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.

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.

We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.

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

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

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.

Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.