Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

For most people, the simplest way to invest is to buy a home. This provides protection against inflation (since the price of housing generally rises at least as fast as the price of consumption), and it also allows the owner to avoid paying rent, which is equivalent to a real return on investment of 3–4 percent a year. But for a person with 10 to 50 thousand euros, it is not enough to decide to buy a home: the possibility may not exist. And even for a person with 100 or 200 thousand euros but who works in a big city in a job whose pay is not in the top 2 or 3 centiles of the wage hierarchy, it may be difficult to purchase a home or apartment even if one is willing to go into debt for a long period of time and pay a high rate of interest. As a result, those who start out with a small initial fortune will often remain tenants, who must therefore pay a substantial rent (affording a high return on capital to the landlord) for a long period of time, possibly for life, while their bank savings are just barely protected from inflation.