Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

The top centile is a particularly interesting group to study in the context of my historical investigation. Although it constitutes (by definition) a very small minority of the population, it is nevertheless far larger than the superelites of a few dozen or hundred individuals on whom attention is sometimes focused (such as the “200 families” of France, to use the designation widely applied in the interwar years to the 200 largest stockholders of the Banque de France, or the “400 richest Americans” or similar rankings established by magazines like Forbes). In a country of almost 65 million people such as France in 2013, of whom some 50 million are adults, the top centile comprises some 500,000