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

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

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.

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

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.

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.