Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

  Conclusion

  I have presented the current state of our historical knowledge concerning the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income since the eighteenth century, and I have attempted to draw from this knowledge whatever lessons can be drawn for the century ahead.

  The sources on which this book draws are more extensive than any previous author has assembled, but they remain imperfect and incomplete. All of my conclusions are by nature tenuous and deserve to be questioned and debated. It is not the purpose of social science research to produce mathematical certainties that can substitute for open, democratic debate in which all shades of opinion are represented.

  The Central Contradiction of Capitalism: r > g

  The overall conclusion of this study is that a market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.

  The principal destabilizing force has to do with the fact that the private rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g.

  The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.

  The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the return on capital varies directly with the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.

  The problem is enormous, and there is no simple solution. Growth can of course be encouraged by investing in education, knowledge, and nonpolluting technologies. But none of these will raise the growth rate to 4 or 5 percent a year. History shows that only countries that are catching up with more advanced economies—such as Europe during the three decades after World War II or China and other emerging countries today—can grow at such rates. For countries at the world technological frontier—and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole—there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1–1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted.1

  With an average return on capital of 4–5 percent, it is therefore likely that r > g will again become the norm in the twenty-first century, as it had been throughout history until the eve of World War I. In the twentieth century, it took two world wars to wipe away the past and significantly reduce the return on capital, thereby creating the illusion that the fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism (r > g) had been overcome.

  To be sure, one could tax capital income heavily enough to reduce the private return on capital to less than the growth rate. But if one did that indiscriminately and heavy-handedly, one would risk killing the motor of accumulation and thus further reducing the growth rate. Entrepreneurs would then no longer have the time to turn into rentiers, since there would be no more entrepreneurs.

  The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation. For example, I earlier discussed the possibility of a capital tax schedule with rates of 0.1 or 0.5 percent on fortunes under 1 million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between 1 and 5 million euros, 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros. This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market. Historical experience shows, moreover, that such immense inequalities of wealth have little to do with the entrepreneurial spirit and are of no use in promoting growth. Nor are they of any “common utility,” to borrow the nice expression from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen with which I began this book.

  The difficulty is that this solution, the progressive tax on capital, requires a high level of international cooperation and regional political integration. It is not within the reach of the nation-states in which earlier social compromises were hammered out. Many people worry that moving toward greater cooperation and political integration within, say, the European Union only undermines existing achievements (starting with the social states that the various countries of Europe constructed in response to the shocks of the twentieth century) without constructing anything new other than a vast market predicated on ever purer and more perfect competition. Yet pure and perfect competition cannot alter the inequality r > g, which is not the consequence of any market “imperfection.” On the contrary. Although the risk is real, I do not see any genuine alternative: if we are to regain control of capitalism, we must bet everything on democracy—and in Europe, democracy on a European scale. Larger political communities such as the United States and China have a wider range of options, but for the small countries of Europe, which will soon look very small indeed in relation to the global economy, national withdrawal can only lead to even worse frustration and disappointment than currently exists with the European Union. The nation-state is still the right level at which to modernize any number of social and fiscal policies and to develop new forms of governance and shared ownership intermediate between public and private ownership, which is one of the major challenges for the century ahead. But only regional political integration can lead to effective regulation of the globalized patrimonial capitalism of the twenty-first century.

  For a Political and Historical Economics

  I would like to conclude with a few words about economics and social science. As I made clear in the introduction, I see economics as a subdiscipline of the social sciences, alongside history, sociology, anthropology, and political science. I hope that this book has given the reader an idea of what I mean by that. I dislike the expression “economic science,” which strikes me as terribly arrogant because it suggests that economics has attained a higher scientific status than the other social sciences. I much prefer the expression “political economy,” which may seem rather old-fashioned but to my mind conveys the only thing that sets economics apart from the other social sciences: its political, normative, and moral purpose.

  From the outset, political economy sought to study scientifically, or at any rate rationally, systematically, and methodically, the ideal role of the state in the economic and social organization of a country. The question it asked was: What public policies and institutions bring us closer to an ideal society? This unabashed aspiration to study good and evil, about which every citizen is an expert, may make some readers smile. To be sure, it is an aspiration that often goes unfulfilled. But it is also a necessary, indeed indispensable, goal, because it is all too easy for social scientists to remove themselves from public debate and political confrontation and content themselves with the role of commentators on or demolishers of the views and data of others. Social scientists, like all intellectuals and all citizens, ought to participate in public debate. They cannot be content to invoke grand but abstract principles such as justice, democracy, and world peace. They must make choices and take stands in regard to specific institutions and policies, whether it be the social state, the tax system, or the public debt. Everyone is political in his or her own way. The world is not divided between a political elite on one side and, on the other, an army of commentators and spectators whose only responsibility is to drop a ballot in a ballot box once every four or five years. It is illusory, I believe, to think that the scholar and the citizen live in separate moral universes, the former
concerned with means and the latter with ends. Although comprehensible, this view ultimately strikes me as dangerous.

  For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content. Too much energy has been and still is being wasted on pure theoretical speculation without a clear specification of the economic facts one is trying to explain or the social and political problems one is trying to resolve. Economists today are full of enthusiasm for empirical methods based on controlled experiments. When used with moderation, these methods can be useful, and they deserve credit for turning some economists toward concrete questions and firsthand knowledge of the terrain (a long overdue development). But these new approaches themselves succumb at times to a certain scientistic illusion. It is possible, for instance, to spend a great deal of time proving the existence of a pure and true causal relation while forgetting that the question itself is of limited interest. The new methods often lead to a neglect of history and of the fact that historical experience remains our principal source of knowledge. We cannot replay the history of the twentieth century as if World War I never happened or as if the income tax and PAYGO pensions were never created. To be sure, historical causality is always difficult to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. Are we really certain that a particular policy had a particular effect, or was the effect perhaps due to some other cause? Nevertheless, the imperfect lessons that we can draw from history, and in particular from the study of the last century, are of inestimable, irreplaceable value, and no controlled experiment will ever be able to equal them. To be useful, economists must above all learn to be more pragmatic in their methodological choices, to make use of whatever tools are available, and thus to work more closely with other social science disciplines.

  Conversely, social scientists in other disciplines should not leave the study of economic facts to economists and must not flee in horror the minute a number rears its head, or content themselves with saying that every statistic is a social construct, which of course is true but insufficient. At bottom, both responses are the same, because they abandon the terrain to others.

  The Interests of the Least Well-Off

  “As long as the incomes of the various classes of contemporary society remain beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, there can be no hope of producing a useful economic and social history.” This admirable sentence begins Le mouvement du profit en France au 19e siècle, which Jean Bouvier, François Furet, and Marcel Gillet published in 1965. The book is still worth reading, in part because it is a good example of the “serial history” that flourished in France between 1930 and 1980, with its characteristic virtues and flaws, but even more because it reminds us of the intellectual trajectory of François Furet, whose career offers a marvelous illustration of both the good and the bad reasons why this research program eventually died out.

  When Furet began his career as a promising young historian, he chose a subject that he believed was at the center of contemporary research: “the incomes of the various classes of contemporary society.” The book is rigorous, eschews all prejudgment, and seeks above all to collect data and establish facts. Yet this would be Furet’s first and last work in this realm. In the splendid book he published with Jacques Ozouf in 1977, Lire et écrire, devoted to “literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry,” one finds the same eagerness to compile serial data, no longer about industrial profits but now about literacy rates, numbers of teachers, and educational expenditures. In the main, however, Furet became famous for his work on the political and cultural history of the French Revolution, in which one endeavors in vain to find any trace of the “incomes of the various classes of contemporary society,” and in which the great historian, preoccupied as he was in the 1970s with the battle he was waging against the Marxist historians of the French Revolution (who at the time were particularly dogmatic and clearly dominant, notably at the Sorbonne), seems to have turned against economic and social history of any kind. To my mind, this is a pity, since I believe it is possible to reconcile the different approaches. Politics and ideas obviously exist independently of economic and social evolutions. Parliamentary institutions and the government of laws were never merely the bourgeois institutions that Marxist intellectuals used to denounce before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet it is also clear that the ups and downs of prices and wages, incomes and fortunes, help to shape political perceptions and attitudes, and in return these representations engender political institutions, rules, and policies that ultimately shape social and economic change. It is possible, and even indispensable, to have an approach that is at once economic and political, social and cultural, and concerned with wages and wealth. The bipolar confrontations of the period 1917–1989 are now clearly behind us. The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers.2 It is long since time to move beyond these old controversies and the historical research they engendered, which to my mind still bears their stamp.

  As I noted in the introduction, there are also technical reasons for the premature death of serial history. The material difficulty of collecting and processing large volumes of data in those days probably explains why works in this genre (including Le mouvement du profit en France au 19e siècle) had little room for historical interpretation, which makes reading them rather arid. In particular, there is often very little analysis of the relation between observed economic changes and the political and social history of the period under study. Instead, one gets a meticulous description of the sources and raw data, information that is more naturally presented nowadays in spreadsheets and online databases.

  I also think that the demise of serial history was connected with the fact that the research program petered out before it reached the twentieth century. In studying the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries it is possible to think that the evolution of prices and wages, or incomes and wealth, obeys an autonomous economic logic having little or nothing to do with the logic of politics or culture. When one studies the twentieth century, however, such an illusion falls apart immediately. A quick glance at the curves describing income and wealth inequality or the capital/income ratio is enough to show that politics is ubiquitous and that economic and political changes are inextricably intertwined and must be studied together. This forces one to study the state, taxes, and debt in concrete ways and to abandon simplistic and abstract notions of the economic infrastructure and political superstructure.

  To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.

  Notes

  In order to avoid burdening the text and endnotes with technical matters, precise details concerning historical sources, bibliographic references, statistical methods, and mathematical models have been included in a technical appendix, which can be accessed on the Internet at http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c.

  In particular, the online technical appendix contains the data from which the graphs in the text were constructed, along with detailed descriptions of the relevant sources and methods. The bibliographic references and endnotes in the text have been pared down as much as possible, with more detailed references relegated to this appendix. It also contains a number of supplementary table
s and figures, some of which are referred to in the notes (e.g., “see Supplementary Figure S1.1,” in Chapter 1, note 21). The online technical appendix and Internet site were designed as a complement to the book, which can thus be read on several levels.

  Interested readers will also find online all relevant data files (mainly in Excel or Stata format), programs, mathematical formulas and equations, references to primary sources, and links to more technical papers on which this book draws.

  My goal in writing was to make this book accessible to people without any special technical training, while the book together with the technical appendix should satisfy the demands of specialists in the field. This procedure will also allow me to post revised online versions and updates of the tables, graphs, and technical apparatus. I welcome input from readers of the book or website, who can send comments and criticisms to piketty@ens.fr.

  Introduction

  1. The English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) is considered to be one of the most influential members of the “classical” school, along with Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Ricardo (1772–1823).

  2. There is of course a more optimistic school of liberals: Adam Smith seems to belong to it, and in fact he never really considered the possibility that the distribution of wealth might grow more unequal over the long run. The same is true of Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), who also believed in natural harmony.