1、Capital in the T wenty- First CenturyCAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY omas Piketty Translated by Arthur Goldhammer e Belknap Press of Harvard University Press , , Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First published
2、as Le capital au XXI sicle, copyright ditions du Seuil Design by Dean Bornstein Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Piketty, omas, Capital au XXIe sicle. En glishCapital in the twenty- rst century / omas Piketty ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer. pages cm Translation of the authors
3、Le capital au XXIe sicle. Includes bibliographical references and index. !“# $ - - % - - % ( a l k . pap e r ) . Capital. . Income distribution. . Wealth. . Labor economics. I. Goldhammer, Arthur, translator. II. Title. HB&.P % .dc %Contents A c k no w le d g me n t s. vii Introduction. Part One: In
4、come and Capital . Income and Output. . Growth: Illusions and Realities. Part Two: e Dynamics of the Capital/Income Ratio . e Metamorphoses of Capital. . From Old Eu rope to the New World. &. e Capital/Income Ratio over the Long Run. % %. e Capital- Labor Split in the T wenty- First Century. Part re
5、e: e Structure of In e qual ity . In e qual ity and Concentration: Preliminary Bearings. $. Two Worlds. . I n e q u a l i t y o f L a bo r I n c o m e. . I n e q u a l i t y o f Ca p i ta l O w n e r s h i p. % . Merit and Inheritance in the Long Run. . Global In e qual ity of Wealth in the T wenty-
6、 First Century. Part Four: Regulating Capital in the Twenty- First Century . A Social State for the T wenty- First Century. . Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax. &. A Global Tax on Capital. & %. e Question of the Public Debt. & Conclusion. & Notes. & Contents in Detail. %& List of T ables and Ill
7、ustrations. %& Index. %vii A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s is book is based on * een years of research ($ ) devoted essentially to understanding the historical dynamics of wealth and income. Much of this research was done in collaboration with other scholars. My earlier work on high- income earners in
8、 France, Les hauts revenus en France au e sicle (), had the extremely good fortune to win the enthu- siastic support of Anthony Atkinson and Emmanuel Saez. Without them, my modest Francocentric project would surely never have achieved the interna- tional scope it has today. Tony, who was a model for
9、 me during my graduate school days, was the rst reader of my historical work on in e qual ity in France and immediately took up the British case as well as a number of other coun- tries. Together, we edited two thick volumes that came out in and , covering twenty countries in all and constituting th
10、e most extensive database available in regard to the historical evolution of income in e qual ity. Emman- uel and I dealt with the US case. We discovered the vertiginous growth of in- come of the top percent since the s and $s, and our work enjoyed a certain in+ uence in US po liti cal debate. We al
11、so worked together on a num- ber of theoretical papers dealing with the optimal taxation of capital and in- come. is book owes a great deal to these collaborative e0 orts. e book was also deeply in+ uenced by my historical work with Gilles Postel- Vinay and Jean- Laurent Rosenthal on Pa ri sian esta
12、te rec ords from the French Revolution to the present. is work helped me to understand in a more intimate and vivid way the signi cance of wealth and capital and the problems associated with mea sur ing them. Above all, Gilles and Jean- Laurent taught me to appreciate the many similarities, as well
13、as di0 erences, between the structure of property around and the structure of property now. All of this work is deeply indebted to the doctoral students and young scholars with whom I have been privileged to work over the past * een years. Beyond their direct contribution to the research on which th
14、is book draws, their enthusiasm and energy fueled the climate of intellectual excitement in which the work matured. I am thinking in par tic u lar of Facundo Alvaredo, Laurent Bach, Antoine Bozio, Clment Carbonnier, Fabien Dell, Gabrielle Ac kno w l e d g me n t s viii Fack, Nicolas Frmeaux, Lucie G
15、adenne, Julien Grenet, Elise Huilery, Ca- mille Landais, Ioana Marinescu, Elodie Morival, Nancy Qian, Dorothe Rouzet, Stefanie Stantcheva, Juliana Londono Velez, Guillaume Saint- Jacques, Christoph Schinke, Aurlie Sotura, Mathieu Valdenaire, and Ga- briel Zucman. More speci cally, without the e1 cie
16、ncy, rigor, and talents of Facundo Alvaredo, the World Top Incomes Database, to which I frequently refer in these pages, would not exist. Without the enthusiasm and insistence of Camille Landais, our collaborative project on “the scal revolution” would never have been written. Without the careful at
17、tention to detail and impres- sive capacity for work of Gabriel Zucman, I would never have completed the work on the historical evolution of the capital/income ratio in wealthy coun- tries, which plays a key role in this book. I also want to thank the institutions that made this project possible, st
18、art- ing with the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, where I have served on the faculty since , as well as the cole Normale Suprieure and all the other institutions that contributed to the creation of the Paris School of Economics, where I have been a professor since it was founded, and of
19、which I served as founding director from & to . By agreeing to join forces and become minority partners in a project that transcended the sum of their private interests, these institutions helped to create a modest public good, which I hope will continue to contribute to the development of a multi-
20、polar po liti cal economy in the twenty- rst century. Finally, thanks to Juliette, Dborah, and Hlne, my three precious daughters, for all the love and strength they give me. And thanks to Julia, who shares my life and is also my best reader. Her in+ uence and support at every stage in the writing of
21、 this book have been essential. Without them, I would not have had the energy to see this project through to completion.Capital in the T wenty- First Century1 Introduction “Social distinctions can be based only on common utility.” Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, article 1, 1789 e d
22、istribution of wealth is one of todays most widely discussed and contro- versial issues. But what do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the
23、 nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced in e qual- ity and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century? What do we really know about how wealth and incom
24、e have evolved since the eigh teenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way? ese are the questions I attempt to answer in this book. Let me say at once that the answers contained herein are imperfect and incomplete. But they are based on much more e
25、xtensive historical and comparative data than were available to previous researchers, data covering three centuries and more than twenty countries, as well as on a new theoretical framework that a0 ords a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Modern economic growth and the di0 usion of
26、knowledge have made it possible to avoid the Marxist apocalypse but have not modi ed the deep structures of capital and inequality or in any case not as much as one might have imagined in the optimistic de cades following World War II. When the rate of return on capi- tal exceeds the rate of growth
27、of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty- rst, capitalism auto- matically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically un- dermine the meritocratic values on which demo cratic societies are based. ere are neverthe
28、less ways democracy can regain control over capitalism and ensure that the general interest takes pre ce dence over private interests, while preserving economic openness and avoiding protectionist and nationalist re- actions. e policy recommendations I propose later in the book tend in this 2 direct
29、ion. ey are based on lessons derived from historical experience, of which what follows is essentially a narrative. A Debate without Data? Intellectual and po liti cal debate about the distribution of wealth has long been based on an abundance of prejudice and a paucity of fact. To be sure, it would
30、be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the intuitive knowledge that everyone acquires about contemporary wealth and income levels, even in the absence of any theoretical framework or statistical analysis. Film and literature, nineteenth- century novels especially, are full of detailed infor
31、mation about the relative wealth and living standards of di0 er- ent social groups, and especially about the deep structure of in e qual ity, the way it is justi ed, and its impact on individual lives. Indeed, the novels of Jane Austen and Honor de Balzac paint striking portraits of the distribution
32、 of wealth in Britain and France between and $. Both novelists were in- timately acquainted with the hierarchy of wealth in their respective societies. ey grasped the hidden contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women, including their marital strategies and per-
33、 sonal hopes and disappointments. ese and other novelists depicted the ef- fects of in e qual ity with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statisti- cal or theoretical analysis can match. Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be le* to economists, sociologists, his
34、torians, and phi los o phers. It is of interest to every- one, and that is a good thing. e concrete, physical reality of in e qual ity is visible to the naked eye and naturally inspires sharp but contradictory po liti cal judgments. Peasant and noble, worker and factory own er, waiter and banker: ea
35、ch has his or her own unique vantage point and sees important aspects of how other people live and what relations of power and domination exist between social groups, and these observations shape each persons judgment of what is and is not just. Hence there will always be a fundamentally subjective
36、and psy- chological dimension to in e qual ity, which inevitably gives rise to po liti cal con- + ict that no purportedly scienti c analysis can alleviate. Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts and that is a very good thing. Nevertheless, the distribution question also deserves
37、 to be studied in a systematic and methodical fashion. Without precisely de ned sources, meth- Capital in the Twenty-First CenturyIntroduction 3 ods, and concepts, it is possible to see everything and its opposite. Some peo- ple believe that in e qual ity is always increasing and that the world is b
38、y de ni- tion always becoming more unjust. Others believe that in e qual ity is naturally decreasing, or that harmony comes about automatically, and that in any case nothing should be done that might risk disturbing this happy equilibrium. Given this dialogue of the deaf, in which each camp justi es
39、 its own intellec- tual laziness by pointing to the laziness of the other, there is a role for research that is at least systematic and methodical if not fully scienti c. Expert analysis will never put an end to the violent po liti cal con+ ict that in e qual ity inevita- bly instigates. Social scie
40、nti c research is and always will be tentative and im- perfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and po liti cal mechanisms that might explain them, it ca
41、n inform demo cratic debate and focus attention on the right ques- tions. It can help to rede ne the terms of debate, unmask certain precon- ceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scien-
42、 tists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it a signal privilege). ere is no escaping the fact, however, that social science research on the distribution of wealth was for a long time
43、based on a relatively limited set of rmly established facts together with a wide variety of purely theoretical spec- ulations. Before turning in greater detail to the sources I tried to assemble in preparation for writing this book, I want to give a quick historical overview of previous thinking abo
44、ut these issues. Malthus, Young, and the French Revolution When classical po liti cal economy was born in En gland and France in the late eigh teenth and early nineteenth century, the issue of distribution was already one of the key questions. Everyone realized that radical transformations were unde
45、r way, precipitated by sustained demographic growth a previously un- known phenomenon coupled with a rural exodus and the advent of the Indus- trial Revolution. How would these upheavals a0 ect the distribution of wealth, the social structure, and the po liti cal equilibrium of Eu ro pe an society?4
46、 For omas Malthus, who in $ published his Essay on the Principle of Population, there could be no doubt: the primary threat was overpopulation.2 Although his sources were thin, he made the best he could of them. One particularly important in+ uence was the travel diary published by Arthur Young, an
47、En glish agronomist who traveled extensively in France, from Calais to the Pyrenees and from Brittany to Franche- Comt, in $ $, on the eve of the Revolution. Young wrote of the poverty of the French countryside. His vivid essay was by no means totally inaccurate. France at that time was by far the m
48、ost populous country in Eu rope and therefore an ideal place to observe. e kingdom could already boast of a population of million in , compared to only $ million for Great Britain (and & million for En- gland alone). e French population increased steadily throughout the eigh- teenth century, from the end of Louis XIVs reign to the demise of Louis XVI, and by $ was c
