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Thomas Piketty
Personal blog · piketty.pse.ens.freconomicspolitics
Thomas Piketty's personal blog at piketty.pse.ens.fr covers economics and politics. Since 2014, 48 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Piketty responds in depth to the FT”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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59mentions?
48HN people?
2014–2026first – last linked?
Thomas Piketty page personnelle homepage
Most-linked posts?
- Piketty responds in depth to the FT5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-05-29
- On the Share of Inheritance in Aggregate Wealth: Europe and the USA, 1900–2010 [pdf]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-02-08
- /en/capital21c22 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-15
- /files/capital21c/en/pdf/T12.2.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-24
- /files/capital21c/en/media/FT23052014c.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-07-26
- /files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2015.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-18
- /files/Schularicketal2014.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-22
- Piketty: The Roman Market Economy (2013) [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-18
- /files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTables.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-01
What Hacker News says?
Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP historically has floated around 18% https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/tax-reve... Here's the income percentage held by the top 1% 1950-2010 http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Fig... While its true that its higher now than it was the 1950s-1980s, its an increase of about 15%. It if was the case that the very high marginal rates were actually b…
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTables.pdf
on “Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working”Submitted On the Share of Inheritance in Aggregate Wealth: Europe and the USA, 1900–2010 [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI do plan to go back farther in time; I think it will also be interesting. The claim about RCA seems unlikely. Radio Corporation of America stock grew very fast through the 1920s, peaking in September 1929 before the crash. However, even at the very end, it doesn't seem to even have been top 10 among industrials in the S&P index: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/McGrattanPrescott2001.pdf#pa... Instead, on that list w…
Comment linking /files/McGrattanPrescott2001.pdf
on “IBM is splitting itself into two public companies”Submitted Piketty responds in depth to the FT as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs I suspected, it counts dollars. Moreover, it attributes any subsequent income for somebody that received an inheritance as "inherited" (up to certain exponential boundary). I.e. if you received an inheritance of $1000, spent it, and in 30 years since you became a millionaire, then the amount of wealth you have up to what you could have if you invested $1000 at certain rate would be still counted as "inherited". I…
Comment linking /files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2017.pdf
on “Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees”Submitted Piketty: The Roman Market Economy (2013) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionJust a heads up about the book. Its dense, like a Nassim Taleb book dense. it took me over a month to get through it so if you choose to read it, its not a weekend read. If you want the highlights, this economist article does as decent a job of summarizing 400+ pages as you can hope for in 4 paragraphs. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/ec... As for the content, the main take away, is his r >…
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/pdf/F10.9.pdf
on “Why Inequality Matters”Submitted Economics of Inequality (2013-14 course page) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBelow is the logic why r-g matters for wealth inequality and is a reasonable thing to look at. In particular this happens in so-called "random growth theories" of wealth inequality or "theories with multiplicative shocks." At the same time you're right there is nothing special that happens when r overtakes g and it's kind of irrelevant whether r>g or r<g. This is based on a bunch of lecture notes and papers: http://…
Comment linking /files/Piketty2015JEP.pdf
on “The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 [pdf]”Is the outsourcing somewhat recent? I've been reading through the actual text in the Piketty book and he discusses the relative advantages of large university endowments vs smaller ones. He has a data table in it for 1980-2010 where the returns seem pretty reasonable (but much higher for larger account balances of Harvard-Yale-Princeton). http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/T12.2.pdf People can argue a…
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/pdf/T12.2.pdf
on “Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds with Schools Attached”[2016] , discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13555925 Actual paper: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/BaroneMocetti2016.pdf
Comment linking /files/BaroneMocetti2016.pdf
on “The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)”This is exemplary of the type of sway which massively concentrated enterprises can have over governments, and will continue to have as more and more companies engage in M&A: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Brennan2016.pdf Replace HRC with Jeff Bezos and "algorithm" with "consumer": https://busy.org/life/@blakemiles84/clinton-book-excerptish-... At some point we're going to have to Bust the Trusts.
Comment linking /files/Brennan2016.pdf
on “Amazon to Build Second HQ in North America”The median might have done well, but we know for a fact that inequality has risen dramatically in the past 40 years, mostly as an effect of big tax cuts to the wealthy. I'd be interested in seeing an analysis dividing the population in bottom 50, top 10 and middle 40, post-tax. This is the most similar thing I could quickly find http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideologie/pdf/G11.7.pdf and it seems to show that low-in…
Comment linking /files/ideologie/pdf/G11.7.pdf
on “Where our economy is, for the young”I don't know about the Forbes list, but it seems the share of wealth being inherited is pretty high & increasing at a good clip: On the Share of Inheritance in Aggregate Wealth: Europe and the USA, 1900–2010 http://www.piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2...
Comment linking /files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2017.pdf
on “Apple to contribute to U.S. teen's education for spotting FaceTime bug”No, no. I don't mean that he forces the interpretation of data. That's par for the course. He makes numerous data gathering errors that all seem to make his conclusion stronger. Example: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/media/FT230520...
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/media/FT23052014c.pdf
on “We’re Measuring the Economy All Wrong”'Per Thomas Piketty roughly 60% of America's wealth is inherited, meaning most of America's riches are owned by people who didn't work for them.' https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1092536441819648000 http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2015....
Comment linking /files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2015.pdf
on “Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two”> It seems that the graphs in this tweet are another confirmation of Piketty's observation. As far as I can tell, the graph is based on an earlier graph from Pikettys paper: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2015.... Compare to Figure 5
Comment linking /files/AlvaredoGarbintiPiketty2015.pdf
on “More than half of all private wealth has been inherited in most of Europe”So I did a little digging into the citations, and the most authoritative paper on the subject is J.-W. Lee and H. Lee, Human capital in the long run [1]. While there isn't a time-series for Canada, Fig. 9A shows the U.S. had a significant advantage over Canada in 1870 (in terms of average years of schooling per capita) and both countries had been increasing this number at approximately the same rate. Fig. 10 shows t…
Comment linking /files/LeeLee2016.pdf
on “College became the default – Let's rethink that”For example look at Plots 11.12 to 11.15 here[0], which show an inverse correlation between growth and inequality and a direct correlation between tax rates and inequality. There are some pretty simple arguments that would justify this: one individual with 20 times the average income is going to spend less than 20 individuals with the average income. Note that I'm not arguing for some Soviet-level of extreme equalit…
Comment linking /files/Piketty2019GraphiquesTableauxLiens.pdf
on “Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]”Response in full (pdf): http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Tec...
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppendixResponsetoFT.pdf
on “Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data”Piketty has the goods (on page 19), and adjusted for inflation they were stable: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Schularicketal2014.pdf You can argue about his conclusions, but you cannot argue with data. People today have no idea about the percentage of income that went into housing back then. It was really small! In my corner of the nation (rural), fixer-uppers that no bank will give you a mortgage on are going fo…
Comment linking /files/Schularicketal2014.pdf
on “The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership”>"National wealth" is not a vague notion, it's the product of lots of government workers doing a lot of statistics Wow what a convincing justification for the need to equate the measurement of rising capital within national jurisdictions over an analysis that acknowledges the distinction between revenue among fortune 500 shareholders and the average person who is not exposed to such returns. >Income for the bottom 1…
Comment linking /files/Piketty2015AER.pdf
on “Study links sugar-filled drinks to millions of heart disease and diabetes cases”Thomas Piketty's book on the matter should have enough for you. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2015AER.pdf https://wid.world/news-article/whats-new-about-wealth-inequa... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10888-010-9155-y
Comment linking /files/Piketty2015AER.pdf
on “Study links sugar-filled drinks to millions of heart disease and diabetes cases”The central thesis of Piketty's Capital [1] is that inequality is a core feature of capitalism. He backs this with meticulous research[2] into centuries of wealth, income, and tax data. You can argue about what is the "right" level of inequality or with the policy recommendations (that massive government interventionism via a global tax on wealth is required). However, the results and data are solid. [1]: https://ww…
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTablesLinks.pdf
on “Inequality and Skin in the Game”Cambridge Dictionary: Oligarch - One of a small group of powerful people who control a country or an industry. And here's a frequently quoted study showing that the US is much closer to an oligopoly than pluralistic democracy: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/GilensPage2014.pdf So, the definition and evidence say, yes.
Comment linking /files/GilensPage2014.pdf
on “CEO of Mistral: AI is software. It can be controlled”Economics is political, so it should come as no surprise that economists have political opinions about what should be done at the level of the economy. Or is only that which is vaguely left-wing that is "political" or "ideological", and mainstream neoliberal politics and economics are simply "objective" and "technocratic"? I think it's important to separate the empirical and analytic part, to which you can apply obj…
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppendixResponsetoFT.pdf
on “Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists”I would not cite Piketty, Zucman or Saez who are the hardest fighters of the wealth inequality thesis as they usually mix political advocacy and have been criticized in their methodology and have been under a fair share of controversies. Btw I have grouped them because this is how they are usually treated, both by the fact they are all French economists but also on the fact they all push for the same inequality thes…
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppendixResponsetoFT.pdf
on “Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists”Piketty has a book called Capital in the 21st Century, which makes similar statements and has pointers to his reference material here: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 Also, it's a good book.
Comment linking /en/capital21c2
on “The Great Pause Was an Economic Revolution”I quoted Wikipedia as it appears you have not read the book: you must of course read all the citations for the paragraph. Had you been interested in actually considering the validity of the sentence I quoted, as opposed to nitpicking, you would have found that the 2nd citation refers you to http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 where you can find a table of contents[0]. Chapter 15 - "A Global Tax on Capital" stan…
Comment linking /files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Contents.pdf
on “Inequality: A Piketty problem?”Have you checked here? http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 Not sure if that gets you what you are looking for.
Comment linking /en/capital21c2
on “Revised estimates of the share of national income going to top earners”
