Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

Despite these caveats, my estimates for capital’s share of national income in this period (at least 40 percent) appear to be valid: in both Britain and France, the rents paid to landlords alone accounted for 20 percent of national income in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and all signs are that the return on farmland (which accounted for about half of national capital) was slightly less than the average return on capital and significantly less than the return on industrial capital, to judge by the very high level of industrial profits, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century.