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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 inequality gets to an extreme, it is completely useless for growth.