Capital and Ideology

by Thomas Piketty

it is important to begin by taking the measure of the historic reduction of socioeconomic inequalities and the decline of private property in this period. Let us begin with income inequality (Fig. 10.1). In Europe, the share of the top decile (the 10 percent of the population with the highest incomes) amounted to about 50 percent of total income in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries until the beginning of World War I. It then began a chaotic fall between 1914 and 1945, eventually stabilizing at around 30 percent of total income in 1945–1950, where it stayed until 1980. European income inequality, which was significantly higher than that of the United States until 1914, fell below US levels during the so-called Trente Glorieuses 1950–1980, a period of exceptionally high growth (especially in Europe and Japan) and historically low levels of inequality. In addition, the revival of inequality since 1980 has been much stronger in the United States than in Europe so that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the United States has taken the lead—the reverse of the situation at the turn of the twentieth century.