The author observes, like Tocqueville, an increasingly unequal distribution of income from capital and labor. His thesis is based on the hypothesis of a return on capital (consisting of natural resources, infrastructure and public and private facilities, net of debt) always higher than the economic growth rate (covering in particular changes in wages), since the beginning of history, except during periods of war and economic depression (as in the 1930s). The unequal relationship between rentiers and workers should, according to him, grow rapidly in the twenty-first century. This structural inequality (denoted r> g) between the return on capital (including the “top 1%” in the income scale) and the return on labor is a potential source of social conflict and threat to modern capitalism. This gap is mainly explained by the rapid increase in savings of the wealthiest households. Thomas Piketty advocates the introduction of a more progressive tax and the establishment of a new global tax on capital.
The publication of Thomas Piketty’s latest book has had a global impact. It was considered by some Anglo-Saxon economists as a turning point in economic thought. This thesis has sparked mixed reactions in all Western countries. The author was notably accused of revisiting the Marxist approach to the “class struggle between bourgeois and proletarians.”
The work of Thomas Piketty has been the subject of much criticism of an ideological and methodological nature, summarized in the following book, reviewed by the Turgot Club.
