No hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest.

I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.

The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

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.

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.

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.

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.