Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

The second force that might explain the natural end of inheritance is increased life expectancy, which lowers the mortality rate m and increases the time to inheritance (which decreases the size of the legacy). Indeed, there is no doubt that the mortality rate has decreased over the long run: the proportion of the population that dies each year is smaller when the life expectancy is eighty than when it is sixty. Other things being equal, for a given β and μ, a society with a lower mortality rate is also a society in which the flow of inheritance is a smaller proportion of national income. In France, the mortality rate has declined inexorably over the course of history, and the same is true of other countries. The French mortality rate was around 2.2 percent (of the adult population) in the nineteenth century but declined steadily throughout the twentieth century,8 dropping to 1.1–1.2 percent in 2000–2010, a decrease of almost one-half in a century