Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

To sum up: inheritance occurs later in aging societies, but wealth also ages, and the latter tends to compensate the former. In this sense, a society in which people die older is very different from a society in which they don’t die at all and inheritance effectively vanishes. Increased life expectancy delays important life events: people study longer, start work later, inherit later, retire later, and die later. But the relative importance of inherited wealth as opposed to earned income does not necessarily change, or at any rate changes much less than people sometimes imagine. To be sure, inheriting later in life may make choosing a profession more frequently necessary than in the past. But this is compensated by the inheritance of larger amounts or by the receipt of gifts. In any case, the difference is more one of degree than the dramatic change of civilization that is sometimes imagined.