents of their accumulated capital.