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.

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.

We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the 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.

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

I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.

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