Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

In 1950–1960, as capital was once again accumulated and the capital / income ratio β rose, fortunes began to age once more, so that the ratio μ between average wealth at death and average wealth of the living also increased. Growing wealth went hand in hand with aging wealth, thereby laying the groundwork for an even stronger comeback of inherited wealth. By 1960, the profile observed in 1947 was already a memory: sexagenarians and septuagenarians were slightly wealthier than people in their fifties (see Table 11.1). The octogenarians’ turn came in the 1980s. In 1990–2000 the graph of wealth against age was increasing even more steeply. By 2010, the average wealth of people in their eighties was more than 30 percent higher than that of people in their fifties.