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

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

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.

Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.

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.

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.