The fact that a person has good ideas at age thirty or forty does not imply that she will still be having them at seventy or eighty, yet her wealth will continue to increase by itself. Or it can be passed on to the next generation and continue to increase there. Nineteenth-century French economic elites were creative and dynamic entrepreneurs, but the crucial fact remains that their efforts ultimately—and largely unwittingly—reinforced and perpetuated a society of rentiers owing to the logic of r > g.
