Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they dont even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.

There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite.

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 important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.

The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.

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.