Having reviewed Piketty’s Capital earlier this week, I thought I’d also pass along a few choice quotes. If you haven’t read the review yet, though, I’d start there.
On his thesis
“A society structured by the hierarchy of wealth has been replaced by a society whose structure depends almost entirely on the hierarchy of labor and human capital. It is striking, for example, that many recent American TV series feature heroes and heroines laden with degrees and high-level skills, whether to cure serious maladies (House), solve mysterious crimes (Bones), or even to preside over the United States (West Wing).”
“Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it.”
“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy (as it did through much of history until the nineteenth century and as is likely to be the case again in the the twenty-first century) then it logically follows that inherited wealth grows faster than output and income.”
On ideology
“I was vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism, some of which simply ignored the historic failure of Communism and much of which turned its back on the intellectual means necessary to push beyond it.”
“Both the antimarket and the antistate camps are partly correct: new instruments are needed to regain control over a financial capitalism that has run amok, and at the same time the tax and transfer systems that are the heart of the modern social state are in constant need of reform and modernization, because they have achieved a level of complexity that makes them difficult to understand and threatens to undermind their social and economic efficiency.”
Interesting Facts
“There is no historical example of a country at the world technological frontier whose growth in per capita output exceeded 1.5 percent over a lengthy period of time.”
“Billionaires today own roughly 1.5 percent of the world’s total wealth, and sovereign wealth funds own another 1.5 percent.”
“Capital is a better indicator of the contributive capacity of very wealthy individuals than is income.”