Thomas Piketty
Based on Wikipedia: Thomas Piketty
In 1991, a twenty-year-old French economics student traveled to the Soviet Union. What he witnessed there—the crumbling remnants of a communist experiment, the empty shelves and broken promises—transformed him into, as he would later put it, a "firm believer in capitalism, private property and the market." This might seem like an unremarkable conversion story, except for one detail: that same young man would go on to write the most influential critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century, a dense economic treatise that somehow became a global bestseller and landed on coffee tables from Brooklyn to Beijing.
Thomas Piketty's journey from Soviet disillusionment to rock-star economist illuminates something essential about his work. He is neither a revolutionary calling for the abolition of markets nor a defender of the status quo. He is something more dangerous to conventional thinking: an economist with receipts.
The Accidental Celebrity
Piketty was born in 1971 in Clichy, a suburb of Paris. His parents had been involved with Trotskyist politics and the famous May 1968 protests that convulsed France, though they had drifted away from radical politics before their son's birth. Perhaps this family background planted the seeds of his later preoccupation with inequality and redistribution—or perhaps it simply made him skeptical of easy ideological answers.
He was, by any measure, a prodigy. At eighteen, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, one of France's elite grandes écoles, to study mathematics and economics. By twenty-two, he had completed his doctoral thesis on wealth redistribution, earning the French Economics Association's award for best thesis of the year. At the London School of Economics, where he did his PhD work, he crossed paths with another young doctoral student named Daron Acemoglu, who would become one of the most influential economists of his generation. The corridors of academic economics in the early 1990s were apparently crowded with future stars.
After finishing his PhD, Piketty landed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor—a remarkable position for a twenty-two-year-old foreigner in the most prestigious economics department in the world. But he didn't stay long. After just two years, he returned to France, eventually helping to found the Paris School of Economics in 2006.
This decision puzzled many American economists. Why leave MIT for France? The answer reveals something about Piketty's character: he cared more about asking the right questions than about career advancement in the American academic system, which at the time rewarded mathematical virtuosity over historical investigation.
The Data Revolution
Piketty's great innovation was deceptively simple. He looked at tax records.
This might sound mundane, but it was actually revolutionary. Economists had long studied inequality using household surveys, which ask people about their income and wealth. The problem is that very wealthy people either don't respond to surveys or dramatically underreport their holdings. When you're studying the top one percent—or the top 0.1 percent—survey data is nearly useless.
Tax records, by contrast, capture what the wealthy actually report to governments. They're not perfect—the rich are famously creative at avoiding taxes—but they're far more reliable than asking a billionaire to fill out a questionnaire. More importantly, tax records go back decades, even centuries in some countries. This allowed Piketty to construct something unprecedented: a statistical portrait of inequality stretching back to the French Revolution.
Working with Emmanuel Saez, a French-American economist at Berkeley, Piketty built datasets covering the evolution of income and wealth across the developed world. Their findings were striking. In the United States, the top ten percent of earners took home more than half of total national income by 2012—the highest level recorded since the government began tracking such data a century earlier.
But Piketty's real contribution wasn't just measuring current inequality. It was showing that inequality had a history—and that history was not what most economists assumed.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Rentier
For decades, economists had accepted a comforting story about inequality, associated with the economist Simon Kuznets. According to this story, inequality naturally increases during early industrialization as workers move from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity factories. But as economies mature, inequality decreases. The benefits of growth spread more widely. The arc of capitalism bends toward fairness.
Piketty's data demolished this narrative.
The decrease in inequality that Kuznets observed in the mid-twentieth century, Piketty argued, was not a natural feature of capitalist development. It was a historical accident—the result of two world wars, the Great Depression, and deliberate policy choices like steeply progressive income taxes. These events destroyed inherited wealth and compressed the income distribution. But they were exceptions, not the rule.
The rule, Piketty argued, was something else entirely. Left to its own devices, capitalism tends toward ever-greater concentration of wealth. This happens because the rate of return on capital—the money you earn from owning things—typically exceeds the rate of economic growth. If your investments grow at five percent annually while the economy grows at two percent, your share of total wealth increases year after year. Over generations, this dynamic creates vast hereditary fortunes that dwarf what anyone could accumulate through labor alone.
Piketty captured this insight in a simple formula: r > g. The rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g). This inequality, he argued, is the fundamental force driving wealth concentration throughout capitalist history.
The implications were profound. If Piketty was right, the relatively egalitarian societies of the postwar decades were a brief interruption in capitalism's normal trajectory toward what he called "patrimonial capitalism"—a society dominated by inherited wealth rather than entrepreneurial achievement. We were heading back to the world of Jane Austen novels, where your life prospects depended primarily on who your parents were.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
In 2013, Piketty published these ideas in a seven-hundred-page book titled Capital in the Twenty-First Century—a deliberate echo of Karl Marx's Das Kapital. The title was provocative, but Piketty was no Marxist. He believed in markets and private property. He just thought capitalism needed guardrails.
No one expected what happened next.
The book became a phenomenon. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction—an almost unheard-of achievement for a dense economics tome filled with graphs and data tables. Piketty found himself profiled in glossy magazines, invited to Davos, celebrated and attacked with equal fervor.
Why did a technical book about tax data captivate the public imagination? Timing played a role. The 2008 financial crisis had shattered confidence in the economic establishment. The Occupy Wall Street movement had put inequality on the political agenda. People were hungry for explanations, and Piketty provided one that was both rigorous and accessible.
But there was something else. Piketty offered a story—a sweeping narrative of capitalism's past, present, and future that gave shape to anxieties that had been floating in the cultural atmosphere. When people said they felt the game was rigged, Piketty showed them the data proving they were right.
His proposed solution was characteristically bold: a global wealth tax. Not just income taxes, which the wealthy could avoid through various schemes, but a direct annual levy on the total value of assets—real estate, stocks, bonds, art, everything. Only a coordinated international approach, Piketty argued, could prevent the wealthy from simply moving their money to more hospitable jurisdictions.
Critics called this proposal utopian, and Piketty cheerfully agreed. He knew a global wealth tax was politically impossible in the near term. But he wanted to shift the conversation, to make previously unthinkable ideas thinkable. In this, he largely succeeded.
The Political Economist
Unlike many academic economists who maintain a careful distance from partisan politics, Piketty has been unabashedly engaged. He has advised Socialist Party candidates in France, written columns for left-leaning newspapers like Libération and Le Monde, and served briefly on the economic advisory committee of Britain's Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.
These political involvements have sometimes ended badly. In 2006, he left his position as head of the Paris School of Economics after just a few months to advise Ségolène Royal's presidential campaign. She lost. In 2012, he signed an open letter supporting François Hollande's candidacy. Hollande won but governed in ways that disappointed Piketty, who later described him as "hopeless."
His relationship with the British Labour Party was particularly turbulent. When appointed to Corbyn's economic advisory committee in 2015, Piketty was seen as a major coup for the party's left wing. His earlier advice to Labour that taxes could be raised above fifty percent on million-pound incomes without harming the economy had thrilled progressives. But he reportedly missed the committee's first meeting, and in June 2016, he resigned, citing frustration with what he called the party's weak campaign in the Brexit referendum.
In 2015, the French government attempted to award Piketty the Legion of Honour, the nation's highest decoration. He refused, stating that he did not think it was the government's role to decide who was honorable. The gesture captured something essential about Piketty: a willingness to reject conventional marks of status in favor of his own judgment.
Beyond Capital
Piketty's 2019 book, Capital and Ideology, expanded his analysis from economics into intellectual history. Where his earlier work had focused on the dynamics of wealth accumulation, this book asked a different question: How do societies justify inequality?
The answer, Piketty argued, is ideology—systems of belief that make current arrangements seem natural or inevitable. Every society, from medieval Europe to colonial empires to modern democracies, has developed narratives explaining why some people deserve more than others. Understanding these ideologies is essential to changing them.
The book introduced a concept that captured something many observers had sensed but couldn't quite articulate: the "Brahmin Left." Piketty argued that left-wing parties throughout the Western world had been captured by educated elites—professionals with advanced degrees who supported progressive social causes but showed less enthusiasm for economic redistribution. Meanwhile, right-wing parties had been captured by business elites—the "Merchant Right." Working-class voters, abandoned by both camps, had become politically homeless.
This framework helped explain puzzling political developments: why working-class voters in the United States and Britain had drifted toward right-wing populists, why left-wing parties struggled to build majorities despite rising inequality, why politics increasingly felt like a battle between different factions of the privileged.
Critics found Capital and Ideology sprawling and sometimes vague. The French economist Nicolas Brisset argued that Piketty's definitions of "ideology" and "capitalism" were too loose to support his ambitious claims. But even skeptics acknowledged the book's scope and ambition—over a thousand pages covering everything from ancient Indian caste systems to Swedish social democracy to the Chinese Communist Party.
The Optimist
In 2022, Piketty published A Brief History of Equality, a much shorter and more accessible book intended for general readers rather than economists. Its message was surprisingly hopeful.
Despite everything—rising inequality, political dysfunction, environmental crisis—Piketty saw grounds for optimism. Looking at the sweep of history from 1780 to 2020, he argued that the overall trajectory had been toward greater equality. Slavery was abolished. Colonial empires collapsed. Women gained rights. Progressive taxation expanded. The welfare state was built.
These gains didn't happen automatically. They resulted from social movements, political struggles, and sometimes violent upheaval. But they happened. And they could happen again.
This optimism might seem at odds with Piketty's earlier warnings about capitalism's tendency toward concentration. But he sees no contradiction. The forces driving inequality are powerful, but they are not irresistible. History shows that determined political action can bend the arc toward justice—not inevitably, not permanently, but meaningfully.
The Controversy
Piketty's work has attracted fierce criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Some have challenged his data, pointing to errors in spreadsheets and questionable methodological choices. Others have disputed his theoretical framework, arguing that his simple formula r > g doesn't capture the complex dynamics of modern economies.
More fundamental criticisms come from those who question whether capital really does earn consistent returns over long periods, whether economic growth might accelerate to close the gap, or whether entrepreneurial dynamism renders inherited wealth less important than Piketty suggests. These debates continue in academic journals and will likely persist for years.
Piketty's personal life has also generated controversy. In 2009, his former partner, the politician Aurélie Filippetti, filed a complaint of domestic violence against him with the police. She later withdrew the complaint, though Piketty acknowledged the incident. This episode has complicated his status as a progressive icon, though it has not significantly diminished his academic influence.
The Economist as Public Intellectual
Whatever one thinks of his conclusions, Piketty has changed the conversation about inequality. Before Capital in the Twenty-First Century, mainstream economics largely treated inequality as a side issue—something that might warrant attention but wasn't central to understanding how economies function. After Piketty, inequality became impossible to ignore.
He demonstrated that serious economic research could reach a mass audience without sacrificing rigor. He showed that tax records and historical archives contained treasures that more theoretically-inclined economists had overlooked. He proved that big questions about the nature of capitalism were not only worth asking but could be answered with data.
Today, Piketty continues to teach at the Paris School of Economics and holds the title of Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, where he first studied as a doctoral student in the early 1990s. He remains engaged in public debates, writes regularly for newspapers, and continues to produce research on inequality through the World Inequality Lab he helped create.
His ultimate legacy remains uncertain. Will his work be remembered as a turning point in how we think about capitalism, or as an interesting but ultimately flawed contribution to economic thought? Will his policy proposals—wealth taxes, international coordination, democratic control of the economy—prove visionary or utopian?
What seems certain is that Piketty asked the right questions at the right moment. In an era of rising inequality and growing skepticism about economic orthodoxy, he offered both a diagnosis and a vision. Whether or not his answers prove correct, the questions he raised will shape economic and political debates for decades to come.
The young man who visited the Soviet Union in 1991 and emerged believing in capitalism never stopped believing. He just insisted that belief wasn't enough. Capitalism, Piketty argues, needs to be understood, measured, and reformed—or it will devour the democratic societies that make it possible. Whether you find this warning persuasive or alarmist, it has become impossible to ignore.