The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and 20s.

I certainly agree that capital is not a one-dimensional object, and that the return on capital takes very different forms for different assets or different people.

Contrary to a tenacious myth, France is not owned by California pension funds or the Bank of China, any more than the United States belongs to Japanese and German investors. The fear of getting into such a predicament is so strong today that fantasy often outstrips reality. The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one.

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.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries.

Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence.